Tintamarre Diving

Yesterday, I went diving with a couple of friends at Tintamarre island, about 3 km off of St. Maarten. I've never been diving there before, but it was probably the best dive I've done while I've been here and I'd highly recommend that any divers here take a trip out there. As usual, we went with Dive Octopus, the only people that I'll dive with anymore. Tintamarre itself is a small island (about 80 acres) that used to be inhabited and was the site of the first airport in the area, but is now deserted. It has a very nice beach though and I'd like to go back out to visit the island one day.

The first dive was the Japanese Garden. It was the nicest reef that I've been to so far. As soon as we hit the bottom (about 50' down), we saw a nurse shark that was just sleeping under a ledge. I wanted to pet it, but decided to let this one sleep. The reef has a bunch of channels cut through it and varies in depth about 20 feet from top to bottom, so it's a lot of fun to swim through and around. It also seemed to be more colorful than most of the other reefs around the island.

After a 30 minutes of deco at the surface, we traveled to another site on the opposite side of the island to visit the wreck at Tintamarre, which is an old tugboat. It wasn't the biggest wreck I've seen, but it was probably the most enjoyable since you could penetrate nearly the entire thing. It is very open and still very much in tact, so there's really no risk at all of getting lost or tangled in anything. It was neat to stand in the wheel house, where the steering wheel mount is still standing, and look out over the front of the boat. After we had all been through the boat, we explored the reef around the wreck, which was also nice. Sally (our divemaster) found a dead lobster which she stuck on her head. That made me laugh and if you've been diving, you'll know that smiling quickly makes your mask fill with water. As soon as I cleared my mask, she put the lobster on someone else's head and my mask was quickly full of water again. Oh...we saw another nurse shark on this dive, but this time I decided to pet it! It got a little scared and took off pretty quickly, which was unfortunate because I was hoping it would want to play!

The picture was taken by Sally, but not on our dive. She's got a couple thousand dollars worth of camera equipment at the shop and takes some pretty great underwater pictures. If you are looking for somewhere to dive...definitely go with Octopus Diving, and ask them to take you to Tintamarre!