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This year I turned 60. To celebrate the occasion I decided to travel to someplace far from anywhere I had been before. Looking at a map one day I noticed a tiny group of islands off the south tip of India … the Maldives. After doing some research, I decided this was just the location I was looking for and booked a 10-day diving trip on a liveaboard.
Traveling to the Maldives from the Seattle area takes nearly two days in each direction. Our flights covered more than 11,000 miles, taking us from Seattle to San Francisco to Korea to Singapore and finally to the Madivian capital city of Male, in the central-eastern part of the tiny island nation. From there we boarded our boat … the 125-foot Carpe Vita Explorer … where we spent the next week and a half visiting more than two dozen dive sites covering six of the southern atolls.
About the Maldives
The Maldives are an island chain just north of the equator in the Indian Ocean, about 430 miles southwest of Sri Lanka. They consist of 1,190 islands spread out in a double-chain of 26 atolls running roughly 600 miles north-to-south. Each atoll is made up of a ring of islands and shallow reefs encircling a deep lagoon, with deep channels allowing water exchange between the lagoon and open ocean. Only about 200 of the nation’s islands are inhabited. About 90 of those have been developed as tourist resorts. The rest of the islands are either uninhabited or are used for agricultural or other livelihood purposes.
Roughly one quarter of the nation’s population lives in Male … an island city that offers an interesting mix of modern urban and ancient tradition. Much of the city’s rather impressive downtown structure appears to be very recently built, but interspersed among the high-rise government and office buildings are parks, ancient mosques and other buildings dating back several hundreds of years to a time when sultans ruled. The international airport is on the separate island of Huhule, roughly a 10-minute ferry ride from downtown Male.
Diving in the Maldives is determined by two distinct monsoon seasons, each named after the prevailing wind conditions that define the season. The northeast season – which runs from December to April – brings with it mild wind and weather conditions, but strong currents. The boats typically visit the southern atolls during this season. The southeast season – which runs from May to November – brings more rain and wind, but less current. During this time of year, diving is done in the north.
We were there for the northeast season, diving in the south, and experienced almost perfect weather with mild winds, postcard sunrises and sunsets, temperatures in the low to mid-80’s (F) and very comfortable humidity. Water temperatures were consistently between 80 and 83 degrees Fahrenheit during the entire trip. In short, the environment was about as perfect as it can get. The one exception was visibility, which for most dives ran from fair to poor.
The Carpe Vita Explorer
The Carpe Vita Explorer is a very new vessel, having been in operation for just short of a year by the time of our trip. The boat very comfortably accommodates up to 20 divers, with spacious guest quarters, plenty of room for lounging on three of its four decks, and one of the friendliest, most accommodating crews I’ve experienced anywhere. These guys are very good at what they do, and put a great deal of effort into making sure we had a good experience.
Meals are all served buffet style, and the main dinner entrée was sometimes caught by the crew during the morning hours. Food was plentiful and very well prepared, although I could have wished for a bit more variety. Nonetheless, I found myself eating things I don’t normally prefer (like beets and cauliflower) simply because they were so well prepared they were delicious. I’d happily have taken the cook home with me.
All diving is done from a separate vessel … a 61-foot diving tender (called a dhoni) that accompanies the main boat and comes alongside for transfer and transport to the dive sites. The dhoni very comfortably accommodates 20 divers, and provides showers and a head for after-diving comfort. When it’s time to go diving, the divers transfer from the main boat to the dhoni using a short (2-step) ladder. All dive equipment remains aboard the dhoni for the duration of the trip, so the only thing divers need carry between boats is a towel and camera equipment.
The Diving
The typical diving day consisted of three or four dives, depending on the day’s travel plans, and was interspersed around the day’s meals. A typical day’s schedule would have a pre-breakfast dive, post-breakfast dive, and two dives between lunch and dinner. Sometimes the schedule would have our fourth dive at night, after dinner.
