Trip Report - Cayman Aggressor July4th, 2009

[thesmoothdome]

Dive schedules are pretty well timed out, but I've never been on one that limited your bottom time. Most 5 dive a day locations go with a schedule like:

Breakfast @ 7am
Dive Briefing 1 @ 7:45
Dive 1 @ 8am
Dive 2 @ 11am
Lunch while the boat moves to another site
Dive 3 @ 2pm
Dive 4 @ 5pm
Dinner @ 6:30
Dive 5 @ 8:00pm

It's not really that rushed. The dive deck will stay open until everyone who is diving is off the boat. If you fall asleep and miss it by 1/2 an hour, then you're out of luck, but I've never found a need to rush off the boat. On the flip side, I've only been ask to limit bottom to an hour once or twice. Unless the captain has to get the boat moving at a certain time, there's always some flexibility. I've seen plenty of folks routinely do 90 minute profiles without catching any flack. I'm usually good with a 50-75 minute profile, but I suck air.

[scubarobin]

Originally Posted by CompuDude

Ugh. Yuck. I thought that was the whole point of LOBs! No rushed schedules!

nope, the point of doing LOB is to be able to do 4-5 dives per day and never haul dive gear around! Also, you get to dive sites that the day boats can't get to for the most part. There has to be a schedule though to a certain extent, otherwise the boat just sits over one dive site all day and people get tired of that. Most people want to see several different dives sites each day, therefore people have to be back on the boat at a certain time so the boat can move.