My attempts to organise a trip to the Maldives for Chinese New Year 2009 kicked off in the summer of 2008. I’d initially thought I would just pick out a live aboard from the internet, book some berths and flights and away we’d go. Alas, not so easy. A lot of live aboards are only interested in full charters (could I guarantee 18 divers?!) and those that were more flexible worked out to be very expensive by the time you’d included flights and any transit accommodation. Then I came across the Diving Adventure website – a dive shop and travel agency based in Causeway Bay. They had a package for a 9-day trip (6 full days of diving) that fitted our requirements perfectly and significantly undercut anything I had been able to come up with – and also involved far fewer headaches for me as organiser.
Our little group of 5 joined the 13 others who’d signed up for the trip, at the check-in counter at Chek Lap Kok, and our Maldivian diving adventure began.
It was quite a bleary eyed bunch that arrived in Male – the 4 hour time difference meant while it was 11pm on the ground our bodies were very much under the impression that it was actually 3am! We begrudgingly unpacked our dive gear to the crates provided on the diving dhoni before being ferried to our home for the coming week – the MV Island Safari 1. A mercifully brief introductory chat preceded our grateful collapse in the spacious berths allocated to us.
The plan for the week involved an anti-clockwise route, starting from Male itself and encompassing North Male, Rasdhoo, Ari and South Male atolls. Each day started with tea, coffee, bananas and crackers before the first dive. Breakfast would follow and generally there would be two more dives, punctuated with lunch and dinner buffets – for sure nobody went hungry (or lost any weight) on this trip. The dive program assumed 3 dives a day but once there we discovered that it was possible to squeeze in an extra night dive and a day dive. But most, it seemed, were happy to sleep or fish off the back deck!
Our first day offered a gentle start with schools of bluestriped snapper and “fields” of garden eels but the excitement was upped later in the day with the sighting of several manta rays offering many divers superb close-up views and some great photo and video opportunities.
Day 2 saw everybody awake before dawn with the prospect of diving with hammerheads. A blue water descent to 30m revealed an expanse of glittering fish scales – the remnants of the sharks’ dawn feed. The perpetrators of the carnage drifted impressively into view, large and initially unphased by the arrival of so many bubbles to their realm. Alas, excitement got the better of many divers and despite the instruction not to descend below 30m (a Maldivian Government regulation), many did so in an attempt to secure a more intimate experience. Ultimately they succeeded in driving the sharks deeper and deeper and out of view, though I don’t believe anybody felt anything less than exhilarated, as they hung in the water completing their safety stops – and unplanned decompression. The remainder of the day on Ari Atoll dished up white tips, turtles, mating octopus, morays galore and big maori wrasse, such that everybody went to bed that night both satisfied and knackered.
The third day stands out for more of the big stuff. The chance to snorkel with whale sharks (and scrum with about 30 other snorkellers for the best view), observe leaping marlin and scores of dolphins and the sedate passage of leopard sharks swimming on the surface. Whale shark snorkelling certainly calls for some stamina as well as self-defence skills. Spotted from the bridge of the boat, everybody was in the water within moments of being given the all clear from the bridge but from then on it was everyone for himself as more boats would add their snorkellers to the melee of thrashing limbs and the shark in question would swim nonchalantly on, seemingly oblivious to the commotion above and even the occasional visitation from a duck diving photographer. Eventually each shark spotted would turn away into deeper water though one opted to almost breech amongst his throng of admirers before finally departing the scene. Breathless we would all return to our respective vessels until the next sighting.
Day 4 marked our last two dives on Ari Atoll with lots of small caves and overhangs and a swim through to explore. Large sea fans, octopus, big tuna and cruising sharks were regular sightings and the fun continued as we sailed to South Male Atoll with a school of dolphins frolicking in our bow wave. An outing to one of the local villages was followed by our first night dive of the trip. A multitude of blue tails occupied the reef’s cracks and crevices as evidence of sleeping redtooth triggerfish and the bright reflection of torchlight in the eyes of shrimp and lobster was common place but the highlight was certainly a large marbled ray resting on a ledge and trying hard to ignore the flashbulbs (and fins) of his visitors.
Before departing for the Maldives I’d been led to believe that strong currents were a feature of much of the diving there but so far we’d been exposed to hardly any – my newly fabricated reef hook was feeling forlorn and neglected. This changed on the 5th day when we were introduced to Guraidhoo Corner. The first attempt at Guiraidhoo was something of a cock-up with our group being dropped in too early. This resulted in a nearly everyone running out of air before reaching the corner where the big stuff was reputed to hang out though on route, Napoleon Wrasse, Tuna, Barracuda and white tip sharks were all in evidence so still not a shabby dive. A second attempt was far more successful and pretty much everyone was rewarded with the site of a school of eaglerays, grey reef, black tip and white tip sharks. The last 2 dives of the day were on the submerged atoll of Kuda Giri where a small fishing boat wreck afforded a bit of a change from the beautiful coral scenery while the shallows made for a good night dive with another octopus to play with. If that wasn’t enough excitement, our boat crew entertained us till late in the night with a performance of local music that had pretty much everyone up and dancing – not that we were given a whole lot of choice!!
Day 6 and it’s our last day of diving. Emboudoo Express had many of us making use of our reef hooks in the hope of catching sight of some passing big fish but clearly nobody told them they were expected and the highlight of my photos amount to a colourful cushion star and my buddy with bubbles streaming behind her. The nearby Bando’s rock made for a better site with a sleepy nurse shark, a very photo friendly turtle and a not so sleepy black tip shark while Feydhoo Finolhu Caves (actually a series of overhangs in a wall) provided the colourful finale to our trip with a small school of barracuda and a host of different morays.
That night we moored up in Male’s sheltered lagoon and a leisurely breakfast the following day was followed by a snorkelling trip to Banana Reef, one of the original Maldivian dive sites though now a bit passed it’s best. Bags packed, we transferred to the pier at Male Airport where several of us opted to spend the remainder of our pre-flight day at the pool of the transit hotel where cold beer and pizza awaited. All in the interests of steady decompression you understand.
I had a fantastic time diving in the Maldives and I wouldn’t hesitate to return. Both marine life and coral are superb and certainly on a par if not better than anything I’ve seen in South East Asia and that includes Sipadan and Layang Layang. Boat was very comfortable with far more space available than I’d expected both in the cabins and on deck and sea conditions were so calm you hardly new you were on the water. I would have preferred some more exposure to current on the dives but the organisers are catering for a very mixed bunch of skill levels and so can’t really be blamed for keeping the dives undemanding. If more demanding dives are your thing you would need check whether your interests can be accommodated before hand – or flood the boat with your colleagues! In my book the trip definitely gets two thumbs up.
Bruce