Cook Islands

[Mark R Sims]

Anyone dived in Rarotonga and have any advice ?

[richard scarsbrook]

Anyone dived in Rarotonga and have any advice ?
My wife and I dived there in January this year. We are both AIs with over 1000 dives each. Rarotonga is lovely, a great place to get over your jet lag if flying westabout to NZ or Oz. The diving is easy and pleasant - good but no cigar as the americans would say. Think Malta with coral. There are four dive outfits on the island - Cook Island Divers caters for the young backpacker crowd; Pacific Resort is follow-my-leader diving; we dived with Rarotongan Dive Centre (RDC); and I forget the fourth one. RDC was fine and I recommend it. It's run by Huw & Sheryl John, and Steve Grant (Welsh, Kiwi & Kiwi respectively). Huw started his diving with a traditional BSAC branch in south wales, and understands the requirements of BSAC branch divers (he is also a relative of the great Barry John of RUFC John/Edwards halfback pair fame!). RDC respected our qualifications and we dived unguided.

All the diving is from RIBs or similar (we saw the other dive outfits' boats about). There are only about 3 launch points on the island, but they are fairly evenly spread around the island, and since it's only about 30km in circumference you can nearly always get in somewhere. There are plenty of fish, we saw one shark, the drop-offs are steep but not vertical, and there is some coral bleaching. We did six dives and always had the site to ourselves.

Don't travel round the world just for the diving in Rarotonga, but do give it a whirl if you are in the area.

BTW we also did six dives in Western Samoa. An interesting place, a couple of dives excellent, better than Raro, the others rather mediocre. Moana Divers in Apia, and Pacific Resort Divers in the south were both OK (that means the air was clean, everything worked, the boat was there when you surfaced, they seemed to know what they were doing, and they did not insist on guided diving [PRD set a ridiculous 20m depth limit but we ignored it]).

Also this week I have been researching dive outfits in Fiji, with a view to a stopover there next January/February. I have emailed about 20 operations but the replies so far are not encouraging. The majority of operations appear to insist on strictly controlled guided diving, and the couple that don't are in locations we don't want to go to for non-diving related reasons. One of the replies has to be the most patronising of any I have ever received to queries of this type. So it's looking like Rarotonga again.


Feel free to email privately for further information.

Regards
Richard Scarsbrook
FCD/AI