Eddy's Scuba Blog

Here is a review of the Nekton Pilot as a scuba diving liveaboard. This was my first liveaboard and in general terms I was pleased with the Nekton Pilot. It was really a nice scuba diving platform, very convenient for someboday whose main interest is diving.

The Boat
The Nekton Pilot has a "SWATH" (Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull) design, it is basically a platform sitting on top of two submerged pontoons. This design makes it very stable and smooth when cruising. Sometimes we did not even feel the boat moving. This design came from the Navy, so if you've seen the the "stealth boat" this boat is similar (sans the stealth capabilities), in my opinion. The pontoons can be filled with ballast (ocean water) to lower the boat for greater stability in rough water. The ballast can be pumped out to make the boat higher when docking. Since the center of gravity can be made lower, you get the impression that you are on a bigger ship (8 times bigger according to Nekton).

The boat has three decks: The Sun Deck, the First Deck and the Second Deck. The Sun Deck is the topmost deck and has two areas, the Bridge and a recreational area. The recreational area has an open area and covered area. The covered area is a lounge with 2 round tables (for 8+ people) and a whiteboard. This is where the morning dive briefings happen. Next to this area there is a closet for rental equipment, a shelf for dry belongings and a rack with "no-fly" hangers (tied to the rack) for hanging your wetsuits. Here are pictures of the Sun Deck and the Bridge:

The Bridge sits at front-most part of the boat. Actually you get an unobstructed view of the ocean on this bridge, which you don't in most other ships. The bridge is equipped with modern communication equipment and also sonar which is seen on the left side of the picture. I guess sonar would very useful when navigating around shallow reefs. Captain Ephey will let you get into the bridge and even "drive" the boat on a quiet night. I heard that people have done this, but I didn't myself.

Here's a picture of the ship schematics that was hanging on the lounge. The guy in the corner is either the designer of the boat or was involved somehow in the construction or design of the Pilot.

The First Deck houses the main dining area, the A/V lounge, the galley and sleeping cabins. The main dining area has an "L-shape" and can sit more than 30 people. In each corner there is audio-visual equipment including monitors or projection screens, VCR, DVD and PCs with USB connections. There is a library of PADI instruction video-tapes and also on local information. One afternoon I remember watching a tape of the history of Belize and some of the "ground" attractions.

The Audio/Visual lounge is right next to the dining area and can be visible from the dining area. It has large projection TV, a PC with USB, universal memory card adapter (CompactFlash, SD, Memory Stick, etc). and DVD burner. This where you can upload your digital pictures (using the memory card adapter. At the end of the trip there is a picture competition. Anybody that has taken pictures on the trip can participate. The results are decided by popular vote on Friday night, the last day of the cruise.

Here's also where we have our nightly lectures. Every night after dinner, usually at around 6:45pm, a member of the crew would give a lecture. The topics varies from fish id, turtle species, mostly marine biology related subjects. Here's a picture of Ryan giving a lecture on turtle species:

The lecture is a good time to relax after dinner and rest a bit before the night dives. Sometimes the night dive briefing will happen right after the lecture in this lounge.
In the A/V lounge there is a library of Fish ID/marine biology books, mostly on local species. There is also a shelf of paperbacks for the bookworms.

The Second Deck houses the rest of the cabins, crew quarters and other utility rooms. My room was on this deck, which in my opinion is better, if you prefer a quieter area. The front rooms on the second deck are preferable in my opinion.

The Rooms
The rooms are small. Even though, I was lucky to be assigned the whole room to myself (usually they eleep two people) I found it somewhat tight. Make sure that your luggage is foldable, otherwise the space would be even tighter. The room has either two twin bed or a double bed, a sink (with a kitchen faucet), bathroom, A/C, a PA system (you hear all the announcements of happenings on the boat like dive briefings, lectures, etc.), and a small shelf/closet. The bed was quite comfortable and there were reading lights.

The bathroom space was tight but it served it's purpose. You have a shower head and a marine toilet that is close to the size of a regular toilet, although it's partially driven with air. You get fresh clean towels every day at around noon when they clean the room. You also get an ample supply of soap and toilet paper.

