In 1998 I went to Guadeloupe, an island in the French Antilles and dove the "Réserve Cousteau", a national marine protected area. The diving there was fun with nice coral structures, abundant marine life and interesting underwater volcanic spings that bubbled at 130ft. I really liked that trip, the first one I made after getting my advanced. I was more comfortable and relaxed in the water and thus enjoyed my dives much more. Talking to the locals, they told me all about a wonderful island north of theirs called Saba. Saba, they promised me, offers the best diving in the Caribbean with jaw-dropping pinnacles raising from the abyss, swarming with fish and sharks, patched with colorful coral  and bright  multicolor sponges. My guidebook was also very inspiring, describing Saba as a world class dive destination. I was hooked. That was more than ten years ago and Saba was still on my list of dive spots to go before I die or the place disappears (I crossed the Maldives off my list in 2001, so it's just about me now).

At the beginning of the year a few of our group of Sea Dwellers decided that we ought to go on a dive trip together. We do dive boats all the time, we do barbecues all the time, pool/drink sessions, so why not a trip? Someone offered the BVI, and then they start talking about St Marteen (or St Martin if you land on the French side). I dusted off my guidebook and read about the diving in St Martin: it sucked, everything got wiped out in 1995. It was in 1998 though so it's probably OK now. However I proposed we all had a look at Saba which according to several websites still ranked as a world-class dive destination. Everybody bought it. In February, we all booked our flights and patiently waited for our October trip.

Off we went.

Well first, Saba is not that easy to reach. You have to go to a bigger island first. We landed in St Marteen, the Dutch side of the island. From there we were carried over by bus to the SS Heineken. This is an old ferry/tug boat that stinks of diesel and takes forever to cross the 20 miles that separate St Marteen from Saba. They offer free, apparently unlimited, beer, hence the name... In my original plans I had imagined myself flying on a small puddle jumper to the smallest (and most scary) international airport in the world, the Juancho E. Yrausquin Airport on Saba. Well, we did not. Probably because our small group of friends soon had become a large group of travelers once we entrusted the organization of our dream vacation to a travel agent, and there was no way we could ferry 13 people and three tons of dive equipment on small Cessnas... First hiccup. Not the last unfortunately...

We debarked on Saba soon after sunset. The immigration formalities were quite fun. Two border officers check your passport on the pier in the light of their flashlights and welcome to Saba!

Saba is a volcanic island.. It's basically a dormant but not extinct volcano in the middle of the ocean. A guy had a road built between the 3 villages of the island in the 40's despite the opinion of all experts at that time that it could not be done... With grades of probably 25% and hairpin turns, this is quite a piece of civil engineering. We landed at the Bottom (this is actually the name of the village) and had to go to Windwardside. A bus transported us over there where Julinana's, our hotel, was. We were greeted there by the owners who soon announced the room attribution.

We got very, very, very unlucky and were given the worst room they had. I don't really care about "the view" for a room, I think it is a waste of money to pay more just to be able to see the ocean, I usually couldn't care less as long as I can sleep, but this time, everybody had paid the same and all ended up in nice, renovated, adequately located ocean view rooms except us who were cast away in a little shack next to a graveyard, which although not uncommon on Saba, still does not qualify for a garden view as the owners and the dive operator tried to convince us of.

When it comes to room, my wife is not as lenient as I am. She was very, very, very pissed off. She was all the more pissed off that she had especially requested rooms by numbers based on the reviews she had read in her guidebook and the web. Of course the hotel was full and there was no possibility to change. Of course nobody really wanted to switch with us after seing our miserable (but air-conditioned) shanty. Of course she blamed it on me. And that made her stay and my stay terrible. From that moment on, our trip was wasted.

The next day we went diving. I was hoping that the "world-class super dupper diving" that we were promised would quieten the ire of my spouse.

Well that too failed to deliver...

