In January 2001 we stayed 4 days on Nevis, a small island in the Caribbean near St. Kitts. To get there we flew via American Airlines to Miami, then from Miami to St. Maarten, where we stayed a couple of nights at the Divi Little Bay Beach Resort. The resort was OK, but we found the hotel people singularly unfriendly, and I wouldn't go back there again. From St Maarten, we flew on a tiny prop plane with Windward Island Airways to Nevis. Flying is obviously relaxed like everything else in the Caribbean, as the copilot read the newspaper all through the flight. The airport at Nevis is not much more than a hut and a landing strip, then it's a 30 minute or so journey in a local taxi to the Four Seasons resort, where we stayed.
The
Four Seasons is one of those luxury hotels that you only stay in if you're rich
or someone else is paying. Fortunately for us it was the latter, a company freebee.
It's all a bit unreal, including the service. For example while sitting at the
pool an attendant will regularly come by with glasses of iced water, you do
not even have to ask.
We chose to get some diving in in our free time, although we did manage to go sailing one day which was great fun. Diving is not particularly developed on Nevis, however we found a place called Scuba Safaris Nevis Ltd. who have two boats and a dive centre at Oualie Beach. We booked two day's diving with them, the first day we dived Monkey Shoals, a large stretch of reef and sandy gullies. The coral was in good condition and there were loads of really large lobsters to be seen, along with some large porcupine fish. The divemaster told us they look out for the lobsters during the week, then on Sunday they go out diving by themselves and catch them, and sell them to the local restaurants. There didn't seem to be any shortage of lobsters. The max depth was 18.2m, dive time 50 mins, during which I used 150bar of air. After a surface interval of just 30 minutes (!) we did a second dive at a place called 'Doughnuts' which consisted of a lot of coral formations on a sandy seabed. Max depth was 12.1m, dive time 41mins, and I used 90 bar. Viz was about 25m and the water a pleasant 26C, warm enough in our 3mm full length suits. The water was a bit choppy and a couple of divers on the boat took the opportunity to feed the fish...
The
second day we went and picked up some people from St Kitts, which is seperated
from Nevis by a shallowish channel. We were to dive Monkey Deeps, hardly deep
at about 22m, for 40 mins, although the reef did slope off more and you could
probably get 30m if you ignored the DM, who was an amiable Rastafarian. After
a slightly longer 40min surface interval, we went to Doughnuts again which seemed
to be the standard second dive because it is so shallow, for a 51min dive, max
depth 11.4m. The water was much calmer and the dives were very relaxed.
I can't really say the diving was anything spectacular, and I certainly wouldn't go to Nevis for a diving holiday, but it had been fun. We flew from Nevis back to St. Maarten, then on to Curacao and to our next destination, Bonaire.