The Tribune

THE Deep Water Cay team of East End, Grand Bahama, recently welcomed a Brazilian team of divers visiting the islands of the Bahamas with the Ministry of Tourism.

“The Grand Bahama visit was a quick one night and day trip,” said Rosalyn Pinder, of the Grand Bahama Tourism office. “We were able to visit Unexso last night and meet some of their dive team and then we wanted them to see a bit more of the island and the beauty of the east too.”

The group included ten divers and one full-time writer for international dive magazine www.divemag.org, as well as the Brazilian representative for the Bahamas in Tourism.

“We are bringing this team here to help us develop our South American market,” said Tina Lee, Bahamas Tourism, South American Market. “This group will visit our islands for a week and experience a variety of dive resorts to tailor packages for future guests.”

Arriving at the Deep Water Cay, McLean’s Town Welcome Centre at 9am, the team was greeted by their Deep Water Cay divemaster, Philip Russell, who took them on the 10-minute boat ride to the cay. “Today we will take our guests on a morning dive - to two locations. First to ‘Out of Air,’ a deep dive, and then to a low coral reef dive site we call ‘Fish Tank’ where we hope to see some sharks. As we would with any guest we will take a short lunch break at our picnic site on ‘South Lunch Beach’ and I hope the stingrays will come to visit them.”

The teams were then fitted with masks, fins, weights, all the required dive gear, and tanks which were loaded on the two boats that would take them on the all day tour of the island. “I am very excited to see what Grand Bahama has to offer,” said Thiago Louback, a dive instructor at Mar-a-Mar in Brazil. “The weather is so nice, the structure of the dives and visibility incredible and the biggest bonus is the close proximity of the dive resorts to the actual dive sites – so near!”

“Diving here at Deep Water Cay is easy and efficient using one of our 33ft World Cats that’s been custom rigged for our dive guests,” noted Buzz Cox, General Manager, Deep Water Cay. “We were delighted to be able to showcase our destination resort to these special visitors and look forward to seeing many Brazilians here in the months and years ahead. What a fun group!”

Summing up the visit Mrs Pinder noted, “Our guests could not stop talking about Deep Water Cay and how wonderful the water and staff were,” she said. “We want to thank all of Grand Bahama for being so welcoming and hopefully making their GB visit one of the best!”