The Food
All meals on the Pilot are served buffet style, although you are waited on for drinks, second helpings and dessert. For breakfast you get usually eggs, sausage, an assortment of breads, cereal and fruits. Lunch usually includes a soup (made with the previous day leftovers ;)), salad and a main dish like tacos, a sandwich or burgers. Dinner is more elaborate with salad, a main course like roast beef, bbq pork or carved turkey. It also includes "homemade" dessert like key-lime pie, cheesecake, pumpkin-walnut pie. If you are lucky, there could be dessert leftover after the night dive. For more details on actual the menu checkout:

http://www.nektoncruises.com/Liveaboards/Dining.aspx

Here's a picture of one of the buffets:

I believe this one was bbq pork with mashed potatoes. For the most part, the food was consistently good to excellent. Considering that the boat is self sufficient for an entire week (it is not supplied every day), they do a good job at keeping the food and vegetables fresh. Some of the desserts were really out of this world. The cooking was done by Leslie and Cristina, two gals from Honduras.

The Snacks
Snacks are available on every surface interval :). In between morning dives, sometimes a line forms for the morning cookies punctually at 10:30am. The cookies vary every day, one day could be peanut butter, another chocolate with nuts. In between afternoon dives, you get other snacks like this conch ceviche.

This is the only afternoon snack that I remember having, maybe because I was not aware of it. I only found out about the afternoon snacks after chatting with Cristina. That particular day she was cooking the ceviche, which is one of my favorite dishes.

The picture is of two of the crew, Cristina and Helena cooking ceviche. Helena is one of the instructors, and lived in Costa Rica for a while. Sometimes they have "galley duty", that is one of the dive crew would help out in kitchen either helping cooking, serving or doing the dishes. Cristina, orinally from Honduras, was the second cook or cook helper and also in charge of the room cleaning every day.

The Diving Facilities
The Nekton Pilot is indeed a diving machine. It was originally designed for diving in mind, which you can't say about other boats. It has a movable dive deck that can go up or down depending on the conditions and needs of the day. The tanks are aligned along the whole back of the deck (except for the middle staircase) and one half of the front side. Tanks are refilled in place with hoses. At the beginning of the trip you are assigned a place and that's where you leave your equipment. I could leave my BCD attached to my tank for the entire trip, with no need to switch tanks or assemble or reassemble things. There was also a cubby hole underneath for your mask, fins and snorkel.

There were three entry points (to the water) on the dive deck, one on starboard (left side), one on port (right side) and one in the middle. For the ones on the sides you had to jump about 3ft into the water. I preferred to use stairs to get into the water because of my camera, most photographers did. You can literally walk into the water with the middle stairs.

The dive deck has a "hanging bar" that is lowered on every dive. This bar is a convenience to do your safety stop. It sits at 15ft deep. Next to the bar there is always a tank with a regulator, in case you run out of air during your safety stop, which never happened to me.

There is always a rope running from the mooring line and another one from the dive deck to one of the small boats. On every dive, one of the small boats is put on the water and tied with a line. In case, you need to be "rescued", that is you popped up too far from the boat, they will come get you. The bubble watcher observing on the sun deck will ask you with signals whether you are ok. This happened to me one time, we popped up about 500 yards from the boat and the bubblewatcher signalled me whether I was ok, I was ok, but had a long swim ahead. This is when I got the chance to take a picture of the Pilot from the water.

For photographers, there are several convenient features on deck. On the First Deck there is a padded camera table with a rinse bucket (to test your housing) and air hose to spray the water out off your equipment once the dive is over.

Down on the dive deck itself there is another two rinse buckets for camera equipment next to middle entry stairs. Also on the dive deck there are two hot showers and an igloo with warm towels. There are other designated rinse buckets to rinse masks and wetsuits. Some of those buckets are really plastic trash cans (50 gall.) with labels.

Nitrox is available on the Pilot. Although it's advertised to be 28%, I did managed to get up 34%. Nitrox is generated by their onboard machine, therefore it varies, some days I would get 32% or 33%. I guess I was lucky because I was the only one on board using nitrox. Otherwise my "share" of oxygen would have been lower.

