Above is a video of the Shark Dive at Pacific Harbor and below is a TripAdvisor review I wrote for our trip to Beqa Lagoon, Fiji, in April. As you will see it is not very flattering. I am on a mission to get folks to tell the truth about dive locations and operations. A fools errand I am sure but considering that you will spend thousands of dollars and up to 40 hours travelling half way around the world wouldn't you think that both the dive resort and fellow divers would want to tell the truth. Well maybe not the dive resort! World Class Diving it is not!
We spent two weeks, diving two tanks for 12 days, with BLR in
April 2014 and I want to focus on the diving and dive operation for this review. As a point of reference this was our second
dive trip to Fiji. Our first trip to
Fiji was to Taveuni diving the Somosomo Straits and then the Bligh Waters off
of Viti Levu. We are dive photographers
with over 600 ocean dives each. We have
travelled the world for over 30 years, 20 of those years taking two to three
dive trips per year. We have considerable
pacific diving experience, e.g., Palau, Yap, Great Barrier Reef, etc. We maintain a diving blog and underwater
photography site and provide recommendations on the best dive locations and
travel tips to our followers. If you are
a seasoned diver with world class diving experience you will most likely be
disappointed with the diving experience and the dive shop at BLR. At each lagoon dive site we found the visibility
to be extremely poor, generally around 75 feet or less, sometimes much less. Not ideal for photography. Because the lagoon is so shallow there is a
lot of dead coral from storm damage and you spend a lot of time diving over
dead coral. The dive sites generally
have a few coral heads and there really isn’t much to see until you get to the
coral heads. A great disappointment was
the lack of big fish, I suspect this is due to spearfishing by the locals, we
saw several small boats that were spearfishing near dive sites and learned that
locals from Pacific Harbor came over at night to spearfish the dive sites. Nor will you find large schools of fish such
as jacks or snapper, actually there were not big schools of fish at all that we
saw in 24 dives. We did see a few small
schools of barracuda and a shark or two, along with a few small turtles and
small lobsters but no large ones. We
were also expecting an abundance of colorful soft corals but were disappointed
that there were so few as compared to the abundance of colorful soft coral at
Taveuni and the Bligh Waters. The dive
operation caters to large groups rather than your individual diving experience,
so you will be diving with up to 16 or 22 divers of varying experience levels,
mostly new divers. No small boat diving
option is available. Even the shark dive,
which is combined with another dive operation from Pacific Harbor, may have up
to 32 divers in the water from the combined operations. This is a lot of divers converging on one
spot and for a seasoned diver it does take away an immense amount of pleasure by
getting your mask knocked about and your head pounded by inexperienced divers
hyped up on a shark induced adrenaline rush.
While the shark dive is billed as the “best”, we have experienced many
and this one was good but not the best we have experienced by far. BLR has plans to implement their own shark
dive in the future, hopefully, they will keep it to a smaller group. I was also disappointed that the dive guides
had limited knowledge of the names of fish and critters. They tend to focus on a select few,
pre-written on their slate, to show guests but on several occasions I asked the
name of an unusual find only to be told they didn’t know or they gave me a
name, which I learned later was incorrect.
After each dive you are asked to give your time and depth to be recorded
by the staff which was annoying especially since we were not given a printout
of it at the end of our visit as promised.
The dive operation does not have any interest in taking divers to better
dive locations located outside or just on the edge of the lagoon, requests are
excused away, and as a result BLR dives the closer inner lagoon that has less
than optimum diving. We learned BLR may be providing future trips
to better dive sites outside of the lagoon but for an additional upcharge. For
experienced photographers the dive sites around BLR are also less than ideal
and you would be better served choosing another dive location in Fiji, there
are many to choose from including great liveaboards. There was no camera table on our boat and the
camera bucket sometimes had two or three layers of cameras stuffed in them,
causing some divers to scurry to get their camera before any damage could
occur. The boats are old, slow and in
need of maintenance which accounts for some of the reluctance to take divers to
the more distant but far better dive locations. There was tension between folks within the
dive operation that clearly impacted the guest experience. This tension along with a patronizing
attitude to the guests and staff by the dive managers made for some very
uncomfortable situations. Upon departure
my expectation as told to me by the dive manager was that our equipment would
be cleaned. It was dunked but not
cleaned so when it dried there was salt water in the BC and it was encrusted
with salt. The level of diving at BLR is
far from world class and I suspect that the puzzling high ratings given on
Tripadvisor are from new or occasional divers that frequent cattle boat
operations with groups and pronounce the diving is “world class” because they
have limited comparative experience.
Comparing BLR to other dive operations in Fiji and around the Pacific, they
fall quite short of the mark in providing a quality and memorable dive
experience for their guests. My hope is
that seasoned divers reading this review will now have clear expectations when
selecting their dive location and if they choose to go to BLR then they do so with
level set expectations with regard to the quality of diving.
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