Diana S.
1 Reviews
I loved my time on Mana island with Ratu Kini! I would stay …
I loved my time on Mana island with Ratu Kini! I would stay with them again but dive with the other shop on the island (more on this below).
The good: The staff were really friendly and helpful.
The bad: Some parts of the island are not accessible when it’s high tide because they are private property and the only public right of way is via the beach, which disappears in high tide — this is not Ratu Kini’s fault, of course. Just something to keep in mind.
I would NOT recommend diving with them. For context I am a recreational diver with about 80 dives under my belt (not a professional by any means). On two separate occasions, the dive master offered my non-diving friend to “teach” her how to dive. I asked him if he was an instructor, assuming he would say yes in light of his offer, and he said that he was not, he was a dive master (DM). This should have been my first red flag but alas!
I did two dives with Ratu Kini (two tanks in one outing) with my two other diver friends who were quite inexperienced (less than 10 dives post certification). The DM did not do a pre-dive brief, did not tell us the protocol for what to do if someone got lost during the dive, which every DM repeats before a dive. He did not say the max depth for the dive or what the geography of the site would be, what animals we could expect to see — absolutely no info about the site. He did not clarify who would be dive buddies with whom. None of the things that have been discussed in every dive I have ever been on.
The DM decided that he would send us all with 10 lbs weight belts without asking any of us how much we needed. I told him I was going to need much less than that and the DM looked annoyed that I brought it up. One of the other divers needed more weight and had a lot of trouble descending so the DM put rocks inside his BCD to help him sink (usually, the DM dives with extra weights for this exact reason).
Before getting in the water, I specifically told the DM that I didn’t want him to feed the sharks and he said he would not but as soon as we got to the bottom, he pulled out a bag and fed them — this was completely unnecessary as the sharks were visible throughout the dive and no one in the group even asked for this. The DM twice picked up sea cucumbers for no apparent reason — he simply put them back down a minute later. The DM also touched and kicked corals unnecessarily (ie not in an emergency) throughout the dive, it was heartbreaking because there was a lot of dead coral at the sites to begin with!
The two other divers did not have a dive computer (the shop did not have any available for rent) and they were constantly going deeper than 18 m (the max they were certified for) and the DM never pointed this out to them during the dive or afterwards, even though it was clear that they were going to finish their air very quickly (the deeper you are, the more air you consume).
On the first ascent, the DM did not signal for the safety stop, I had to specifically ask if that’s what we were doing. I began my stop at the same time as everyone else but the DM ended the safety stop early (according to my computer, I hadn’t finished my safety stop) but he just ascended with the other two divers and left me at 5 meters alone — this is not something you should do, ever but especially because the other two divers did not have their own dive computers. Overall, I was left with the impression that this DM did not have appropriate training or he simply did not care to follow basic diving procedures designed for safety. – via 
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