Trip Report Emperor Voyager May 2016

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Tippytoes12

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Messages
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Location
UK
# of dives
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My husband and I have just come back from this wonderful trip , so I'm sharing a brief report. We learned to dive in 2008 and both totally fell in love with it. We have been to the Red Sea , Thailand, Raja Ampat , Komodo and the Maldives on liveaboards which we love. I take lots of pictures and my husband is an awesome spotter. I use a Canon s110. The first one died in the Philippines and because I had two new housings I bought a used S110 on ebay , which worked really well.

We live in the UK and flew with Emirates from Gatwick to Dubai. Emirates have great fares and now go to all our favorite places. But somewhat inevitably the standard of the food and service has gone down somewhat. Still all four aircraft had many empty seats !

Emperor very kindly picked us up from Male Airport at 11 am , just three hours after the previous passengers left. Our cabin was ready. How they turn around a full boat in a few hours is beyond me , but they did. We had a cabin on the upper deck , which was perfect.....not super luxurious , but great. There were only ten passengers on a boat which usually carries twenty , so extremely spacious. Our fellow passengers were several single divers from Germany , Spain , the UK and a family from Israel. Everybody was super cool and friendly and we had a wonderful week. There were three guides , two European and a Maldivian guide. We were impressed that every guide did every dive. They were superb guides , cheerful and friendly , great spotters and extremely professional and organized. All diving was done from a dhoni and the boat crew were fantastic with helping us In and out of the water. The food was not as great as other trips , but nobody went hungry. Free Nitrox was available. The LOBs in the Maldives dont travel at night , unlike the Deep South Red Sea trips and most days there were just 3 dives available , which was more than enough. People could go off in buddy pairs if they wanted , but we tended to stick to the guide.

On the first diving day we did a check dive, which was fine. Sadly the coral was not in great shape but we had a nice long spot of a baby green turtle. We then set off for a southern Atol for what would be one of the highlights of the trip , a sunset dive with nurse sharks and rays. We jumped almost on top of two nurse sharks and had 50blissful minutes with them At one point our group had three nurse sharks lying on their backs in front of us. It was hard to resist not tickling their stomachs. We were so near them that it was difficult to ge a picture of a whole of a shark.

The remaining days were spent around the Southern Atols. The most memorable times were a channel dive with scores of grey reef sharks , white tips and eagle rays , plus a night snorkel with mantas at the back of the boat. The Maldives is great for big things , but we also had some fantastic macro spots. We saw sharks and hawksbill turtles on almost every dive. We also had spots of many eagle rays. There were also some huge octopus and on the morning dives they tended to be out on the reefs.

When we went to the whaleshark area, the plan was that to start with an hour would be spent looking for a whaleshark to snorkel with. This was however in the company of lots of other boats and became a bit of a bunfight with lots of scrambling on and jumping off lots of boats. There weremany snorkeling boats , who seemed to want to drop their clients on top of an animal regardless. We did see a tail but other passengers were luckier. Ironically the boat captain had a brilliant view when a shark swam past the back of the boat several times. We then went for a dive to an area where whalesharks might be , and purely by chance jumped in on top of one and had a long long swim with it ! Not everybody had a great spot snorkeling , but we all saw it on the dive.

The other dives were mainly around coral covered thilas. The soft corals have not been badly affected by the bleaching , many were in superb condition and had masses of fish life. There were channels in and between these thilas with enormous pale pink sea fans and masses of fish chilling out between them. Another wonderful dive was Blue Caves , which actually were swim throughs festooned with pale blue soft corals. In one thee was a large whit tip , asleep when we arrived anda sleeping when we left her! These reefs were perhaps not quiet as pristine as Raja Ampat or Komodo , but still very very good. The Maldives is a lot quicker and easier to get to than Raja Ampat.

On the second last night we were taken to an uninhibited island for a barbecue dinner , which was fabulous. On the last day diving finished at about 11.30 and we sailed to Male where a tour of the city was on offer. We chose not to do this and just to chill out. The weather was not too bad , not wonderful , but not bad either. We did however have a lot of rain the second week.

Obviously we were super satisfied with the trip , the diving was awesome and we met some great people. I'm happy of course to answer any questions.

We then spent an excellent second week in a British run dive resort on a local island. I will post a review on this next.
 
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Thanks for sharing!

Very useful to know since I'm going on Voyager in July...looking forward to it!
 
Thanks for this and I'm very much looking forward to your report on the land resort.
 
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