In 10 days we did 33 dives, which I could best describe as extremely variable. Our dives covered wrecks, reefs, channels and pinnacles. The diving conditions were as variable as the sites we visited. Currents ranged from mild to very strong, and visibility ranged from barely 20 feet to well over 100, depending on the site. Some of the sites appeared to be trashed by overuse or dynamite fishing, while others appeared to be pristine and barely used at all. Some of the sites we visited only once had me wishing for return visits, while some that we visited more than once made me wonder why we ever went there at all. One early morning dive we spent the entire time swimming in open ocean … in hundreds of feet of water at a depth of about 70 feet looking for hammerheads. Although we only saw one, well below us, we saw lots of pelagics swimming by, long strings of salp colonies drifting in the current, and a curious blue glowing plankton that … looking downward into the abyss … gave the impression of looking at the stars from deep space. This was a completely new experience for me … one of many … that went into the “magical” category.
The wrecks were probably my favorite dives. The first was in South Male atoll, at a place called Kuda Giri. The wreck was perhaps 150-foot long, and just a short swim out from an incredibly interesting reef with a swim-through. I could have spent several dives here. Unfortunately, we only got one. And as was the case with most of our dives, the profile was fairly deep which made for a relatively short dive on an AL80. The second wreck was at a house reef in South Ari atoll called Matchafushi. Once again the wreck is just a few fin kicks out from one of the more healthy reefs we found on the entire trip. And once again the wreck was fairly deep, and so covered in life that the limitations of the available air left much of it unexplored. Both of these wrecks were so covered in life that I could have happily spent several dives on each.
In between those two wrecks, we did three reef dives and three dives on a Manta cleaning station that I found generally uninteresting. Visibility on all of these dives was not very good, ranging from 30 to 50 feet. The manta site … Rangali Madivaru … was trashed … clearly due to diver overuse and bad diving habits. The first two dives there were no mantas, and although there were occasional turtle or moray encounters, I logged the dives as basically boring drifts over rocks and dead coral. The third dive at this site we did encounter mantas … but as soon as the mantas showed up it started raining divers! We ended up sharing a few moments of manta encounter with about a hundred other divers … the majority of whom clearly had no diving skills at all. It was a mob scene … divers landing on top of other divers, kicking and breaking corals, and generally making it almost impossible to enjoy the mantas cruising overhead. I spent more time dodging flailing fins and arms than watching the mantas, and managed only a single picture that was croppable of divers and bubbles. Perhaps in an attempt to control this chaos, the dive guides were frantically trying to get everyone to hold onto something on the bottom … which I neither needed nor wanted to do, but my guide kept insisting I do it anyway. Overall, I found the experience rather disappointing.
In between these dives, we cruised the surface looking for signs of whale sharks, which we eventually found. On this occasion we entered the water with only mask, fins and snorkel … and once again we found ourselves in a virtual melee of divers from several boats. The experience of swimming with the world’s largest fish was offset by that of being part of a scrum of snorkelers … each frantically jockeying for position above the slowly swimming whale shark. We found two whale sharks, and in each encounter I took three quick pictures and got myself out of the melee. The experience was surreal … I’ve had more personal space in the cheap seats at a Grateful Dead concert … but this was my first-ever whale shark encounter, and that made it all worthwhile.
That evening we headed south to Vaavu atoll, where we saw our first soft corals of the trip in a beautiful reef called Rakheedoo Corner. This was also one of the better dive sites for visibility … perhaps as much as 80-90 feet.
We did our next several dives at Meemu and Thaa atolls … mostly diving channels looking for reef sharks and eagle rays. These dives were mostly in very strong current, and we were issued reef hooks for the occasion. On these dives, we were expected to “hot drop” … which means stepping off the boat negatively buoyant and swimming quickly to the reef to hook in. Currents were strong enough here to sweep you quickly away otherwise. On our first dive we saw lots of sharks and rays, but I had the wrong lens on the camera, and we were not close enough for me to get any reasonably good pictures. Before our next dive, one of our party mentioned to the dive guide that she was uncomfortable descending that fast, and could we please drop in just a bit further upstream so as to have some drift time before reaching the depth they wanted us to hook in. Unfortunately, they took us so far from the site that we then spent the next several dives drifting for 25-30 minutes and often not even making it to the drop-off before we had to ascend due to our available air. This part of the trip was extremely disappointing, particularly because the groups who were being dropped at the site were having some nice shark encounters while we were basically drifting over more rocks and dead coral. After two days of this type of diving I was suffering a bout of buyer’s remorse for bringing my friends to the Maldives for what I considered boring dives. Of the 12 dives we did at these sites, I would consider half of them to have not been worth doing, and on a very expensive dive trip they were more than disappointing.
