I spent three months with CCC Tobago, from December 2010 to March 2011.
CCC Tobago is based at Man-O-War Bay Cottages in Charlotteville, a small fishing village, and is right on the beach. It is a beautiful bay, surrounded by rainforest, and with a handful of shops and places to eat, a fishing co-operative and not much else.
On arrival at the base, a single building surrounded by coconut, almond and citrus trees, my first thought was how crowded it was. In a house designed for a maximum of eight people, CCC have crammed fifteen at the time of writing. Let me guide you through the house.
There is a lovely wooden deck on the beach, which is used for mealtimes. It’s a shame that there aren’t enough chairs for everyone and most of them are broken beyond comfort. I couldn’t find a cup to have a drink either - the expedition leader had hidden them all to discourage people from leaving them lying around the house. Just what I needed after a long journey to get here!
Inside the house, there is a communal area, again with a woeful lack of seating; a table on which we lay out meals; and whiteboards for drawing up the plans for each day. Directly off of this room are two bedrooms, each designed for two people but containing two pairs of bunk beds. I couldn’t even fit between the beds without turning sideways. Storage space is in short supply, as is privacy.
A corridor with one open plan sink, two showers and two toilets leads to the back of the house. There was only one working toilet for the first ten weeks I was on site. At the back is the science room, which houses a couple of computers, some diving equipment and also two beds. If the small front bedrooms don’t have much privacy and storage, its non-existent here! I really felt for the people who were stuck sleeping here. There is one larger bedroom at the back, also with four bunks which was almost exclusively reserved for the staff. Finally, there is a kitchen. Functional but cramped, although the oven struggles to cook anything.
Staff and volunteers…
For most of my stay there were more staff than volunteers. They were generally hard working, lovely people, with the exception of the Expedition Leader for the first half of my stay. An obnoxious man who insisted on playing loud gangsta rap all day, even through lectures. He drank so heavily he upset one volunteer enough to leave four weeks early; and he also stole from the volunteers and from Coral Cay. A new Expedition Leader took over half way through my stay, but sadly the project was in such a mess that, despite his hard work, it never really got back on track.
There was a Project Scientist and two Science Officers, responsible for all of the science training (learning to identify fish, coral and diseases; and how to survey); a Scuba Instructor responsible for all dive training; an Education Officer who worked with local schools and the community; and a Medical Officer. Finally the Boat Captain, who did an excellent job. The previous Boat Captain was been sacked part way through my stay.
Staff typically stay for 3-6 months and I felt the high turnover combined with poor handovers showed in the running of the site. Staff are unpaid, apart from the boat captain. Volunteers pay and the per-week rate gets less the longer you stay. I paid £2,600 for fifteen weeks, which included a 10% discount. This included a free Divemaster course (just the teaching, I still paid for materials).
Into the sea…
Coral Cay places a strong emphasis on safe diving, with conservative dive plans and many, many rules.
Some of this is good - with inexperienced divers diving up to twice a day on air, six days a week its sensible to be cautious (for example, almost all dives are limited to 43 minutes). But the rules were arbitrarily enforced and broken far more often by staff than by volunteers and I can’t overemphasise just how many rules there were.
For example, one rule is that all divers must wear a mask at all times on the surface (this was enforced briefly) and must have a reg or snorkel in their mouth at all times on the surface (I never saw this enforced). What a great way to take the fun out of diving - divers almost always ascend excited and immediately want to talk about their dive on hitting the surface. Most volunteers wore snorkels but one staff member refused to wear a snorkel for the entire duration of my stay and this was accepted.
Another example is that all divers must carry a dive knife and this is enforced, but if you’ve lost your knife then its fine to dive without one.
Scuba Equipment
I recommend bringing your own scuba equipment. The regulators that CCC hires out are awful, regularly leaking loudly and so old they are beyond repair. The BCDs are in good condition though. Unfortunately you can expect your own gear to take a battering with inexperienced divers lifting it onto the boat and treading on the hoses and second stages.
