| Hello
I went to Cape Verde in April, stayed in Santa Maria and also dived with Cabo Verde diving.
The dive centre was good, you'll be picked up at 8-8.15am and returned back to the hotel at around 1PM. It was windy which led to some swell which made climbing the ladder into the RIB a bit tricky at times. The diving was good with plenty of fish, a couple of nice wrecks, moray eels and a nurse shark on one of the wrecks. The reefs are rocky with many small caves and over-hangs that are filled with fish - if you look on top of the reef you can find nudibranchs. We never went deeper than 30m. On one day the currents were strong, and all week it was too windy and too strong currents to go up to the caves/blue hole [Burancona and Regona (spelt wrong)] on the north part of the island (I think ideal conditions are rare to go there, but you may be lucky). Water temp is 23 Deg C. The RIB leaves at 9ish from the jetty in Santa Maria and returns just after 12. There is a guy selling carved stone turtles on the jetty which are quite nice (one is now sat on the decking outside) - the turtle is aparently the symbol of CV, though we didn't see any all week while diving.
Aside from diving there really is nothing to do. You can visit other islands but the trips require flights and as such are quite expensive. The resort its self is a huge dusty building site with building work going on 6 days a week in nearly every diection we looked. We were B&B are were very disappointed with the quality of the local restaurants (we were both ill with vomitting bugs). If you're AI though the lack of choice (mostly pizza or fish in every restauant we went in) won't matter too much.
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Claire |