Our final nine dives were in Laamu atoll … some 250 miles south of where we started this trip. These were also mostly channel dives, although the currents weren’t as strong as on previous dives, and we had the best visibility of the trip. For these three days I felt like I’d finally gotten what I came here to see … healthy reefs, reasonably good visibility, and a plentiful marine life. On a couple of the milder dives, we were allowed to go “explore” in buddy teams without the dive guide. I enjoyed these dives the best, as I was able to stop travelling and just stop and “see” the reef. Sometimes I would just hover over a particularly pretty patch of corals and watch the interplay between the fish that lived within them.
Overall I would rate the trip a success, with some moments of disappointment. For those considering travel to the Maldives, I would recommend that you put some real effort into finding out what the different atolls have to offer, and making your itinerary and choice of season according to your expectations. There’s a lot to see, but there’s also a lot of room for bad choices if your expectations don’t match the conditions of where you go. Most of the dives are fairly deep profiles, with typical maximum depths in the 90-100 foot range and average depths of 50-60 feet, which can make for rather short dives unless you’re very good on air.
If you are looking for beautiful reefs with lots of soft corals and invertebrate life perhaps the Maldives isn’t a good choice. We found only a handful of nudibranchs, no cephelopods (octopus or squid), very few crabs or shrimp, and only two lobsters. Many of the reefs looked trashed … sometimes interspersed with large patches of healthy corals as one would find in places that were dynamite fished. The reefs close to Male and in Ari were generally crowded. But once you get away from that, there were also places that were just downright magical. The concentration of fish life here is probably greater than anyplace I’ve ever been … even on reefs that didn’t appear to be very healthy. And the further south we got, the healthier the reefs looked.
Because of this variability, I would highly recommend a liveaboard … and in fact would highly recommend the Carpe Vita Explorer. If you are going during northeast monsoon season, plan for some pretty heavy current that can challenge even a very experienced diver.
And finally, some pictures ... my first whale shark encounter ...
... and my second ...
... my only manta ray encounter on this trip ...
... hooked in, watching sharks and eagle rays ...
You can see more photos of my trip at Image hosting, free photo sharing & video sharing at Photobucket
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
Traveling to the Maldives from the Seattle area takes nearly two days in each direction. Our flights covered more than 11,000 miles, taking us from Seattle to San Francisco to Korea to Singapore and finally to the Madivian capital city of Male, in the central-eastern part of the tiny island nation. From there we boarded our boat … the 125-foot Carpe Vita Explorer … where we spent the next week and a half visiting more than two dozen dive sites covering six of the southern atolls.
About the Maldives
The Maldives are an island chain just north of the equator in the Indian Ocean, about 430 miles southwest of Sri Lanka. They consist of 1,190 islands spread out in a double-chain of 26 atolls running roughly 600 miles north-to-south. Each atoll is made up of a ring of islands and shallow reefs encircling a deep lagoon, with deep channels allowing water exchange between the lagoon and open ocean. Only about 200 of the nation’s islands are inhabited. About 90 of those have been developed as tourist resorts. The rest of the islands are either uninhabited or are used for agricultural or other livelihood purposes.
Roughly one quarter of the nation’s population lives in Male … an island city that offers an interesting mix of modern urban and ancient tradition. Much of the city’s rather impressive downtown structure appears to be very recently built, but interspersed among the high-rise government and office buildings are parks, ancient mosques and other buildings dating back several hundreds of years to a time when sultans ruled. The international airport is on the separate island of Huhule, roughly a 10-minute ferry ride from downtown Male.
Diving in the Maldives is determined by two distinct monsoon seasons, each named after the prevailing wind conditions that define the season. The northeast season – which runs from December to April – brings with it mild wind and weather conditions, but strong currents. The boats typically visit the southern atolls during this season. The southeast season – which runs from May to November – brings more rain and wind, but less current. During this time of year, diving is done in the north.
We were there for the northeast season, diving in the south, and experienced almost perfect weather with mild winds, postcard sunrises and sunsets, temperatures in the low to mid-80’s (F) and very comfortable humidity. Water temperatures were consistently between 80 and 83 degrees Fahrenheit during the entire trip. In short, the environment was about as perfect as it can get. The one exception was visibility, which for most dives ran from fair to poor.
