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I do not profess to be a regular liveaboard diver so you may wish to take what I have to say here with that in mind. I thoroughly enjoyed my seven days on Spirit of Freedom, that in spite of having a severely blocked sinus for about 40 hours of the trip which severly hampered my ability to join in and enjoy. My sincere gratitude to the dive team on SOF who were extremely understanding and patient as my decents towards the end of the week were a slow and cautious process, typically taking around ten minutes to get to minus 20m instead of the usual one or two minutes. New Matt in particular oozed sympathy and understanding for my predicament and made me feel very comfortable with the fact that I was 'being slow' and for me that was the measure of a good professional dive crew. As James the Diving Director re-assured me..... We have nowhere else to be so take as long as you need. This was exactly what I needed to hear and helped me to keep trying to sort my equalisation problems out rather than think that I was simply holding people back and just heading for my bunk. The crew we had on SOF were simply fab in every respect. I'm going to balance my review here with a couple of negative points. The SOF operates a limited system of whips on the refills. This means that tanks are inflated quickly with the result that they heat up and after half an hour they are twenty bar down on the fill pressure. Hats off, everytime I pointed this out the crew were entirely happy to top up the fill which for a 63 year old gas guzzler like me was very welcome. This problem could be solved by having a greater number of whips with slower fill regimes. I was surprised to repeat dive a couple of sites. I had always imagined that the GBR was enourmous and offered a dizzying array of dive sites for each prevailing wind direction. I now realise that this was a rose tinted perspective. The onboard accomodation is extremely good with comfortable cabins and staterooms. Wifi was a little slow. The dive set up for each dive was pretty impecable with spotter armed with binoculors and fin attendants both entering and exiting the water. My good lady who does not dive had the pleasure of a crew guide on each snorkel trip. All in all a great seven days. - via 