What is the house reef like at Eden Beach, and how close is it to Bari reef? Also, do the apartments have porches?

Hi Mary ...the down stair 2 bedroom apartments have nice porches with a table and chairs. The upstairs studios have small side porches. The house reef is mostly a rubble field with a web cam at 60ft. and 2 wreaks...1 a little below the cam and the other about 60 meters north. Both wreaks start at about 60ft.

lots of fish life there!

HI Mary - you can swim over to the Bari reef from Eden Beach. I stayed at Sand Dollar and swam the other way - over to the cams - not a bad swim and then dive back. And yes is is mostly coral rubble until you come up to the Bari.

We stopped there to do our second dive of the morning and there is nothing there but the "40 Feet Underwater Exposition" which in my opinion is a complete waste of time (and $5 if you paid for it)

Our boat moored, we swam by the camera for a quick snapshot, up to the expo spent 2 minutes looking at the pictures that are just ok, noticed the guy made a statue of himself (someone put a tag on his hand that said "Jimmy Hoffa" which I thought was real funny) and we were back at the boat in less than 15 minutes.

It's pretty tough to present your "art" when your competing against a beautiful reef.

Meredith is right....there are a lot of fish. I found a frog fish and a horse fish in the day....lots of nice tarpon and lobster at night.

Clarification: There is not a lot of reef near the web cam: a beautiful wreck, not lots of reef. Just south east of the web cam are a few coral heads with lots of little critters. I spotted lots of orange sided gobies and a few triple fins.

There is a reef NORTH of the web cam and that's where seb and I found a sea horse and lots of other critters.

We dove to the web cam, put on our christmas gear, then headed north to the reef. On our way back we looked at the art exhibit.

Ask one of the wanna dive folks for directions and they won't let you down.

Mare

There's not a lot of reef at *any* of the "house dives" from what I could tell, supported by Jesse's descriptions. There's a bunch of rubble, and only small sparse groups of live corals.

However, there's about 3 of everything in the shallows at Eden. I'd found multiples of nearly every critter I'd seen elsewhere, most hanging around near the dock area where the coral shelves or overhangs are. Take a good light so you can see up underneath the overhangs. I spent over 80 minutes on one dive mostly just snuffling around in the shallows between 8 and 20 feet. The stone fish do a good job of looking like rubble, so look closely before you put a finger down to steady a photo.

The wreck north of Eden was where I finally found the seahorse, in the coral rubble and little bit of soft corals. Someone said they'd seen a HUGE moray in the wreck, around 7 feet long, but it didn't show itself for me. I think the site is called "Front Porch" from Jesse's descriptions, but there's no BMP marker.