The Carpe Vita Explorer
The Carpe Vita Explorer is a very new vessel, having been in operation for just short of a year by the time of our trip. The boat very comfortably accommodates up to 20 divers, with spacious guest quarters, plenty of room for lounging on three of its four decks, and one of the friendliest, most accommodating crews I’ve experienced anywhere. These guys are very good at what they do, and put a great deal of effort into making sure we had a good experience.
Meals are all served buffet style, and the main dinner entrée was sometimes caught by the crew during the morning hours. Food was plentiful and very well prepared, although I could have wished for a bit more variety. Nonetheless, I found myself eating things I don’t normally prefer (like beets and cauliflower) simply because they were so well prepared they were delicious. I’d happily have taken the cook home with me.
All diving is done from a separate vessel … a 61-foot diving tender (called a dhoni) that accompanies the main boat and comes alongside for transfer and transport to the dive sites. The dhoni very comfortably accommodates 20 divers, and provides showers and a head for after-diving comfort. When it’s time to go diving, the divers transfer from the main boat to the dhoni using a short (2-step) ladder. All dive equipment remains aboard the dhoni for the duration of the trip, so the only thing divers need carry between boats is a towel and camera equipment.
The Diving
The typical diving day consisted of three or four dives, depending on the day’s travel plans, and was interspersed around the day’s meals. A typical day’s schedule would have a pre-breakfast dive, post-breakfast dive, and two dives between lunch and dinner. Sometimes the schedule would have our fourth dive at night, after dinner.
In 10 days we did 33 dives, which I could best describe as extremely variable. Our dives covered wrecks, reefs, channels and pinnacles. The diving conditions were as variable as the sites we visited. Currents ranged from mild to very strong, and visibility ranged from barely 20 feet to well over 100, depending on the site. Some of the sites appeared to be trashed by overuse or dynamite fishing, while others appeared to be pristine and barely used at all. Some of the sites we visited only once had me wishing for return visits, while some that we visited more than once made me wonder why we ever went there at all. One early morning dive we spent the entire time swimming in open ocean … in hundreds of feet of water at a depth of about 70 feet looking for hammerheads. Although we only saw one, well below us, we saw lots of pelagics swimming by, long strings of salp colonies drifting in the current, and a curious blue glowing plankton that … looking downward into the abyss … gave the impression of looking at the stars from deep space. This was a completely new experience for me … one of many … that went into the “magical” category.
The wrecks were probably my favorite dives. The first was in South Male atoll, at a place called Kuda Giri. The wreck was perhaps 150-foot long, and just a short swim out from an incredibly interesting reef with a swim-through. I could have spent several dives here. Unfortunately, we only got one. And as was the case with most of our dives, the profile was fairly deep which made for a relatively short dive on an AL80. The second wreck was at a house reef in South Ari atoll called Matchafushi. Once again the wreck is just a few fin kicks out from one of the more healthy reefs we found on the entire trip. And once again the wreck was fairly deep, and so covered in life that the limitations of the available air left much of it unexplored. Both of these wrecks were so covered in life that I could have happily spent several dives on each.
In between those two wrecks, we did three reef dives and three dives on a Manta cleaning station that I found generally uninteresting. Visibility on all of these dives was not very good, ranging from 30 to 50 feet. The manta site … Rangali Madivaru … was trashed … clearly due to diver overuse and bad diving habits. The first two dives there were no mantas, and although there were occasional turtle or moray encounters, I logged the dives as basically boring drifts over rocks and dead coral. The third dive at this site we did encounter mantas … but as soon as the mantas showed up it started raining divers! We ended up sharing a few moments of manta encounter with about a hundred other divers … the majority of whom clearly had no diving skills at all. It was a mob scene … divers landing on top of other divers, kicking and breaking corals, and generally making it almost impossible to enjoy the mantas cruising overhead. I spent more time dodging flailing fins and arms than watching the mantas, and managed only a single picture that was croppable of divers and bubbles. Perhaps in an attempt to control this chaos, the dive guides were frantically trying to get everyone to hold onto something on the bottom … which I neither needed nor wanted to do, but my guide kept insisting I do it anyway. Overall, I found the experience rather disappointing.
