Turks and Caicos Aggressor II
I have travelled on a lot of live aboard dive yachts in the last 15 years, including the Peter Hughes (Aggressor & Dancer fleets) in Indonesia (Komodo), Belize, Turks & Caicos), as well as the Mike Ball boat in Australia, and the Explorer Ventures boats in Saba/St. Maarten/St. Kitts. We dove on the Turks and Caicos Aggressor in November 2009, and honestly, it was our favorite boat of them all.
Travel Coordination:
The Aggressor crew were at the airport, ready to take our bags and whisk us over to the boat, and similarly had shuttles ready to take us back to the airport (very sadly) on our return.
Accommodations / Food:
Rooms on live aboard dive yachts are always a bit tight (bring folding/soft-sided luggage!), but our rooms were very comfortable, with adequate storag efor all of our "stuff". The meals on the yacht were fantastic! As a really nice added bonus, when we came up from our night dives, the crew was waiting for us with hot cocoa. That was such a nice touch!
Diving:
Like any good live aboard, the Aggressor makes the diving easy. Your gear awaits on the back of the boat, and you can just roll into the water -- up to 5 dives a day. That's why liveaboards cost more, but for ease and logging a lot of dives, it is a good deal.
What makes the Turks & Caicos Aggressor really special was the crew, led by Captain Amanda (she is still there at time of this posting, and we plan to go back within the next year). To date, all of my experiences on the Peter Hughes boats have been really positive, but I think Captain Amanda was our favorite – she was great in making us feel so welcome on the boat, and in guiding us to some really nice dive sites
Turks and Caicos is my personal favorite for diving in the Caribbean. The waters are particularly clear, the reefs are lush, there are some really nice walls, and a great variety of both large creatures (sharks, rays, grouper, moray eels, barracuda) and small creatures (nudibranchs, garden eels, Christmas tree worms…you get the idea).
One particularly fun dive by the crew involved the “pyramid of love” – a perforated metal pyramid shaped box (about the size of a breadbox), which is filled with frozen fish, and place on the reef. The crew brings it down on one of the dives, to draw sharks – it never fails. Ordinarily, I object to feeding wild animals, but in this case, it was kind of fun, and it wasn't feeding them from our hands. There were a couple of reef sharks cruising around, drawn by the scent of thawing fish, along with a large moray eel, a grouper (named Gulley, who was well known to the crew), and a little nurse shark. The nurse shark won, he flipped on his back, swam under the pyramid and basically sucked all the fish out. It was quite comical to watch! You have to admire his creativity!
