I arrived back from the most amazing and wonderful Maldives last night after a fantastic adventure in trying first of all locate, and then hopefully too dive with Manta Rays. The Maldives are truly the jewel of the Indian Ocean, a set of coral atolls that are unbelievabley beautiful and contain some of the best marine wildlife in the world.
This was our island where we based ourselves for our trip.....a tiny isolated island you could walk the entirety within 10 minutes.
Some of the dives where very technically challenging, really hard work as where the islands are dotted about, the Indian Ocean is forced through channels between the Islands. These channels in many cases are deep, but the main problem are the currents, these can only be described as extremely severe. Face the current at the wrong angle and it will rip the mask from your face and the reg from your mouth, sometimes we found ourselves just being blown around like washing on a clothes line in a tornado.
However, for three weeks anytime between September and the first week of October these currents bring in clouds of plankton which gives us, as divers both good, and bad problems. The good is that it attracts the Manta Rays (that's if you can find them) that come in from the deeper open ocean to feed on the plankton, and the bad is that this makes the visability of the water terrible. I mean really terrible, just 4 metres max at 35 metres ! Mixed with the currents, the two make it virtually impossible to get quality pictures, (the pictures come out like your taking them in a blizzard as the plankton gets in front of the lens) and the current gives you in most cases a single chance to get a picture before you are blown further down the reef.
Here are just a few below, I will post more and tell you about the weeks adventures when I have caught up with everything at work and at home.
These are Black Tip Sharks hunting a large school of sardines. The sharks, about a dozen of them gathered every morning and evening, forcing the sardines into the shallow waters and then charge into them to catch them. This picture was taken from the roof of my little room I rented taken as I had my morning coffee. I use to get up at 6am every morning and snorkel with the sharks to watch them hunt.
The heron would also get in on the action......
Beautiful colours and beautiful fish.....
One of favourites to watch are the shy and somestimes aggresive Clown Fish....Nemo! They try and hide in the stinging anemone and if they have young they will come out and stand their ground after a while, chasing you off and pecking at your mask. (Check out the baby Clown fish the adult is trying to protect at the bottom of the picture, you can just see it's tiny face poking out to see if I am still here !)
Was I lucky enough to find the Manta's ?.......................
A long story and lots of hard work tracking with some local help......but......
Just a mere 8 metres (25 foot) from wing to wing......
Hope you enjoyed the pics.....I will post some more over the week.
Pacific State 808
