NCL Diving Questions for Saydiver or other divers

[crw]

Saydiver,

You have dove in all the NCL sites and I saw a previous post highlighting the operators that you utilized. Any recommendations you can make (NCL vs solo) would be appreciated. Specifically, how did you handle transportation on non-NCL excursions -- repeated rental cars seem expensive. Did you hear any feedback from others (or yourseld) regarding the quality of the NCL hosted diving?

[Mekamax]

Where are you looking at diving? We do our own dives for a few reasons. One is we choose companies that have no more than 6-8 divers. Most cruise ships have "cattle boats" with so many divers they couldnt' keep track. In Cozumel our boat had to call one of their boats just to tell them they had about 30 divers on the surface behind them..... Another is price - we typically will pay a lot less for a better dive operator and we like to be able to choose one for safety and not take just what the cruise line is offering. Another reason is to choose the dive site - this you can not do on a cruise ship tour. Mainly we dive in Cozumel and Cayman. These are very easy to do on your own. Some other places may not. I will NOT pay in advance since too many times the ship just doesn't get to that port and you will loose your money. This can cost us more in taxi fares but has saved us on missed ports. I personally like to do shore dives when possible because these we can dive and then relax on the beach and there is no set time. BUT boat dives are the best way to go to see a lot of diverse marine life.... Debbie