anyone been to barbados????

charleskieffner · 05:31 AM

spending my 50th birthday there. got free tickets. all i have to split w/g/friend is room/car/food. never been before.

anything must see/must do?

whats best dive shop there? been diving for 33 years now, so its kind of second nature. bringing poseidon regs,zeagle tech b.c.,nikonos V w/strobe, digital cam w/strobe, mask,fins,m 1/2 mm suit. all of this on wheels. and one really REALLY REALLY BIG POSEIDON STAINLESS DIVEMASTER DIVE KNIFE to slit the throat of any pesky sharks that want to bug me. TSA always has fun with this one! hahahaha LOL!

best fishing charter?

best restaurants?

figured its off season for a reason............hurry-kanes(hurricanes). figured that if all hell breaks loose with a cat 5 hurricane, the british military will be able to clear runway and generally bring peace and calm amongst the island inhabitants. unlike other low lying backwater/jerkwater islands that i may have to swim, when they get nailed by storm surge. let alone all the water/electric problems after the storm.

hows that for reasoning????

playing a huge crap shoot here in the next 30 days that a hurricane doesnt spawn off afrika and totally screw up my trip. yes i am glued to NOAA daily

sharks FEAR ME!

rs6er · rs6er's Garage

Think you're in the wrong forum.

charleskieffner · 08-19-2007, 05:20 AM

mods my bad please move to OT

RoninLB · 08-19-2007, 02:07 PM

"barbados???? "

never been there.

I'd figure a short hop to Bonaire if a cat anything comes around. It's close by so should be $75-$100. Although i've never been in Bonaire during a hurricane, the north end has some of the wildest diving with wildlife during huricanes. Kinda like everything gets pushed there.

Bonaire is out of the hurricane belt afai know.

charleskieffner · 04:00 PM

barbados.........ie. "the bearded ones". original name given by spanish in 1492. arawaks lived peaceful life. along come cannibal caribs who enjoyed barbequing their victims with a beer sauce! i kid you not. caribs mean and nasty. spanish come along 1492, check it out and split. along come british. they claim it while everyone else fighting over other carib islands.

they start sugar cane fields which leads to rum. mt . gay rum oldest distillary in new world. george washington and his brother visit. brother gets sick and dies. george goes on into history books flogging his men across the cold cold delaware river.

along comes wwII and obvious strategic port.

along comes concorde.

along comes falklands war. last stop fer brits along w/ascension island, before maldives(falklands) many many many moons south. hms conqueror sinks general belgrano heavy cruiser w/major loss of life. belgrano used to be heavy cruiser "USS PHOENIX" hows that fer trivia. hms conqueror flys pirate flag homeward bound after sinking. GOTTA LOVE THESE GUYS!

dumb-a$$ brits learn all about nasty french "exocet-missile". brits no longer build cheap a$$ destroyers out of aluminum after having their a$$'s handed to them with cheap devastating supersonic missile. literally one shot one kill invention, much to brits surprise.

along comes concorde paris crash. concordes grounded. (1) concorde on barbados mothballed.

along comes cruise ships.

port gets dredged to accept deep draft overloaded cruise ships.

now heres my choice reasons...............

barbados and puerto rico are flight hubs. without them no one flys. cat 5 rips thru..... first place for repairs to be done to get aerospace system back in place.

barbados owned by brits.........last i checked they are our allies in a coupla wars. military present there, in case of riots.

rum makes my g/friend HORNEY!

diving on big a$$-ed wrecks makes me HORNEY! one is greek cruise ship 365ft long from 60-120ft down.

diving on 17th century pirate ship anchorage with rum bottles/dabloons/cannon balls etc. makes me even more HORNEY! and the fact it IS NOT A MARINE SANCTUARY, i can keep whatever i find!!!!!!

flights are free..........YEP FREE! pays to buy der porschen on der wells fargo credit card!

and the best reason...............the hotel we are staying at is the "YELLOWBIRD"!

and the country rock band "POCO" has a kick ass song called "BARBADOS" which i can play fairly well on drums.

lookin · 08-19-2007, 06:44 PM

Wife and I went to barbados a couple years ago and had a great time. Stayed & partied in a place called "the gap". Good place to party, dance and listen to music was the "ship inn" in the Gap. Good surfing place is called the soup bowl and there is a round restaurant, to your left as you're looking at the water, that is great. Also great wind surfing if there is wind. We rented a small car called a moke and cruized all over the place.

