Maldives

Well, what a trip!  The Maldives is certainly a gift for divers that keeps on giving.  

Following a fairly uneventful 12 hours flying we arrived in Male airport to be meet by our EcoProDivers reps who guided us straight onto a waiting Dhoni and whisked us off from the hustle and bustle to our beautiful new(ish) 43m liveaboard home "Seascape" for the next 7 days.  Having never been on a liveaboard dive boat before I was a little apprehensive but it certainly exceeded my expectations.   We were met onboard by the friendly smiling crew handing out freshly squeezed fruit juices and local teas which seemed to be the order of proceedings after each dive thereafter.  The boat was clean, tidy and very spacious, with lots of areas for everyone to find their vibe.  Bedrooms were air conditioned and I’m told a lot more spacious than some of the club’s previous Red Sea trips.  Bathrooms did the job and there was always lots of warm water for showers.  

The first evening was spent on briefings about the boat, safety, dive plans and, perhaps most importantly, how the bar tab worked!  So, onto the diving,  I was told liveaboard dive schedules can be brutal and they certainly weren’t wrong!  Each day we’re woken at 6am with the first dive briefing of the day at 06:30.  Thereafter the day was broadly spent diving, eating + sleeping, with the odd beer thrown in at the end of the day!  Other than the first day we managed 3 dives / day with 2 night dives. 

The diving….. having never done blue water diving before and only with experience of limited viz diving in UK waters and Arlesey I was somewhat anxious before taking that first step off the Dhoni into the big blue.  Thank God I did though, OMG, sea temp of 28 deg and viz of +25m with so much life around you!  As well as the fact I could actually see my buddy (thank you again Colin) I could actually see the whole group of us as well! 

Most dives were down onto reefs around 20-30m, with so much marine life.  Too many species to name but here’s just a few of what we saw to whet your appetite: Clown fish, angel fish, lion fish, trumpet fish, bat fish (funny little things that seem to follow us throughout the dives),  butterfly fish, tangs, groupers, jacks, puffers, wrasse, snappers, cornet fish, pipefish, surgeon fish, clown trigger fish (akin to a Picasso painting!), mantis shrimps and the list goes on. 

If you could bring yourself to turn away from the busy reef and actually look into the big blue we were blessed with many of the the seas big pelagic fish including: Whitetip, blacktip and reef sharks, Nurse sharks, Rays+++ (Manta, Eagle, Devil & Stingrays), shoals of tuna & baraccuda and (I’m told) some of the group spotted a sun fish.  Oh and I’ve not yet mentioned the turtles that periodically swam by!

Weather,  this was probably one aspect of the trip that let us down a little.  Going in rainy season we should expect some rain and certainly that was what we got for the odd short sharp torrential downpour.  In addition when these squalls did pass through it created some chop and we had one or two ‘more interesting’ ascents back onto the Dhoni after diving in 2m swelling seas.  The weather meant we couldn’t get as far down to the south atolls as the team would have wanted and unfortunately this limited our chances of seeing whale sharks…… perhaps that’s for the next visit.

So all in all what an incredible trip.  20m down in the Indian Ocean watching 5-6 large Manta rays on a cleaning station for 40 mins will be a memory I wont forget in a hurry.  In addition to the scale and beauty of the underwater world in the Maldives I also feel I’ve made some great friends on this trip and look forward to spending many more dives, and the odd night sinking a couple of beers, with a really great bunch of folk. 

James Shelford completed his Dive Leader and Dom Young and James Pemberton each clocked up their 100th dives on the trip.

Final word must go to Russ for all his efforts pulling this together, top job Russ, we all had such an amazing time.  Thank you !