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Trip Report: Maldives - January 2003
One interesting thing about this trip is that it originated as a trip to the Great Barrier Reef & Coral Sea...we got lost. Actually this was a birthday trip for my long-time travel buddy Paula so the dates were more or less predetermined. The problem is that the late January or early February time frame is the rainy season in northern Australia so we decided to change the venue. After a little homework the Maldives was selected. The Manthiri was apparently the boat to be on in the Maldives but their website had the dates I wanted listed as "Blocked" which meant some shop or agency had booked the whole boat. I did a little internet searching and found that Neptune Divers offered the trip I wanted and had two spots left. It was a done deal...an expensive deal, but a done deal.
Getting to the Maldives is a friggin' marathon. Flight times and layovers added up to around 44 hours total but Singapore Airlines offer exceptional coach service by US domestic standards, decent food, and pretty good in-flight entertainment. Also, every flight departed and arrived on time and not one piece of luggage was misplaced among the whole group of 12 divers. Not bad overall. We broke up the 8-hour layover in Singapore by going on a bus and boat tour of the city. This turned out to be less than enchanting (Singapore airport is more interesting than the city itself) but it offered some historical tidbits and it used up a few hours.
The flight from Singapore to Male, the capital of The Republic of the Maldives, was about four hours and landed at 10:00PM. Dive masters and tour leaders Manik and Moosa from the Manthiri crew greeted us at the airport and helped get the baggage to the Manthiri's accompanying boat, called a dhoni which carried us to the Manthiri and would serve as our dive boat for the 10-day trip.
The Manthiri is a 85' liveaboard vessel that carries twelve passengers in six airconditioned cabins, each with private baths and showers. Twelve passengers and twelve crew may give you the impression that it would be crowded but unlike most liveaboards, the Manthiri is 100 percent dedicated to living space. All of the dive gear, rinse tanks, compressors, etc. are kept on the accompaning dhoni. All of the cabins are on the lowest deck, accessed from a central hallway. the two forward rooms both have double beds, the other four have two single beds, one on each side of the room (not bunks). The airconditioning for each cabin is individually controlled and works well enough to turn your room into a meat locker. Ours was off most of the time, relying on the overall boat a/c to keep things comfortable.
The main salon had two round dinner tables where the meals were served, and two sets of lounge chairs each surrounding a coffee table, and some benches used as work areas for the photographers. There were plenty of outlets, both 110 and 220V available for use for chargers, laptops or whatever else. Meals were all served by a waiter that offered service most restaurants would be proud of and the food was very, very good...assuming you like fish. All meals except breakfast had at least one fish dish, and some other selection like pasta or chicken. The one advantage is that the Maldivians have had nothing native to eat but fish throughout history so they most certainly know how to prepare fish. They actually serve two breakfasts by my standards, one before the first dive that consists of cereal or oatmeal, coffee and tea, and the "real" breakfast after the first dive which always included eggs, toast, sausages, and fruit. Between lunch and dinner a snack was served with coffee and tea. Dinner was always a nice afare, always served with a wine from such far-flung places as Chile, Argentina, Australia, & France. Overall I felt like I ate five times a day...exactly what I want when I'm diving alot.
Overall the Manthiri is a very nice and comfortable boat. As I understand is inevitable in these islands, there was an occasional roach sighting that made some of our passengers squirm. I on the other hand figured that if it had been in the water, I'd grab my macro lens...sort of a top-side cleaner shrimp if you will. In spite of the occasional unwanted visitor, the boat was kept very, very clean, the cabins were serviced daily, the beds made and towels replaced. The staff made this operation absolutely top notch. The operation of this boat was like clockwork and the staff were always friendly and ready to help. They had an almost magical way of vanishing when they weren't of immediate service. I have no idea where they all went but you would never believe that 12 staff members were on the boat.
Photos of and around the Manthiri
Before I start describing the diving I should say that I wasn't totally enamored by the diving we did. Don't get me wrong, it was very good diving and I certainly was never sorry I was there, but for the price and the travel effort, I had very high expectations. First, lots of the reefs we dove above about 30 feet were dead, I presume due to the warm water event (El Nino) several years ago. This severely limited the amount of casual reef-browsing that was to be done. Instead, we spent most of our day dives in deep water with screaming currents watching for sharks. This is cool when you see the sharks but this type of diving gets really old after several days of it. There were some really beautiful sites, sites with huge numbers of fish and some dives that were very exciting due solely to the shark action, but there were also many dives spent flapping in the current at 90 feet to watch nothing or fighing a current around a mostly dead coral. I'd be hard pressed to do the same trip again without reasonable assurance that the diving would be different. That said, I'll get on with the good stuff about the diving...as you'll see, there was no shortage of good stuff.