We also went to another island called St Vincent charted a yacht and spent a week traveling through the islands and the tobago keys. This part of the trip was fantastic and only cost a couple grand including the captain. If you scuba this might be the ticket.

Have a fun trip and it makes me want to go again.

Dale

Dueller · 07:38 PM

A few years back my then GF and I spent 3 months island hopping thru the Carribbean. We had a flight into St Thomas on 9/30 and out of Carracas VZ on 12/24...no other reservations. We hit 22 different islands plkaying everything by ear. We had to dodge 2 hurricanes but had no real problems.

Barbados is very friendly and larger than most islands we visited (e.g. Saba at 5 sq miles) . The area you are staying (St Laurence Gap...15 minutes by taxi) is the most active for night life and you can walk from your hotel to tons of bars, restaraunts, street food vendors, etc. Plenty of places to rent a car or miniMoke there...I think we paid about $40/day. There are a number of dive charters down there....don't remember who we used but most are reputable and priced similarly.

Some of the best fun we had was renting a MiniMoke. We only used it for 2 or 3 days which is plenty to explore the island. We visited a few tourist sites but pretty much allowed ourselves to get lost on the road that circles the perimeter of the island. We wouyld find out of the way hotels (particularly on the east side of the island. We'd carry towels, snotkeling gear, lunch, fruit, fresh juice and local rum with a cooler of ice and have impromptu picnics on beaches that were often completely ours...especially on the rougher west side.

Safe island save for petty property crime. (somebody lifted a pair of cheap sunglasses I left on a towel on one of the more populated beaches).

There is a sports car racing group we stumbled across down there when we followed a group of club racer/rally type cars one Saturday afternnoon...apparently there used to be a pretty active club down there.

Oh yeah...just remembered something. Ask a local about the Friday night (I think) fish fry at the fisherman's dock. Lots od little booths/chattel houses at the pier with local women cooking up fresh caught fish and ground provisions (plantains, peas, rice, etc) on propane buners. Try the fried flying fish...One of the best meals I've had. Three of us had more food than we could eat and several beers for $20 or so...but that was 6-7 tears ago. They sell bottled beer to was it down and you eat at little picnic tables in the open air. Mostly locals tho...but well worth a $10 CAB RIDE.

charleskieffner · 08-19-2007, 07:25 PM

thank you. exactly what we wanted to hear. tired of reading umpteen web articles and FODORS/condenasty magazines.

have a pretty keen eye for quality dive shops. real no brainer actually, look at the equipment and if its in poor condition you have answer. same with boats. we always cruise docks early am day after landing and just check them out unbeknownst to the crews we may book a fishing charter or dive.

hopefully weather will be cool for dive days w/good viz.

best time to take pics w/or w/out strobe is 10am-2pm.

diving with (2) cameras is a pain, but even with constant anal care and unreal quality repairs at my friends shop, NIKONOSREPAIR.COM, one lousy speck of sea salt or sand can flood a housing or a camera. been there done that. and it sucks. lots of work to set up quality shot on land...........try it underwater! surge/currents/sea-life not being photogenic/goofball rookie divers coming into picture/goofball rookie divers kicking you with their fins etc.

nikonos V w/strobe is "old school" photography and each shot is never point and shoot. digital on other hand is point and shoot. pixelation sometimes in digital shots. none with 35mm. so btwn the (2) i always get shots. but if one floods...............many rums will be the order of the day.

my nikonos IV flooded off of the kona lava tubes. had some unreal natural sunlight pics of lava tubes you could drive a bus thru and some really cool fishlife. nikonos parts = porsche parts $$$$$

since we always bring our regulators and b.c.'s and basic mask snorky fins about the only fear i ever have diving is contaminated air from bad compressor. ie. oil leaks. oil in compressed air at depth becomes bad JU JU!

starting to get pumped for this. plane is booked. rooms booked. 95% already packed and just thinking about going some 3000plus miles away from home!