A Typical Day on board the Nekton Pilot
Here's what a typical day on the Pilot looks like:

Time	Activity
6:30am	Cold Breakfast
7:00am	Hot Breaktfast
8:00am	Morning Dive Briefing
8:15am	First Morning Dive
10:30am	Cookies
10:45am	Second Morning Dive
12:00n	Lunch
1:00pm	Afternoon Dive Briefing
1:15pm	First Afternoon Dive
3:00pm	Snack and/or Movie
4:30pm	Second Afternoon Dive
6:00pm	Dinner
7:00pm	Lecture
8:00pm	Night Dive Briefing
8:15pm	Night Dive
9:30pm	Snack or Movie

Interesting Coral Formations: Inpiration
Today is our last day of diving on the Nekton Pilot. The past two days we've been having bad weather wind high winds, rain and temperatures lower than the water. This morning we woke up to an improvement in weather patterns. However it was still cloudy, but it looked like the sun wanted to come out.

For the morning dives we chose a dive site called "Inspiration". Unfortunately I did not take a picture of the site diagram, so I couldn't post it. Anyway the site was not very memorable, although I made my deepest dive on the first dive to this site, 103 ft.

In terms of marine life, I did not see anything out of the ordinary. Perhaps the creatures were still hiding because of the bad weather. I did see; however, some interesting coral formations like this "coral with spikes and this brain coral:

I also found this coral that looked like a piece of jade and this "ball" of smooth flower corals, I haven't seen anything like this before:

We did a second morning dive on this site as well. Again there wasn't much marine life, and again I had to be contempt with interesting coral formations like this "xmas tree-look-alike" coral formation and this barrel coral that grew around the branch of a soft coral:

I don't know what happened to us on this site in terms of navigation. On the first dive, we popped up more than 400 yds away from the boat. We could not see the boat from below because the visibility was still bad. So it was like a good 10 minute swim on the way back.

The Last One is a Charm: Tarpoon Caves

For our last dive we headed to Tarpoon Caves. The weather had remained cloudy in the morning, but it started to clear up. Under water there were still remnants of the previous days of bad weather. There was silt covering the coral beds.

On previous night dives , we had seen tarpoons on a distance. Even on the surface, you could see them approaching the surface for food. They measure over 3ft on average. At this site, Tarpoon Caves, the name did it justice. We could see tarpoon in plain daylight.

The site was very similar to dolphin pass in terms of layout. A sandy and grassy shallow area next to a wall drop-off all along with channels or swim thrus along the way. However, marine life was more exciting, right away you could see tarpoon swimming around the boat:

On the sandy area you could see hogfish and groupers poking the sand looking for food. At the dive briefing we were told of a pair of big gray angelfish that inhabit the area. Indeed, we found them, the pair was swimming along the sandy and grassy area.

On the second dive at this site, I was chasing the pair. At one moment one of them run around and head straight at me. This is the "closeup" picture I got:

This is a movie of the pair of angelfish:

Jan and Matt, two of my previous dive buddies on this trip, were also on that second dive at Tarpoon. After chasing the angelfish for a while (we were in 30ft of water or less), I noticed that Jan was pointing at something on a grassy area. At first I could not see anything. But later I noticed a boxy funny looking fish. I had not seen something like it before and I didn't have a name for it:

Later on the boat, with the help of the "Reef Fish" book by Hummann and Deloach. We identified as a burrfish. Jan thought it was "web burrfish", but at closer look at the picture, I did not see a we-like pattern, so I believe it was a "briddled burrfish".

By the end of the dive, we were just hanging around the grassy area. Since it was shallow (30 ft) you could use it as a prelude to the safety stop. It was much more fun to swim around than to just hang in there. The sandy/grassy are was indeed very interesting. Another creature that was around there was this southern stingray with a "copilot" (a bar jack), the other fish on top would follow the stingray wherever it went.

This wasn't the only stingray that I saw. I took this movie of another one.

This dive site turned out to be one of the best dive sites in this trip. You could see big creatures like barracudas, tarpoons, medium size fish like angelfish, hogfish, groupers, strange ones like the bridled burrfish and also common ones like this striped grunt with a curious face as we were on our safety stop.

I could not wait for the night dive at this dive site. I guess for some reason they saved this dive for last. Since I was flying not the next day, but the day after. So I could do this night dive and I was the only one. I would end the trip with a one-on-one dive with one of the divemasters.

