Dive Review of Carpe Novo in
Maldives

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Carpe Novo: "Not the best", Mar, 2023, by Paul Salembier, ON, CA ( Reviewer 4 reports with 3 Helpful votes). Report 12404 has 1 Helpful vote.
No photos available at this time
Ratings and Overall Comments 1 (worst) - 5 (best):
Accommodations		Food
Service and Attitude		Environmental Sensitivity	N/A
Dive Operation		Shore Diving	N/A
Snorkeling	N/A
Overall Rating
Value for $$
Beginners
Advanced
Comments	If you were an extremely fit smoker, you might have enjoyed this trip. I'm not, and I didn’t. First, the positives. Like its sister ship the Carpe Vita (on which I've been twice), the Carpe Novo is large for a liveaboard, and the rooms below deck are large. Our room, the first room at the bottom of the stairs below the main deck, had a queen size bed and a single bed, side by side, and a large bathroom with two sinks and a walk-in shower. There were also 2 cupboards and a narrow built-in desk on the far wall. Another plus was the sun deck, which had about 12 comfortable lounge chairs, plus generous built-in bench seating under a hard cover, so you could find shade if you wanted it. The boat also had a dedicated camera room, big enough for about 6 large cameras. There were some things about the boat I found somewhat concerning – small things that were broken and that went unfixed. The first thing I notice was the coffee pot. The lid was broken (and seemed to have been for some time, but no one had bothered to replace it. The safe in our room didn’t work properly. The towel rack in the bathroom was also broken. The fan in the camera room didn’t work, and despite pointing this out on the first day it never go fixed. Though each of these are minor things, when the small things don’t get fixed it makes you wonder about whether the same attitude extends to the bigger things. On the down side, the boat has 2 smokers’ tables just outside the stern doors on the main deck. Most of the crew smoked and we had 6 or 8 divers who smoked, some of whom seemed to be chain smokers. The smoke from these tables would flow into the boat, down the stairs and into our room, where it collected at a level that was frequently disgusting. The crew would be up by 5 am every day, and their first order of business seemed to be to have a smoke. We therefore woke up each day to a room smelling of cigarette smoke. Same thing in the evenings, falling asleep amidst the same fumes. We tried asking for the doors to be closed, but as soon as they were, someone would open them again. The half-hearted compromise was to close one of the two double doors, which did little to reduce the smoke. We put a towel across the bottom of the door, but this was also largely ineffective. I'm not sure whether anyone else had the same problem with their rooms, but I believe all of the divers with rooms below deck were also smokers. The second, and potentially more serious problem, was that we had a “cowboy” dive guide, who thought nothing of long swims against the current at 85 feet, followed by extended periods even deeper, all the while paying little or no attention to the divers he was guiding. I have a DSLR housing and was using a large dome for wide angle, so swimming against a current was a lot more work than would otherwise have been the case. Another demonstration of his cavalier attitude was the response to a stuck inflator valve on the BCD my wife rented. When this was pointed out, the response was “Just punch it a few times”, ignoring the potential for a runaway inflation at depth that this might pose. She had to insist on getting a new one, in order to get action on it. A recurring problem was that the dhoni (the smaller boat from which we did the diving) didn’t seem to be able find the right spot to drop divers, frequently dropping us down-current from the dive sites. On one dive, midway through a long swim to a pinnacle after such a mis-drop, we saw one of the other dive groups from our boat heading in the opposite direction, their guide having wisely decided to forego the tough swim to the pinnacle. Not our guide, though. A thousand pounds of air later, we reached the pinnacle, still in the current, where we clawed our way along the coral against the current to get to wherever the guide was heading. My wife and I were already 20 feet above the guide, to save air, and we abandoned him and the only 2 divers who were still with him to find shelter from the current in a cleft in the pinnacle. Two other divers in the group had done the same, and like them, we quit the dive early to do our safety stop on our own. Of the 15 or so dives we did with that guide, we surfaced on our own a majority of the time. Diving in the Maldives can be challenging, as you frequently have to contend with currents. I think that makes it all the more important to have a dive guide with good judgment. After a particularly harrowing dive, we demanded a new guide, and joined another group headed by the chief dive guide who had better judgment and was more attentive to the divers he was guiding. Our remaining dives went without incident. While I enjoyed two previous excursions on the Carpe Vita sister ship, and we did have some decent wildlife encounters, I have to confess that overall I didn’t enjoy the trip on the Carpe Novo.
Websites	Carpe Novo
Reporter and Travel
Dive Experience	501-1000 dives
Where else diving	Hawaii, Great Barrier Reef, Indonesia, Palau, Fiji, Cozumel, Cuba, Red Sea, Madagascar, St. Lucia, etc.
Closest Airport	Male	Getting There
Dive Conditions
Weather	windy, dry	Seas	currents
Water Temp	81-84°F / 27-29°C	Wetsuit Thickness
Water Visibility	- Ft/ - M
Dive Policy
Dive own profile	yes
Enforced diving restrictions	[Unspecified]
Liveaboard?	yes	Nitrox Available?	yes
What I Saw
Sharks	Lots	Mantas	1 or 2
Dolphins	None	Whale Sharks	None
Turtles	> 2	Whales	None
Ratings 1(worst) - 5 (best):
Corals		Tropical Fish
Small Critters	N/A	Large Fish	N/A
Large Pelagics
Underwater Photography 1 (worst) - 5 (best):
Subject Matter	N/A	Boat Facilities
Overall rating for UWP's		Shore Facilities	N/A
UW Photo Comments	Onboard dedicated camera room, but no fan and smoky (smokers' table right outside the door)

Report currently has 1 Helpful vote

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Dive Review of Carpe Novo in Maldives

Carpe Novo: "Not the best", Mar, 2023,

Ratings and Overall Comments 1 (worst) - 5 (best):

Overall Rating

Reporter and Travel

Dive Conditions

Dive Policy

What I Saw

Ratings 1(worst) - 5 (best):

Underwater Photography 1 (worst) - 5 (best):

Dive Review of Carpe Novo in
Maldives