There was a “scuba shack” when I arrived - a padlocked wooden wall around the kit storage area, but this collapsed a few weeks in and was never replaced. So all the dive gear was stored, partly exposed to the rain and always easily available for anyone to steal. Fortunately this never happened during my stay.
The rinse tanks were a couple of leaky mini-dustbins which just about did the job for a quick rinse after a dive, but there was no way to properly soak dive kit for more than a few minutes.
The previous scuba instructor had not even filed the paperwork with PADI for the courses he had conducted, or done all the knowledge reviews! This caused a lot of grief when the new scuba instructor taught the students their Divemaster course.
The Diving
Many of the experienced divers were surprised and disappointed at the diving conditions in the bay where we did much of our diving, especially when doing shore diving in 1-2 metre visibility when there was no money available to hire a boat. The boat diving around Charlotteville was highly variable, with some good days and some bad, but not really what people were expecting for Caribbean diving.
We did some surveys in Speyside, the next village just a ten minute drive away, where the visibility was always stunning, although I was surprised at the lack of hard coral there. It was mostly sea fans and sponges.
I got only one night dive (with a possible second just before I leave) in fifteen weeks which was a big disappointment. Again, there were so many rules involved with a night dive that I don’t think the staff could face the effort. A night dive could only be on the house reef directly in front of the house and the ascent had to be on a mooring line about 100 metres out to sea (this was easily ignored - descend the line then swim back into shore underwater and say you couldn’t find the line again). Much simpler would have just been to walk into the sea and descend immediately onto the reef. It is bordered by sand and easy to navigate.
When I arrived, CCC were hiring boats because their own boat had sunk during a hurricane the previous autumn. This appeared to be putting huge pressure on the budget, and appeared to be the direct cause of us doing so many murky shore dives when there was no money available to hire a boat. After many empty promises the boat was eventually repaired and back in the water with one of its two engines, but apparently unsafe to take far out to sea so we continued to do most of our diving within the bay. It was often hard to tell what the real story was - more transparency would have helped but volunteers are treated as being pretty dumb much of the time. The staff often don’t realise how much everyone talks to everyone else in such a confined environment!
The Science
The science side of the project appeared badly organised, probably due to the staff turnover rate (the typical stay was 3-6 months) combined with poor handovers and young staff inexperienced at management.
Examples include a lack of information on the frequently used dive sites - such as a lack of dive site maps or information on which sites were best for studying coral disease or fish and so on. In the middle of my stay there was a fortnight where we just did fun diving, photo taking and skills practice (all highly enjoyable) because nobody was able to organise any surveying. For a given dive site, currents can vary a lot throughout the day and there appeared to be no attempt to time survey dives to coincide with weak currents, making for some entertaining and exhausting attempts to swim against the current (all surveys are “out and back” where we lay out a 50 metre reel of rope, then wind it back in).
The dive plan each day often contained mistakes and was regularly modified throughout the day, making it difficult to be sure you were in the right place at the right time.
It would have been lovely to learn more about what was done with the data we collected, but again this information was hard to come by.
Freedom and Safety
Volunteers are only allowed to walk about 100 metres either side of the house on their own; and only to the end of the village - a few minutes walk - in pairs. At night they are not allowed out at all, not even for a walk on the beach. The only exception is if you can get a staff member to go with you, then you can go pretty much anywhere. This created a lot of bad feeling, especially with the only internet access almost in sight of the house but still not accessible on your own.
I started ignoring the rules and found out I could get away with plenty of visits to the internet (I can’t call it an internet café because it was just computers and laundry - no drinks). I could also wander into the village to buy food undisturbed. This was one advantage of the overcrowding - with so many people around, it was easier for one person to disappear for a bit. There were often visitors in the house and the policy on them was always unclear. It appeared that visitors were generally not allowed in the house, but there were plenty of exceptions for people associated with Coral Cay.