Last (Night) Dive of the Trip
The trip was winding down. Most people on the liveaboard were packing up their equipment and suits. The sun deck was littered with BCDs, booties and wetsuits left to be dried out. Today settlement day as well. The day when you pay for any extra that you have taken like courses or excursions. During the day some people took excursions to Half Moon Caye, which is a bird sanctuary. The Nekton Pilot had two small boats that took people there. I decided instead, to continue diving in the afternoon and at night. But first, before dinner I enjoyed my last Belizean sunset onboard:

The night dive started at about 8:00pm. Jeff, one of the divemasters, was going to be my buddy. We first went along the drop-off and encounter a lot of action. First there was this mystery fish that was swimming around us. It was pretty big, at least 3ft long. I did realize the lag time of my point-and-shoot camera trying to get a picture of this guy. I finally got one, but only of its tail fin:

I later looked it up. It looked like an oceanic fish, rather than a reef fish. The pointy fins and scutes along the spine made it recognizable. It was a black jack. It's considered a deep water fish, but often swims along drop-offs. Aparently it approaches divers rapidly, attracted by the air bubbles.

Later on, we found the usual suspects, like this bottom dwelling parrot fish sleeping. Its face looked just like an extra-terrestial creature from a cartoon, smiling.

We also, saw other fish who are usually active fish during the day. This was a hogfish sleeping below a ledge. It was the fist time I could get a picture of a hogfish from the front, because they often swim away from you, so usually you catch them from the side.

On this dive I saw a different kind of lobster. It was not a typical Caribbean spiny lobster. It had a darker red color and looked more like a giant crawfish. I believe it measured a little bit less than a foot.

Then there were the usual suspects, like this coral banded shrimp. This is the first time I could get an almost entire shot of the its body sideways. I usually could get shots of this guy from the front.

On the same ledge where we found the hogfish, there was this whelk. It was not a conch, it was some sort of giant snail. I have never seen one of this guys before. I later found out that this was dinner for the next guy that we encountered.

I was so proud to found this next guy. On one of the lectures or one of the briefings, I was told that the way to find an octopus is to find its lair. Usually it's lair is surrounded by dead shells. Lo and behold, when I noticed a hole filled with empty shells, that told me that I had found a an octopus lair:

This was the first one I've seen in it's lair. Jeff, the divemaster, later commented "that was a good find". At the end of the dive, I spent the safety stop time on the grassy area. Suddenly I noticed something swimming on the grass and did not look like a common fish. It was some sort of trunkfish:

I later looked it up. It was a "buffalo trunkfish", it was a first for me as well. That concluded the last dive in Belize. On this last dive I had seen pretty unique and things that I have seen for the first time which made me happy. It was a nice ending to the trip.

The bad weather continued today, but compounded from yesterday. We went back to Dolphin Pass, one of the better sites. Today we even got intermitten rain, but we dove anyway. The first dive was kind of uneventful. We went along the wall and could see the sand being "blown" through the several passes along the wall. So you would get portions of good visibility followed by portions of bad ones.

As I wrote before coming out was the worst part. The air temperature wend down as low as 70F, but the water temperature remained at 81F! We would rather stay on the water! Here's a picture of the dive deck while we were coming out. I felt for the poor guys on deck duty:

On the the second dive, we decided to just go around the sand bar just below the boat rather than going to the wall. The visibility was getting even worse in the afternoon, you could see coral covered by sand.

On this dive, we did see some unusual things. Like this "lost remora":

He problably lost his host because of the bad weather or was sick? On this particular dive I buddied up with Dave and Brent, two hard core photographers. After chasing a southern stingray, I got separated from them and because of the bad visiblity I never reconnected with them. We were only at about 25-35ft of depth. I later regretted having been separated from Dave, I heard later on that he ran into a "shortnose batfish", one of the strangest, ugliest-looking fish and very uncommon. Dave later showed us a picture of that guy.