Dueller · 07:48 PM

For real world experiences try www.tripadvisor.com and review, comments etc on the public forums on Barbados. I've found that to be an accurate forum on real world experiences.

Let me know about the yellow bird hotel...thinking of taking my wife down in the nexst month or two.

Dueller · 08-19-2007, 07:44 PM

I looked your hotel up on TripAdvisor... excellent reviews overall. Here's a link:

http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g147266-d147783-Reviews-Yellow_Bird_Hotel-Christ_Church_Barbados.html

charleskieffner · 04:45 AM

dueller thanks for the input. unlike any of the hawaiian islands you dont have to deal with distance or elevation. big island is just that BIG! maui is big and both have summits that can seriously affect your trip flying/diving/going to summits to sightsee. good thing i dumped the bucks on a scubapro dive meter/decompression meter. shows correct times to fly,
dive, decompression stops and even a safety stop. not some drunken bar statement that can get you bent real quick.

im a member of DAN. real helpful also on recommending good quality safe shops. damn helpful when g/friend sustained really bad mask squeeze off maui and ruptured all the blood vessels in her eyes. that was a sight for a month! a simple 1800 number puts you in touch with dive doctor. not some clown who thinks hes a doctor........a real diving doctor familiar w/all diver problems. also they can blast you out on a pressurized go fast jet to nearest chamber.

diving in baja, should you get bent.............YOUR SCREWED!

i caught something somewhere that the brits maintain a hyperbaric chamber on barbados. not confirmed yet but by the time i leave, i'll know the closest one.

thats whats cool about hawaii, you have the u.s. navy chamber right at pearl. real helpful should things go real wrong. same with diving pudget sound/san diego. both maintain chambers there.

havent been bent thank god and dont plan on it. but i do want to know where chamber is in case.

lots of photographers get bent because they get absorbed in their subject and dont pay attention to whats going on. my audibles on my scubapro wrist meter will wake the dead, if i overstep any boundaries. pretty much plan your dive on it and then go dive your plan and if you are led astray by depth or ascent times it warns you by visual and LOUD AUDIBLE!!!! really loud!

then i can come back home or hotel and download all my dives from day one when i purchased it. pretty cool and well worth the bucks.

charleskieffner · 08-20-2007, 04:50 AM

pic

this is full fazer strobes on, looking up from 140ft, down in a lava tube!

charleskieffner · 08-20-2007, 04:59 AM

pic

obligatory stupid fish picture.

Dueller · 08-22-2007, 01:05 PM

Charles...when are you leaving? Or are you already there?

charleskieffner · 08-22-2007, 01:51 PM

9/19/07 the brits and the island of barbados will have their hands FULL.....with me! and my money.

actually so far everything is more reasonable than if i went to hawaii, tahoe, santa fe new mex.

80 bucks a night for a king size apt with a/c and a kitchenette. i can throw a beer bottle from my room into the surf! hahahaha make that rum bottles!

nothing has shocked me as far as price. very unlike other "resort" locations.

seems very safe, very laid back, very fashionable conservative. ie. cant wear swim suits into restaurants etc.

cant wait! been surfing web on every subject about island and its history, including how close any german u-boats were sunk during WWII. actually (2) were but they are out in blue water and depths prohibitive to dive on.

charleskieffner · 08-25-2007, 05:55 AM

just got e-mail back from DAN-divers alert network, i have been a member of for sometime.

somewhere i had read about decompression chamber on barbados. since i have been doing this a long time, whenever there is a military prescence ie. navy/marines..........there is usually a decompression chamber near. reason divers are assigned to most ships/ subs for various reasons. EOD, hull techs, force recon blah blah.

since brits have military prescence i was just informed there is a decompression chamber at queen elizabeth hospital on barbados.

cant tell you how relieved i am. have too many stories of dumb -ass rapid ascents over the years. not myself but people i have gone with or been with.

AND GETTING BENT AINT COOL!

remember ...........plan yer dive..............dive yer plan!

knowledge is power.