Swimming was restricted - you had to get a “shore marshal” - anyone from the base - to watch you at all times and you were restricted to a small area in front of the house. Despite the number of people on site, everyone was busy and it was harder than you might expect to find a shore marshal. We even had professional lifeguards watching over the beach, right next door, but still had to have our own shore marshal!
I gave up and went for long swims right across the bay on my own on Sunday mornings when anyone who cared about enforcing rules was more interested in sleeping. The view from out at sea back to the tree covered mountains was amazing.
I know that several other volunteers ventured off on their own on a regular basis. While the staff kept on at us about rules, we just did it discreetly and got away with it anyway.
Coral Cay have a bizarre attitude to safety. They implement so many rules to ensure safety in some areas, but are quite happy to cram six volunteers inside a pickup truck, with all the dive gear and two staff on the back, with a driver who has been drinking and is using his mobile phone for the entire journey, while driving on winding mountain roads in heavy rain.
This is all a real shame. Because volunteers are treated like children and not trusted, they don’t feel motivated to help out improving the site, which could have made a tremendous difference.
Food and Drink
We eat communal meals, with breakfast at 6:00am, lunch at noon and dinner at 6:00pm. These mostly worked well with everyone cooking, and doing other chores, on a rota.
Meat was almost non-existent. In fifteen weeks, I had beef twice and chicken or fish about once a fortnight! Most meals are heavily carbohydrate based, often with at least two of rice, pasta or potatoes. We also bake fresh bread every day. This was lovely but didn’t last long because it was the only communal food we were allowed to eat between meals (and only with margarine, no jam!) and six hours is a long time to go between meals when diving.
For the first half of my stay, we were regularly told that there was not enough money for food, and vegetables were in short supply. This was during the period where the expedition leader was regularly drunk and probably stealing from the budget. For the second half, vegetables were more readily available and we ate much better, but the lack of meat was a real issue. I gave up and started eating beef and chicken at the small restaurants in the village.
We did eat a lot of fresh grapefruit and oranges, which we picked from the trees near the house.
The rules are four beers per night maximum and no spirits the day before diving. And no getting drop down drunk at all. In fact, people rarely drank beer in the week, but most people let their hair down on Saturday night. Entertainingly, it was the staff setting the example with getting really drunk and encouraging the volunteers to do likewise!
The CCC website is misleading when it states that fish is readily available and we have it on the barbeque! It is misleading in many respects - the "Mot Mot trail" and "barbeques on a secret beach" were never available. Recreational diving was available most Saturdays, except when the underpowered compressor was out of action or we were told "just one dive this Saturday", but it was often shore diving in poor visibility. We got a very rare trip to the nearby beach bar one Saturday evening, but most Saturdays we were stuck at the base. The "resident pod of dolphins" was an amazing sight, but seen only once. Charlotteville being on the "forefront of the best diving Tobago has to offer" is a joke. That is over the hill in Speyside, around Little Tobago and Goat Island, but at least we did get to do some surveying there.
Overcrowding
The overcrowding and lack of maintenance did nothing for morale. The house was steadily decaying and when anything broke, it took a long time to get fixed. The staff sleeping in the communal rooms looked thoroughly unimpressed with their raw deal. At the time of writing, the plan is to have a second staff member sleep on the floor when another person arrives next week, brining us up to sixteen people.
When I arrived they weren’t even enough forks, dinner plates or mugs for everyone. If its raining and we are stuck indoors, the communal room barely seats half the group and there is simply nowhere quiet to relax after a tiring day of diving.
Conclusion
I had some good times diving with Coral Cay Conservation and met some lovely people, but the excessive number and arbitrary enforcement of rules, the lack of personal freedom, and the overcrowding took too much of the fun out of it. Coral Cay Conservation need to remember that they have paying customers. If you want to do a lot of diving on the cheap then it might be for you. I won’t be back.
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