Cabo San Lucas Scuba Diving - Scuba Diving Cabo San Lucas - Dive Boats


AMIGO l Custom built for divers, our newest boat is 30' long and 10' wide. Equipped with marine head, individual storage lockers, lots of shade and a freshwater shower. 10 pax.


	AMIGO II A 25' twin engine fast boat. Custom built with freshwater shower and camera dip. Marine electronics to find and reach out of the way adventure sites such as the famous Gordo sea-mount. (4-8 pax.)

AMIGO III

The Rebirth of a Dive Boat

The ultimate recycling challenge? Start with a 20 year old crab boat and turn it into a modern dive boat worthy to join the fleet that has been called “The Most Comfortable Dive Boats in Cabo.

Last year, (pre Swine Flu hysteria of course) my partners and I decided it was time to bring a new boat into the small fleet of dive boats that we operate in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

We had added Amigo I (the boat that Skin Diver Magazine called “The Most Comfortable Dive Boat in Cabo”) to our fleet several years ago. I designed that boat and had it built at a boat yard in Ensenada, Mexico. It all worked out OK, but for 6 months I had to travel regularly from Cabo San Lucas to Ensenada in order to supervise the construction and fitting out. The constant travel wore me down and of course I was away from my company. So, we were torn between building another new boat or perhaps recycling a used boat. I didn’t think any of the boat yards here in Cabo were capable of building the boat I wanted, but rehabbing an existing boat was a job that I felt could be done by some of the yards down here. After much discussion the recycling idea won out and we decided that I should start looking for a boat that we could rebuild.

I’ll mention that I have a theory (developed in over 40 years of diving all over the world) of what a decent dive boat should look like. A dive boat should be wide (beamy in nautical terminology) to accommodate divers loaded with equipment and to be stable in choppy seas, it should have a large open aft deck to give people a bit of room to spread out, it should have safe, secure storage for SCUBA tanks (there are few things more dangerous than a loose SCUBA cylinder rolling around a boat in rough water), a dive boat needs to have a easy entry point so divers don’t have to roll backwards over the side and finally, it should have a small pilot house forward to protect the customers from spray and wind.

No boats to be found here in Mexico met my criteria. Most dive operators in Mexico use what’s called a “Panga” for diving. This traditional Mexican boat design is typically long and narrow. While pangas are probably some of the best fishing boats in the world, in my opinion, they lack the space and stability that makes for a really comfortable dive boat.

Several years ago, when I drew up the designs that would become Amigo I, the basic hull design was based on the crab boats and lobster boats I had worked around on Long Island Sound and Chesapeake Bay while I was growing up. Those boats incorporated the important design features I mentioned above; beamy, stable, large open aft deck with a pilot house forward. So, this time I took my search to the East Coast where this basic design has been successfully used for a hundred years, crabbing, lobstering, commercial fishing, hauling cargo and more recently hauling divers. I decided to search through boats for sale on the East Coast. Late last fall, on Ebay, I found the boat that was to become the Amigo III.

1) The Original Photo of the Boat as Listed on Ebay – November 1st 2008

Ebay is of course an “auction” site. I got involved in the ebay auction and after bidding back and forth I bought the boat. (Sight unseen, I might add, that’s really trusting a guys Ebay rating).

After the purchase was completed we had to arrange to move the boat from Maryland where it was sitting. First, all the way across the country to San Diego with one transport company, then we went through the process of legally importing it to Mexico and finally hired a second transport company to move it down the Baja Peninsula to Cabo San Lucas.

2) The Boat Leaving Maryland - November 15th 2008

3) The Boat Arriving In Cabo San Lucas, December 27th 2008.

After a journey of 3,500 miles that took almost 6 weeks, the boat arrived in Cabo in Late December of 2008, just after Christmas. We left it alone for a few weeks. We were simply too busy with the normal “Christmas Rush” of tourists to even think about doing much to it.

The 15th of January we began the teardown and rebuilding of the boat.