In between these dives, we cruised the surface looking for signs of whale sharks, which we eventually found. On this occasion we entered the water with only mask, fins and snorkel … and once again we found ourselves in a virtual melee of divers from several boats. The experience of swimming with the world’s largest fish was offset by that of being part of a scrum of snorkelers … each frantically jockeying for position above the slowly swimming whale shark. We found two whale sharks, and in each encounter I took three quick pictures and got myself out of the melee. The experience was surreal … I’ve had more personal space in the cheap seats at a Grateful Dead concert … but this was my first-ever whale shark encounter, and that made it all worthwhile.
That evening we headed south to Vaavu atoll, where we saw our first soft corals of the trip in a beautiful reef called Rakheedoo Corner. This was also one of the better dive sites for visibility … perhaps as much as 80-90 feet.
We did our next several dives at Meemu and Thaa atolls … mostly diving channels looking for reef sharks and eagle rays. These dives were mostly in very strong current, and we were issued reef hooks for the occasion. On these dives, we were expected to “hot drop” … which means stepping off the boat negatively buoyant and swimming quickly to the reef to hook in. Currents were strong enough here to sweep you quickly away otherwise. On our first dive we saw lots of sharks and rays, but I had the wrong lens on the camera, and we were not close enough for me to get any reasonably good pictures. Before our next dive, one of our party mentioned to the dive guide that she was uncomfortable descending that fast, and could we please drop in just a bit further upstream so as to have some drift time before reaching the depth they wanted us to hook in. Unfortunately, they took us so far from the site that we then spent the next several dives drifting for 25-30 minutes and often not even making it to the drop-off before we had to ascend due to our available air. This part of the trip was extremely disappointing, particularly because the groups who were being dropped at the site were having some nice shark encounters while we were basically drifting over more rocks and dead coral. After two days of this type of diving I was suffering a bout of buyer’s remorse for bringing my friends to the Maldives for what I considered boring dives. Of the 12 dives we did at these sites, I would consider half of them to have not been worth doing, and on a very expensive dive trip they were more than disappointing.
Our final nine dives were in Laamu atoll … some 250 miles south of where we started this trip. These were also mostly channel dives, although the currents weren’t as strong as on previous dives, and we had the best visibility of the trip. For these three days I felt like I’d finally gotten what I came here to see … healthy reefs, reasonably good visibility, and a plentiful marine life. On a couple of the milder dives, we were allowed to go “explore” in buddy teams without the dive guide. I enjoyed these dives the best, as I was able to stop travelling and just stop and “see” the reef. Sometimes I would just hover over a particularly pretty patch of corals and watch the interplay between the fish that lived within them.
Overall I would rate the trip a success, with some moments of disappointment. For those considering travel to the Maldives, I would recommend that you put some real effort into finding out what the different atolls have to offer, and making your itinerary and choice of season according to your expectations. There’s a lot to see, but there’s also a lot of room for bad choices if your expectations don’t match the conditions of where you go. Most of the dives are fairly deep profiles, with typical maximum depths in the 90-100 foot range and average depths of 50-60 feet, which can make for rather short dives unless you’re very good on air.
If you are looking for beautiful reefs with lots of soft corals and invertebrate life perhaps the Maldives isn’t a good choice. We found only a handful of nudibranchs, no cephelopods (octopus or squid), very few crabs or shrimp, and only two lobsters. Many of the reefs looked trashed … sometimes interspersed with large patches of healthy corals as one would find in places that were dynamite fished. The reefs close to Male and in Ari were generally crowded. But once you get away from that, there were also places that were just downright magical. The concentration of fish life here is probably greater than anyplace I’ve ever been … even on reefs that didn’t appear to be very healthy. And the further south we got, the healthier the reefs looked.
Because of this variability, I would highly recommend a liveaboard … and in fact would highly recommend the Carpe Vita Explorer. If you are going during northeast monsoon season, plan for some pretty heavy current that can challenge even a very experienced diver.
And finally, some pictures ... my first whale shark encounter ...
... and my second ...
... my only manta ray encounter on this trip ...
... hooked in, watching sharks and eagle rays ...
You can see more photos of my trip at Image hosting, free photo sharing & video sharing at Photobucket
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
