Anse Chastenet, St Lucia - June 2000

from Robbie and Jean

St Lucia is one of the Windward islands in the Eastern Caribbean, located closer to the South American continent than the USA - its immediate neighbours are Martinique and St Vincent. Flight time is about 9 hours from Gatwick. Historically, St Lucia was fought over by both the English and the French for more than 150 years and after a period of being British, it finally became independent only 20 years ago – the national language is officially English, but most natives speak a French-based Creole. The island is famous for its two large volcanoes at the south of the island, the “Pitons” and the hotel where we stayed was not far from them. Most of the interesting dives sites in St Lucia are in the Soufriere Marine Reserve, located at the base of the pitons, so we were ideally located for our week of diving.

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Anse Chastenet hotel is 1.5 hours by taxi from Hewannora airport – its a very “interesting” journey because of the poor state of the roads. Once there, we realised it was highly unlikely we’d be going anywhere by road during the week! The hotel is in a wonderful location, amid lush tropical vegetation, and the rooms are scattered throughout the steep hill – ours was at the very top… being unfit was definitely a disadvantage. At night all we could hear was the sounds of the rainforest and the daytime atmosphere was very relaxed. The Hotel was excellent, mostly catering for Americans but also some Europeans. Rooms are very well furnished and expansive (even the lower end Superior rooms) but there is no air conditioning due to the “close to nature” ideals - they are open to the outside world as the walls are simply horizontal slats with wire mesh to prevent insects and other animals entering. Dining was fantastic, we went for the “MAP” plan giving you breakfast and dinner with afternoon tea/coffee; there was a great choice of food with local dishes as well as international, and the quality was excellent. Plus the upper restaurant had wonderful views across to the Pitons.

As we arrived on the first day of the rainy season (June to October) the weather was not ideal, and we had rain every day, although mostly it was patches of light drizzle. It certainly didn’t deter us from diving or even sitting on the beach!

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The hotel is also the base for Scuba St Lucia (SSI / PADI), which seems to be the premiere dive centre on the island. They have a large number of friendly and knowledgeable dive guides and instructors, and all transfers to dive sites are made using powerful modern boats - most sites are within 15 minutes. On many dives they include a photographer or videographer, and videos of your dive are usually playing on the screens by the time you’ve washed your kit!

Anse Chastenet also has its own reef accessible from the shore and this was our first dive, so that we could get familiar with the site (and the guides could gauge our competence!) On all our dives, the water was warm at about 27C, visibility was usually fair/good and there was very little current. We wore 3mm shorties the whole time with no problem. The same evening we did the house reef as a night dive (our first) – this was fun, interesting and awful depending on which of us you asked, the biggest problem being the large number of divers compared to guides, but also our inexperience made things worse. We have since dived at night again in the Red Sea, and found it to be a much more pleasurable experience!

For the remainder of our dives, we went by boat to various locations in the Soufriere Marine Reserve, and generally the number of divers was small. At Trou Diable there was only 4 of us along with the guide, and a diver filming with a video camera – we later learned he was a award-winning local underwater videographer, so it was a good job we bought the video!

The dive sites featured names like “Trou Diable”, “Pinnacles”, “Superman’s Flight” and “Piton Wall”, which certainly matched the glorious scenery above water. Underwater, most of the sites were sloping reefs, with a few featuring vertical columns of rock or coral. The coral was abundant, more so than we remember from the Maldives, although we didn’t see the same range or numbers of fish and larger animals. Still, some of our highlights were: Spotted moray eels, many lobsters, shrimps & crabs, soldierfish, 2 turtles, pufferfish, boxfish, barracuda and jacks.

If you would like to read more details about these dive sites, we would recommend you buy the December issue of Sport Diver, which features an article on the same hotel, dive centre and dive sites we visited!

Although we did not find it too much of an issue, Scuba St Lucia play it safe and restrict the amount of time underwater, generally to a maximum of 45 minutes, no matter the depth. Sometimes we were surfacing having only used half a tank and well within decompression limits – if you “sip” air then this can be a little frustrating as you may feel short-changed. For most people though, this time is plenty and we understand more generous than a lot of other Caribbean destinations that can restrict dives to 30-35 minutes.

In summary, we very much enjoyed our week at Anse Chastenet – although the lack of air-conditioning in the rooms took its toll during the night! The diving was well organised and enjoyable, but we felt that the Maldives had slightly better to offer for fish numbers and varieties and other sea life. It was an expensive week - we had free flights and so booked directly with the hotel, this was about US$1800 each including food and 12 dives (we took our own gear) – a comparable rate including flights can probably be had from Kuoni. For a relaxed but sophisticated holiday, Anse Chastenet must be the best choice in St Lucia given its immediate location to all the dive sites. We met people coming from the north of the island every day (1.5 hours trip) just to dive these sites that were local to us!

Jean & Robbie have their own site at: - http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~spica

For further information you can also look at Sport Diver, Dec 2000 page 62

For more direct information visit these: http://www.ansechastenet.com

AND: - http://www.scubastlucia.com

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