The morning after the day of arrival, the boat set sail to "Maa Giri" the site used for the check out dive. This is a fairly shallow site with no current and is fairly close to the airport at Male. This dive is to verify that all of the divers more or less know what they are doing and have their equipment in order while still in the vacinity of a dive shop. This site was nothing to dance about and in fact, it was the first of several to show the extensive coral damage. However it was good to be in the warm water finally and we got to see some lionfish, pipefish and "Susan's Flatworm". I don't know who this Susan is, but she has a nice looking flatworm.
After the first dive we motored a couple hours to South Male Atoll and to a site called Casimo Wreck. We were told that frogfish were often seen on this wreck and we found one the minute we got to the deck. I immediately spotted what looked like a black trash bag wriggling in the current. I'd never seen a frogfish swim in open water but it looked like new diver that had forgotten their fins. Later in the dive, a second black frogfish was seen sitting on what looked like a hoist at the back of the wreck. This wreck rests in about 100 feet of water and had plenty of life on and around it. Towards the end of our time on the wreck I looked down to see a stingray that looked to be 6 feet wide on the sand. The nearby pinnacle was only about 40 feet from the wreck and was a good place to end the dive. It offered some soft corals, huge anemones with their resident fish and crabs, lionfish and some critters I'll never identify.
That day's third dive was a night dive on the giri (pinnacle) near the wreck. There were a number of critters including a small white-ish moray about the size of my thumb and a couple giant morays (they are pretty big but "giant moray" is what they're really called). We found several varieties of stars including a cushion star. Cleaner shrimp were in every hole waiting for a meal.
The following morning we did two shark dives, one at "Fushi Diga", the next at "Cocoa Corner". each of these dives produced several gray reef and white tip reef sharks. In both cases the sharks were deep, about 100 feet, and on the second dive we Manik, Paula and I all had a deco obligation before we left the water. This proved to be pretty typical of the shark encounters: go to about 85-95 feet, get on a corner that faces into the tidal current, and hang on. The sharks cycle back and fourth in the open water in front of you and usually below. The end of these dives were spent more shallow on the pinnacle of course, but often it only went up to 45-50 feet, so the safety/deco stops were done in open water. We were usually requested to come out away from the pinnacle so the boat could pick us up in deep water.
That day's third and fourth dives were more tranquil and we got to see a few octopi, scorpionfish, another Susan's flatworm, vericose wart slugs, more pipefish, etc. On the night dive, Moosa pointed out some floating cleaner shrimp in a small hole. This was an unusal sight indeed, I had to take a photo of course...
The next day started with a morning shark dive at Gurado Channel where we saw white tip reef sharks and an eagle ray before we got to the corner. A few sharks were spotted from the corner but nothing like the first day's action. Before the second dive we moved on to Felidhe Atoll. There we did three more dives to end the day, including a night dive with pampanos stalking us, or our lights, the whole dive. Titan triggerfish were pretty popular at this site and they didn't hesitate to charge if you got close. Two of our group got "attacked" (no casualties).
Often we would visit the local islands between dives. In some cases we would just go to buy souvinirs & such, on others there would be a planned activity. We got to see the local fishermen put on a drum and dance performance that was interesting and a cool escape from our escape. On another island visit we got to visit a local home where we had tea, snacks, and batelenut. It was all very interesting & educational.
In case you want to know more, here are a few more notes about the dive operation. The briefings were almost always given by Manik who was clearly the senior dive master. Moosa gave a few of them. Briefings were always more or less the same with a general map of the site, a description of the currents and where we'd be dropped in and picked up, and what in general to expect. Everyone dove the same basic plan but there were usually three dive masters in the water so groups could split up with little concern. A dive master was always somewhere in viseable range but they never pushed anyone to follow a particular dive...the current usually did that for them. They would stop divers from getting too shallow near a pinnacle since you'd run the risk of having the current push you over the top. They also warn against mandatory decompression stops since the strong currents can seperate you from the group. I've already mentioned that three of us, including the dive master, knowingly went into deco so this isn't cast in stone. Several others mentioned going into deco only such that it cleared before the safety stop. This was pretty easy at these depths with the Manthiri's 100 cubic foot tanks. Trips in the dhoni from the big boat to the dive sites were seldom more than 10 minutes long. In a couple cases we had to go around long submerged sandbars, too shallow even for the dhoni, which took a little longer. The diving was not drift diving ala Cozumel, but rather pinnacle diving with drifting open water ascents and safety stops. The group usually ascended in generally the same location but at times were picked up several hundred feet apart.