As any tropical vacation I've been to, we got caught by the weather. Today we woke up to a windy day, with swells of 2-3 ft, current and low visibility. Here's an idea of how windy it was. This is a picture on the "Sun Deck" where we hang our wetsuits to dry. That day they were flying almost horizontally:

And as any hard core diver group, we dove anyway. The weird thing about the weather was that the water was warmer than the air! The water temperature was 81 F whereas the air temperature was 72 F. The dive site today was called "Eternity". The base of the reef was deeper than on previous dives, so the "hovering" depth was about 50 ft, dropping to a wall of 130 ft:

The creatures down there must definitely know that there is bad weather up there. They must be thinking bad weather = no divers ;) ... case in point, this Caribbean lobster was walking in the open at daylight:

Another example of creatures sensing the difference of weather was this spotted moray eel. He was with his head out of a hole breathing heavily:

Usually morays are nowhere to be seen during the day, and I've usually found them during the night. I spent several minutes snapping pictures at this moray. He did not even move one bit.

Overall the dives today were uneventful, sometimes boring. So I took pictures of whatever interesting stuff I could find. Like this feather duster:

We did three dives at Eternity today, that was the average "on a bad day" ;) On land-based trips, that was considered a "full day". We did two dives in the morning and one on the afternoon. Coming out of the water was the worst part, you had to come out of 81F-water to 72F- air. Fortunately, we had 2 hot showers on the dive deck. On this day, I would spend several minutes on that shower, since it was too cold to even walk up the stairs.

Finally the weather caught up with me as well, I guess the 2-3 ft swell and 3 ft surge took a toll of my inner ear. I was feeling dizzy after the third dive. We ended that dive at about 3:00 pm. I headed for a nap after that.

At dinner time, I was still feeling a bit a nauseaus. So I took a Dramamine pill and went back to sleep early that day. Because of the weather, the visiblity was getting worse and worse, so I wasn't missing much.

We woke up today to a beautiful day. By now the daily schedule was already engrained in our heads. By 6:00 am you would be awake already and eating breakfast by 6:30. If you woke up early enough, you could catch a glimpse of a gorgeous Belizean sunrise:

Morning Dives: Quebrada

This dive site was sitting on the edge of a wall. The wall was running from north to south. Perpendicular to the wall there were sandy grooves:

The first dive at this site was somewhat dissapointing. There was a lot of soft coral and broken coral on the floor. My buddy Tom and I stayed mostly on the shallow area, about 30 ft deep. There was not much to see, except for ocassional 4-eyed butterfly fish, sergeant mayors, or this queen angel fish:

The dive ended with no major sightings, and we did not look forward for a second dive. At that point, I personally felt like going to a different site for the second dive. Little would I know that second dive would be completely different. Like they said, every dive is different even you go to the same site.

After the dissapointment on the first dive, we decided to take a different direction. We decided to go along the wall and a bit deeper, about 70 ft. Boy what a difference did that make. Since were going along the wall and deeper, we did not see as much soft coral. I guess the soft coral tends to grow in shallow areas (30 ft.) and they looked like plants (need the sun for photosynthesis). To our delight the wall was dressed by colors by corals and sponges:

The dive was becoming very nice, the visibility was around 60 ft. We had started in a northerly direction. On the way back south and nearly approaching the shallow flat area (30 ft), I noticed the biggest spotted drum fish I've ever seen:

This guy might have measure at least 6 inch. I spotted it while I was swimming over the ledge that lead the shallow area to the wall. It was hidden inside a small hole on the wall at about 40ft. I had swim inside that hole to be able to photograph it. Since spotted drums tend to stay at "their home", I managed to take several pictures. I imagine that my buddy must have seen my fins coming out of a coral wall, since I was deep into the hole for a good 5 minutes. This a picture of the same spotted drum's left side:

The spent the rest of the dive at the shallow area, at about 30 ft. surrounded by lots of soft coral. This time I was lucky to find a trumpet fish. It is usually difficult to see them because they hide so well among the soft coral:

I followed it around for a while. It is difficult to shoot them because they are so long. So you either have to shoot the whole fish, which can be difficult to discern, or pick some part of it, like in these pictures where I focused on the eye:

The "Aquarium" in Belize
During lunch we moved to a second dive site called "Aquarium", located on the west side of Long Caye. The name did indeed do justice to the site. It was full of life as we would see in the next three dives. Long Caye was located on the southern side of the Lighthouse Reef. It's marked with the blue star on the small map on the top right of this map:

The diagram did not do justice to the site ;). At briefing, I jokingly said that this was "the worst diagram" so far. However, the diving was not. I saw a variety of fish small and big, like trumpet fish, queen angels, lots of parrot fish, barracudas, groupers, snappers ...

