.... The currents we experienced in the Maldives were sometimes crazy and a couple times I was really wishing I were not in the water.
Another good illustration of where I was going in post #2.
The Maldives is usually
done via live aboard by North Americans. The true bulk of their (Maldives) guest divers are instead land based, largely EU Citizens. They don't do many dives in any given week, but the majority of them are shore dives, a few will use small "Dhoni" boats for some dives. Accent is on the "resort", diving is merely an available program. Not a really viable option for most dive-dive-dive mentalities.
Live Aboards are different there. They are
usually fancied-up cabin cruisers that are not necessarily rigged in any fashion for diving. So looking at their websites won't show you much about that aspect. All your gear, the tanks and air compressor is set up on a "Dhoni", their local version of a "panga", it's a smaller wooden boat with long bench seats, a wooden roof. They work well for some pretty easy getting in-and-out of the water. You transfer from the Cabin Cruiser to the Dhoni, go diving, they drop you back off and then drive a distance away with your gear to run the compressors. The Dhoni staff literally spends entire weeks aboard these 40' boats, hell or high water. This can make the anal retentive fresh-water gear-washers among us go absolutely nuttier than squirrel poop.
Some very few, however, are
like orbiting space stations:
http://www.luxuryyachtmaldives.com/diving_dhoni_service.php but most are cobbled together from various bits of wood.
Most primitive wooden Dhonis work pretty well, for what they are. They seem to have access to gloss enamel paint, which can make the decks very slick. Always accept the hand of a crewman which seemed to be a universal offering. It amazes me how divers will simply not take advantage of an extended hand (lest someone think they are gay?) Every Maldives Dhoni I have ever ridden on, the crew was always extending a hand or trying to keep me from crashing into their ship's internal structures. Bravo.
Much of their real, week to week clientele are non-scuba vacationers who want to deep sea fish or as those European are wont to do- Sunbathe all the parts of their bodies. Sometimes they mix these folks in with divers on a cruise, sometimes not. I was once on a boat there with 18 other divers, all Japanese,
all wearing identical orange/silver 007 wetsuits. The boat's food didn't change from their normal fare from the week before.
...I got the sense that things are somewhat unpredictable in the Maldives...
Your live aboard DMs appear to be very transitory, they don't stay long. The DMs that attach to the Maldives live aboards seem to be Western Europeans and they are worked like poorly paid dogs. I have been several times, and I have the distinct sense that they are all just passing through. Add to this, the huge expanse of geography they sail to avoid bad weather, throw in the shallow nature of the hundreds of islands, you have the perfect storm of highly changeable conditions and no access to a truly local expert.
It is however just the most single bizarre dive experience (in an "easily" accessible location), all the way from the thing they call an Airport, the transfer system to the live aboard (or resort) via float plane or cigarette boat, to the peculiar nature of the cooking (with no females allowed on board and you're now being catered to by a guy who never really had to learn to cook since he had a female doing that for him all his life)
Not to be missed.
