My fiancé and I, along with our friend dove with Reef Pirates on 08/10/21 and 08/12/21. The 4 star rating comes specifically from our dives on 08/12 with Divemaster Joe, Captain Noah and the additional staff member, Hannah that joined our charter. Joe was great at communicating the options of various dive sites and made our group feel comfortable with the dives planned, as we are all new to diving with less than 15 dives each. He communicated the dive plans very well on the boat and made sure that everyone in the group knew what to expect on each dive. We dove the Baby Barge site and Fantasy Reef, both were great sites. We were blessed with fairly calm seas and visibility at about 80 ft which was much better than our first day of diving. We were very happy with Joe and his team and would highly recommend him to charter another dive trip in the future.

Unfortunately, we cannot say the same about the crew we had the first day of diving on 08/10/21. Andrew was our dive master, and he seemed relatively new to Reef Pirates. His group was all inexperienced divers with two people around 12 dives, one person with 6 dives and the last group member doing their first dive after OW. The dive plan was not discussed well, signals were not communicated prior to getting in the water and members of our group were not weighted correctly. It was assumed we all just knew what to do like an experienced dive group. On a normal dive these issues wouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but visibility was around 8 ft or so under water, which made the dive sites more complicated. First, we had a group member surface more than once on the dive, which shouldn’t happen. Secondly, it was admitted after the dives that our dive master lost us and the boat on more than one occasion. Thirdly, the communication wasn’t set on the boat that was needed for us to know what was going on during the dive so a few of us came up to about 12 feet on more than one occasion because of improperly weighted group members and no communication as to what was happening above us. Luckily, they were shallow dives around 35 ft, so the risks were very minimal, but it did not make us feel very comfortable in the staff leading up to deeper dives. Thankfully Joe reassured us on our second dive day and we had AMAZING dives.

We understand the diving industry suffered through COVID, and many people lost their jobs or their staff, and new staff is to be expected. We just hope in the future the crew knows their dive group a little better so they can work through issues and concerns to make sure everyone is diving with clear communication and is comfortable. Dive sites, visibility and the rough waters are definitely uncontrollable, but making sure things are well communicated and that all divers are safe is to be expected. To be honest if we had showed up with Andrew as our master on 8/12 for our second dive, we probably weren’t going to dive based on overall safety because we were being pushed to do the Corsair dive site at over 100ft.

Overall, we give Reef Pirates a 4 star because the second day was some of our best diving to date and Joe and his team deserve the higher rating. They were fantastic and made our dive trip memorable! We hope the rest of the crew working can work on safety and communication to meet the same standards we had on day 2.