This was pretty much the routine for ten days:
Get up at 6AM
Breakfast
Briefing, first dive
Second breakfast
Briefing, second dive
Lunch
Briefing, third dive
Second Lunch (tea, coffee, snacks)
Briefing, night dive
Dinner
Sleep
Night dives were offered on about six of the days, other nights some other activity took its place. We had multiple videographers and digital photographers with us so there was almost always some recent production on the TV in the salon. The boat had a big assortment of fish and critter ID books as well as a selection of novels. Several movies were also available to watch, I didn't look through them to evaluate the selection.
A few more diving highlights:
Daffodil Cave - Felidhe Atoll
As we got down to just below 100', we saw a school of jacks well below us that easily numbered in the thousands. They began to form into a huge swirl of fish that looked like a satelite image of a huricane.
Golden Wall - Felidhe Atoll
An amazing array of colors on this soft coral covered wall. More shades of blues, greens, and reds than I thought existed.
Fish Head - Ari Atoll
Saw big schools of snapper, rainbow runners, and jacks throughout the dive. Also several napolean wrasse, eagle ray, mantis shrimp.
Fesdo Wreck - Ari Atoll
Spent way too much time looking for the wreck, found a field of gorgonian fan corals at about 100 feet that were as big as 10 feet in diameter. I was almost afraid to swim among them for fear of damaging them. We did finally find the wreck and it was absolutely teaming with life. So much so, in fact, that the wreck was almost obscured unless you backed up to see its profile. Very nice dive, would love to have done it again with more time to spend on the wreck.
Photos from Fesdo Wreck
Milos Tila - Ari Atoll
This site almost took away all my disappointment with the damaged coral at other sites. The deeper parts were absolutely thick with soft coral. In fact, almost all of my photos of soft corals were taken at this site. The upper part (around 50 feet) was a veritable kaleidoscope of hard corals. If it weren't for the 20 knot current (it seemed), I would have done 5 more dives on this one site. We did get to do a second dive here with less current. So this is what diving in the Maldives was like once...almost sad when it's put that way.
Photos from Milos Tila
Maya Shark Point - North Ari Atoll
This was the shark dive of the trip. The first half of the dive was spent around 75 and 90 feet, watching several gray reef and white tip reef sharks all around us. There weren't large numbers of them, maybe 10 or 12, but there was still no way to determine how many exactly since they were coming and going in every direction. In the midst of all the action, a small eagle ray, only about 14 inches wide, came overhead and while photographing it my fin got bitten and yanked by a titan triggerfish. All of the animals seemed to be fairly comfortable with our presence (other than the triggerfish) and often came within 10-15 feet or so. Very impressive dive!
Photos from Sark Point
Rasdo Channel - Rasdhoo Atoll
This was last atoll we visited before motoring back to North Male Atoll. It had one purpose only: to see hammerhead sharks. We got up way too early and hit the water just after sunrise, landed on a high current wall/point...and saw nothing. We finned all over that site in the current and eventually saw two gray reef sharks and a few white tips but the highlight was a devil ray. I had mistakenly thought it to be a baby manta ray but the crew corrected me after the dive. As we motored back to the Manthiri, we stopped to snorkel with a manta in shallow water. Only a few of us got in the water, it was the only manta sighted on this trip.
The last night on the boat was spent in the harbor near Male. That final day we went on a walking tour of Male which was very pleasant. The crew rinsed all of our gear and left it on the sundeck to dry. We collected our gear and packed. The flight out, scheduled to leave at 11PM actually left after midnight. No connections were missed because of it.
If I ever go back to the Maldives, I'll definitely book the Manthiri again. I probably wouldn't even bother looking into other options. However, I have a long list of destinations the will come first because of the reasons stated above. Make no mistake, this was a wonderful trip. But there are lots and lots of wonderful trips to chose from.
-J
View the first of several photo galleries from this trip with links to the others.
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