Quote:
| Originally Posted by Yellow Butty Box is it size of boat,location,cost,wrecks,harbour access,sensible sailing times,skipper,quality of tea,cheap B&B,parking etc etc |
Frequently organising things for a University club, we may have slightly different priorities to others. Cheap is good! Cheaper the better really! Don't mind if its a bit scruffy or whatever, as long as it floats, moves around, and drops us on the right wreck and is there when we surface that's just fine :O)
Size obviously useful, but I don't see the point in paying extra for something bigger than you need - as long as there's room without standing on each other that'll do nicely.
Location - obviously if we want to dive the Kyarra then we probably wouldn't use you if you were based in the Farne Islands. We tend to travel around, although places most accessible from the Midlands tend to get visited most.
Wrecks - obviously goes with the location. We tend to book based on what we want to dive, look at whether we can get there easily, and *then* look for a boat that'll do it.
Harbour Access - as long as we can get parked somewhere close and not pay £10/hour for parking then that'll do.
Sailing times - tend to be related to location and dive sites - if I want to dive something on slack and the slack is 7am then obviously i'm going to have to get up early or have to dive something different.
Skipper - always useful to have one. As long as they take us where we want to (reasonably) go, and are fairly nice kind of people then thats fine. If they won't, then there's no point going out with them. Wouldn't want to be on a boat all day with one who really doesn't want to be there, and makes that fact obvious to the divers!
Don't drink tea, doesn't bother me much... don't drink hot chocolate or coffee either :O(
Cheap B&B - again, cheap is good, as long as it has something resembling a bed, a toilet and a shower that'll do nicely. In fact, we could probably do without the bed too.
Parking obviously very useful, but I don't expect to be able to park within 3 seconds walk of the boat. I've dived places where we have to drag kit quite a long way, and although parking close would be good, its really not all that important - we can cope without.
Personally i'd say that as long as we can get on the boat, and it takes us where we want to go and gets us on the site with minimal fuss then that's fine. Everything else is a bonus - nice to have, but we can cope without.
Ultimately, it depends on where we're doing and what we want to do. If we're doing a trip for the club, then it'll usually be organised just about as cheap as possible (while not sacrificing what we can do). When we tend to dive over the summer where we're diving as a group of friends rather than as a club, and so doing slightly more interesting diving, then we'll probably pay a bit more and have a bit more space on the boat, but generally i've found that theres not a lot of difference in price between a nice boat and a crap boat anyway.
David