Presidente InterContinental Resort & Spa Cozumel
ScubaDu is located at the Presidente Intercontinental and operates as an in-house operation while also taking on outside divers. They are a well-run operation with four boats (if required), running two-tank morning dives daily and one-tank afternoon dives and night dives based on demand – four divers minimum. The staff is all friendly, helpful and capable. Nitrox is available for a separate fee.
If one stays at the Presidente, an added bonus is the house reef, sitting just in front of the hotel. While this relatively shallow reef is not the place to see giant pelagics, it is a fantastic place for ‘extra’ dives (included with a diving package) both in the afternoon as well as at night. There is a small barge wreck in this dive area, which provides a home to numerous very large crabs, eels, rays and schooling fish.
Another plus of being a Presidente guest, is the dive valet. Victor was our assigned valet for the week and he did a fabulous job of looking after our gear. Even coming back late from a night dive, there he was ready to take our gear, rinse it, have it dry by morning and ready to go on the dock for the next dive.
Perhaps the only caveat on ScubaDu also relates to diving generally in Cozumel. The visibility in Cozumel is fantastic and there is a lot to see in the large and successful marine park – but there are a lot of divers in Cozumel, really a lot. On every dive we saw several other dive groups and we were not there in peak season. Not surprisingly, the divers range in experience and abilities. So ScubaDu, like all of the many other operators, must play to the lowest common denominator. Typically this means groups of six divers per dive master (diving without a dive master is not allowed). It also means 45 to 50 minute dive times, so coming out with a fair bit of air in the tank for slow breathing divers. In our week of diving, we once had a group of eight divers with just one dive master, and two of those were very new to diving. This of course shortens the actual dive time for a bunch of different reasons. On another occasion, our second morning dive was shortened somewhat because the boat had to get back in time to take out a party of snorkelers.
It is probably fair to assume that ScubaDu, like most operators, would adjust the program to divers that wanted to pay extra for a private dive master or book the whole boat. This could be important in rather crowded Cozumel in terms of longer dives or perhaps getting to sites that are slightly less crowded. Bottom line, ScubaDu are a good operator, but just showing up and joining in with the crowd they have that week is subject to the risks of who else shows up at the same time.
