Fifty Six

★ 5 · Nicholas Liberto · 2015-09-28

If you want to learn safe and fun scuba go here!! Great staff and great learning experience

★ 5 · Erick Bourai · 2010-04-23

I do not recommend it, mainly because there is no spirit in this dive center. On the boat there is no real exchanges. If a dive master shares ideas or something he/she has seen underwater, it is with another dive guide, seldom with a customer. When you arrive in the dive shop or when you board the boat, only your assigned guide greets you, the other staff members ignore you, even if it is the second or third time they see you. The dive guides do not really know their dive sites, they gave us the feeling that they were discovering the sites with us. When our guide asked the deck man to prepare the safety tank so that, if someone needs extra air during the safety stop they can rely on it. The deck man refused! And nobody had anything to say to that. I was really dismayed even shocked. How could you trust staff so badly trained ? Our first contact with Scuba junction was through e-mail and was quite good. There manager, Natalie, gave us many useful information. When we gave her our holiday program she made no remark and even offered to pick us up at the ferry when we arrived. They requested us to pay a deposit. It is not very common for dive centers, but I did it several days before we start our holidays. When they got the deposit I began to ask, in return, more precise commitment from them. And this is when the problem began: she wrote me that they were not working on April 14, the first day of our program When I asked confirmation that, as she proposed, they will pick us up at the ferry, as she proposed in one of her e-mail, she gave me obscure reasons to explain that they cannot. For the pick up I managed with the resort. For the April 14 afternoon dive, I complained and, after two days she wrote that it is ok and there would be dive trip this afternoon. During our epistolary exchanges I have asked several times what is the distance between the dive centre and the resort, and she never answered. I should have heeded all these warnings, but...... When we arrived at the dive center, our first impression was : chaos. There were people everywhere, it was noisy. There was this lady, apparently from the staff, who was shouting, shouting. We thought that something had happened, a problem, a catastrophe. No, it was just her normal way of expressing herself. I guess some people like that, we don't. They made us feel like a Klingon at a Romulan wedding party, if you see what I mean. A young man came to inquire what we needed. It appeared that he was our dive guide to be. He was nice, really trying to help and to make us confortable in this hectic noisy ambiance. The following day, when we came to dive, it appeared that our dive guide was a young lady! That says about their organization! The guide was a young dive master who had started her dive master course 6 months before. She was enthusiastic, her briefing was well done. She was more focus on the life we could see than on the topography, but everybody has his/her preferences. Under the water she showed herself eager to share, even if the dives were not really full of diversity. Our first dive we started on “red rock” and finished in the “japanese garden”. The visibility was not that good, around 10m. We saw a small turtle a medium size barracuda and few blue spotted rays. The second dive was on the “twin pinnacles” (which are three by the way). Nothing deserves to be noted about this dive except the fact that were more divers than people at peak hour in the subway. The second day we dived in “Southwest pinnacle” and then in “Shark island”. Both dives were much more interesting than the previous day. But nothing was really exceptional. We have seen one or two blue spotted rays, some batfish, a scorpionfish Scuba Junction have a local made boat. It is not really adapted to dive trip, very slow and not comfortable at all, especially during the surface interval between two dives : there is a canopy, so part of the deck is protected from the sun. But with all the tanks equipped set on there, it is impossible to find a shady place where to rest. At least, the boat is clean. During the morning dive trips, there are less customers so it easier to find a place to rest on the boat. But they request you to be in the centre at 0700 for that. The snack they provide is very cheap : old biscuits, pineapple not ripe, cheap tea and coffee. The cups are either not cleaned regularly or so old that they are stained by the numerous beverages they have seen. If you have dived in Asia, particularly in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, you have noticed that the dive centres usually offer a full service. On some diving boat you are literally pampered. They take care of your gears, set them on your tank, help you to put the BCD on, help you on the boat, give a hand to remove your gears after the dive etc... Here, in Scuba Junction, the dives were a little bit cheaper than other places, but it was more on the “do it yourself” side. We had to geared our tank ourselves. After the first dive, you have to swap tank yourself. The “diving boat” cannot come to close to the shore. So they shuttle the customer from the beach to the boat with a typical Thai long tail boat. When we came back after the two dives, they send the long tail boat to fetch the customers, the staff and the equipment. I would have expected them to take care first of the customers and then to send back the long tail to fetch the equipment. Instead they had us waiting for more than 20 minutes for them to unload the long tail boat of the full tanks, to load the long tail with the equipment, to load the long tail boat with the empty tanks. Then, when we arrived ashore they asked the customers to help to unload the boat and to bring the stuff to the centre. Since we paid the same price as almost everywhere in Thailand, I wonder why they do not have more deckhands. If, like me, you have been trained the military way, then you will get this hint of nostalgia which might help you to accept it. Otherwise you will not find this amusing, not at all! Erick