Second Dive: The Parrotfish Super Highway

On Our seconfd dive at this site we proceeded on the opposite direction to the previous dive. We went in the northwest direction and descended to about 76 ft along the wall. One amazing thing that I noticed was the "parrotfish super highway" along the wall:

There were hundreds of parrotfish swimming from one side to another, some were swimming in one direction and others in the other direction. There were different kinds of parrotfish as well. I guess they really got a good name. They do swim like birds, maybe they were descendants of prehistoric birds.

There was of interesting formations along the wall. Like this "flute-like" sponge and this brain coral:

Or this pair of giant puffer fish frolicking on the reef wall:

If you stopped and look carefully inside the nook and cranies you were able to find creatures like this king crab:

The dive site felt like and aquarium indeed, different kinds of "action" in different "displays". I was lucky to get this colorful shot of tube sponges on the front, the deep blue on the background and blue cromis lingering on the reef. I think I will practice this kind of composition on my next dives. Getting a picture with the right colors is really challenging, specially during the day. The sun can cause your pictures in that dreadful green tone. Fortunately this picture wasn't like that at all.

We ended the dive on the shallow area and I was lucky to find this blue trumpet fish. It measured about 3 ft and I was following it for a while:

I later read that trumpet fish has different color phases, sometimes they are brown and sometimes they are blue. Or ar they different species? I also read that trumpet fish are more closely related to seahorses. No wonder they can swim forwards and backwards. They actually exhibit similar behavior, they have similar fins and hang around soft coral. They also have the long snout.

When we approached the boat, we noticed lots fish hanging out below, barracudas, jacks, groupers, 4-footer tarpoons. The night dive at this site was going to be exciting ...

Night Dive: Close Encounters of the Strange and Big Kind

After a turkey dinner (Tuesdays is "turkey" day) and a lecture on turtle species, we looked forward to the night dive at this dive site, Aquarium. The weather was nice all day with 81 F of air temperature and water temperature as well. For night dives I usually paired up with Jan and Matt. Jan is always very good at finding out the creatures. She own her own copy of Reef Fish Identification by Paul Humann. This was "the" bible for fish id. I usually checked out this book after my dives, especially when I couldn't identify a creature. The boat had several copies as well.

The dive started with tiny creatures like this coral banded shrimp:

I was glad that the picture turned out nice, because it is usually very difficult to get macro shots with my camera (Sony Cybershot DSC-P9). Usually creatures like tiny shrimp come out out-of-focus with this camera.

Later on I spotted this "mystery" creature, it slithered like an eel, but it was blue:

Jan told me later on, that this was a "manytooth conger eel" and that it was "extremely rare", so rare that even the Reef Fish Identification book had a a picture very similar to mine ... without its head. I thought that was hilarious :).

Speaking of slithering creatures, soon after, we spotted this sharp tail eel:

On a previous trip to Cozumel, I had called this guy "sea snake", now I know the correct name of this species thanks to the Reef Fish Identification book. While I was getting several pictures of the eel, Jan pointed me to this small crab, it must have measured about 4 inch. across. I did fail to look it up in the book, but I personally call it the "Marty Feldman Crab" because of its protruding eyes. It like looked like a character of a cartoon movie. I later found the real name for this crab "batwing coral crab".

Towards the end of the dive, I was noticing a huge fish swimming around us and chasing other fish. It was a huge dog or mutton snapper. It measured about 3 feet long:

You could even hear the noise it was making while it was swallowing other smaller fish. It swam really fast, but it would sometimes stop, either to look for dinner or when it passed between my legs:

As we fisnished the dive, we were starting to gather under the boat and more "stars" started to appear. There was another pair of divers chasing this huge tiger grouper:

It was so tame, that you could almost pet it. It was huge, it must have been close to 3 ft. This was a really good ending treat for this dive ... filled with lots of strange and big creatures.