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Maria La Gorda, Cuba
by Sandy Anderson
We finished off a family (two adults, two late teen sons) holiday to Cuba over Christmas and New Year 2005-06 with four days of quiet beach time, choosing a resort with reportedly good scuba diving for two of us - myself and Number One Son.
To provide some perspective on our skills and background - we have both been divers for about three years (started on PADI Open Water Diver course in Turkey), currently BSAC Sports Divers working (rather lethargically) towards Dive Leader, who do most of our diving in dry suits on the Outer Farne Islands and off the Tyne with Northumbria SAC, but we have had two Red Sea liveaboard trips and occasional UK club trips to Oban, Skye, St Abbs, North Berwick, etc (over 100 dives each). The tour operator first suggested Maria La Gorda to fit in with the rest of our holiday itinerary.
If you go to Awoosh you will find a fairly recent and very comprehensive report (and slideshow) by a Canadian diver which we found very useful pre-trip and fairly accurate when we were there. What follows tries not to repeat the depth of detail about travelling in Cuba, the resort and the diving given in that, but adds a few additional perspectives, especially where we did things differently.
The first thing is that they recommended pre-booking the dive package before you get there because it is cheaper. It is, so do it. They managed to do it from Canada, but we could not from the UK (though both the Boss and I were pretty busy beforehand so did not try too hard). We tried to do it in Havana but failed there as well, but our local tour company said it would be possible once we got to Pinar del Rio province. Sure enough, in our hotel in Vinales a rep from another tour company did it for us at a 15% saving compared with the price we would have paid at Maria La Gorda.
What you pay for is a combination of the three regular daily dives - two in the morning on the reef walls plus a shallow reef top dive in the afternoon (basically for learners - but if enough of the morning people did an afternoon dive they would fit in a wall group). Any occasional night dives cost extra USD40. We did two dives a day for four days - just the two morning dives so that we had lunch and an afternoon on the beach as a family, so cannot comment on the afternoon and night dives. However, note that the Cubans are waking up to tourism and nothing is as cheap as old Cuba hands would have you believe, including the diving.
The second thing is that they were chauffeur driven there and back. Do it. We did hire a car when we left Havana for a few days in the country (around Soroa and Vinales) and enjoyed the experience (and it is an experience) but it is very expensive compared with taking a taxi (a full day site-seeing around Vinales cost us only USD30 for a taxi). Your expensive hire car will be virtually unused at Maria La Gorda and the long drive is hard work for the driver who will also miss seeing much of the countryside. Transfers are normal, but if you have travel connections (or a Havana night club show booked like us) note that the bus back to Havana leaves at about 2 to 2.30pm and takes about 5 hours.
The third thing is that they took their own kit but noted that the hire kit looked OK. Because ours was not just a dive trip, we took only masks (mine is prescription), computers and torches (not provided there). Kit hire is USD7 per dive - because we were doing eight dives and did not need masks we ended up paying USD5 per dive. That is expensive but we were only doing eight dives. Their kit is mostly fine if a bit worn - mostly Mares, with slipper fins and 2.5mm shortie wetsuits (even in early January I was fine, though most other people wore a lot more gear and my son had also taken a 5mm neoprene vest). However, not diving in the afternoon meant that we kept losing "our" kit and I had a run of bad luck with dodgy regulators (damaged mouthpieces, contents gauge not working). In retrospect, we never really needed torches but should have taken our own regs - worn out stab jackets, wet suits and fins are rarely life threatening but dodgy regs are. Because I use a lot of air, I also asked for (and got without any hassle) 15 litre cylinders, but I learned to check the fill before the boat departed as these seemed less reliably filled than the standard aluminium 12 litre bottles (fills are not great anyway - usually in the range 200-220bar).
Fourthly, we can confirm what they say about the dive guides - you will always have one. Not only the briefings run to a formula (as they suggest), so do the dives - down to a cave entrance, swim through to outer edge of wall going down to close to 30m, some more swim throughs gradually coming up to finish off over the reef at around 10m, the whole lasting 50 minutes including the mandatory 3 minute safety stop at 5m. Because I set my computer (Suunto Gecko) at "conservative", on some dives I would get within a minute or two of the no-deco limit but then the guides would start to come up so I never went into mandatory deco time. Despite what the Canadians said, our guides tended to get uptight not just if people wandered off for photography, etc, but also if anyone strayed below 30m (the wall just slopes off down and down into the black). We always buddy pair out of habit, but the guides did not bother organising pairs since they always led a group of six or so. The guides tend to choose the sites - on our first dive they triggered off a diver revolution because people on the boat had already done the site (in some cases twice) so they just switched sites (none of the sites is very far to go). We did repeat one site in our eight dives but there is always a lot to see so we did not feel that was a problem.
Fifthly, the day we left there was a storm with strong winds and no diving. The Canadians also experienced that, so perhaps it is relatively common. Up until then conditions were fine.
Like the Red Sea, for UK divers conditions are easy - great viz, not much in the way of tides or currents, no need to wear a lot of kit, not much in the way of waves on the surface, etc. A (different) Canadian we met there had dived in the Caribbean a lot and Cuba twice - he thought Maria La Gorda was as good as anything he had experienced. From our perspective, the scenery of the caves and gullies with their swim-throughs is pretty spectacular and viz is great, but the coral is mostly hard coral and there was neither the colour nor the fish life (nor the amount of bigger life) that we have seen on our Red Sea trips (nor the wrecks). Having said that, compared with a January dive at Capenwray.... In fairness, the caves and gullies are far better than anything we have seen in the Red Sea (or elsewhere), the corals are lovely (just that the comparison is perhaps unfair), there is lots to see and we may just have had a bad four days for the larger marine life.
Sandy & Tom Anderson, Jan 2006
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