The diving there is good. But for me it was only average Caribbean diving. It's got some interesting dive sites where pinnacles indeed raise from the abyss but all seem to stop at 90ft. The dive operation we had chosen had us dive Nitrox 32% and no deco on these dives. Needless to say that 15 divers on the top of a pinnacle for 10 minutes oscillating between 90ft and 100ft is not the most exciting way yo enjoy a dive! Even with air, the no-deco forces to stay rather close to the top. Great. For the rest, the dive operation was very professional and I really appreciate the fact that I did not have to surface with 1,500 psi in my tank. With the exception of the "deep" dives, all dives were around 1 hour or more depending on your air consumption. And there's always a DM in the water for security and when they guide, they go slow enough so that even when taking a lot of pictures it's fairly easy to catch up. The boat was nice and after seing the other boats of the two other dive operations of the island, I did not regret our selection of Sea Saba.

Then there was the absence of marine life: where the heck are the fish? The reef, very colorful, very beautiful, apparently very healthy were  deserted. A couple of small grunts, a few tarpons, a couple of rays, two octopus, a few turtles, skinny little eels and a funny nurse shark, that's about it. Ending up spending my dive looking for nudibranchs to get some excitement is never a good sign. Gee I could have done that at home... The reef is very beautiful don't get me wrong. But after a couple of dives and a few hundreds photos of pink sponges, I was done. I wanted more, I wanted life, I wanted movement. Good thing I did not bother bringing my huge video gear, that would have been a major waste!

According to our DMs, the fish were scared away by the storms that hit the island 3 weeks before and migrated to the bottom. OK. Possible. However when we left, in preparation for the upcoming big storm (Tomas) that was going to soak the island and laid waste on the unprotected harbor, fishermen were loading tons of lobsters and big fish in bags on boats bound to St Marteen. So has the legendary Marine Reserve become a Fisherman's Reserve? I don't know and I hope not. But it looked awfully suspicious.

So all in all, diving Saba for us, was like diving on an average day in Cozumel. Visibility was mostly in the 50-60ft, we had current on only two dives, and absence of marine life in all of them. The only unusual things we saw was the Elkhorn Coral, a giant coral structure that looks like the horns of an elk (hence the name). Good Caribbean diving, but certainly not world class.

The island itself is gorgeous. I loved the old stoned streets, the white painted wood cottages with their red tin roof. It's quite a location. The road that zigzags from the Bottom to Windwarside to Hell's Gate is amazing and offers awe-inspiring views of the rugged coast of the island. Every morning a plume of clouds seems to stick on Mount Scenery, the volcano top which only clears once in a while. The food was very surprising with a mixture of Creole and French cuisine at Eden (highly recommended) and elaborate curry flavors at Ecolodge (their coconut shrimps is to die for). Hiking the island can be strenous at times but also offers wonderful panoramas that make great stitched pictures!

Speaking of pictures, shooting underwater in Saba is a walk in the park. 3 settings: macro+flash+shutter priority 1/125s for most of the small to mid-size, close up stuff, flash + shutter priority 1/80s for the bigger, further stuff and P Mode for the divers in the blue... I experimented with Aperture Priority with mixed results. If I needed depth of field when I was shooting a shrimp inside a sponge for example, I set my aperture to f/8 (which is the min for my camera), macro + flash and the results were great. However, I tried the same thing for layered compositions and they came out dark despite the camera defaulting to 1/60s. I blocked the sensitivity to ISO 50 as I noticed that in Av mode the camera would select a very high (400, that the max for my camera, I know, it's old) and very noisy ISO.

So you can see for yourself below. It's not world class diving, and it's certainly not world class photography, but hey, it's easy zen point-and-shoot and that's what we love!                                                                                                                                                      

Here are a few panoramic shots topside, all taken with my brand new Canon T2i and assembled using Autostitch.

Saba from the windwardside

Saba from the other side showing the island's powerplant

Windwardside

The road that could not be built

Winwardside

Juliana's

Shearwater Resort