Diving in Kenya

[Goose75]

I'm looking for some good advice on diving in Kenya. We have been putting together a dive & safari trip for 2007. We've planned for January for good dive conditions. The travel agent has been steering us towards the South Coast of Mombasa. We were given quotes that have 2 dives a day and no night dives. The reason given for no night dives were "security reasons". Friends in country have mentioned some recent pirate activity that may be the cause for the security part. We are looking for some insider insight into two questions:

-Is two dives a day typical for Kenya? Should we expect to get more?

-Is the South Coast of Mombasa the best place in Kenya for us to go?

We are a group of divers that prefer diving to relaxing on the beaches. We will have about four days, after which we will be going to safari. Plans are still flexible at this point within our budget and vacation time. I've read through several other links on Kenya and found links to operators I will be checking out.

 

[Rick Murchison]

There are at least two recent threads on Kenya diving...
A search on "Kenya" might be useful.
Rick

 

[Christian]

Goose,

You might want to check out the possibilities to go to Pemba Island, Tanzania, which has the best diving in the area. It is located in the Pemba channel, not far from Mombasa. It is possible to take a ferry from mombasa to pemba - don't know the exact distance, but I would be very surprised if it took more than a couple of hours. You should be able to arrange visas for Tanzania on location. Otherwise it's simple to arrange that before you go.

I was there in november and we had excellent diving. Lots of fish, very good spieces diversity. Very strong currents. Coral was surprisingly good taking in that most places in the central and western indian ocean was severely struck by the el nino 1998. Viz. was stunning with lows of 20 metres (60 ft) and highs of 50 metres (150 ft). No sharks, which was a bit surprising, but schooling barracuda (three different spices), jacks, turtles, wahoo, schooling batfish, tuna, moray eels, huge groupers of different spieces, napoleon wrasse, a big cowtail ray, big crocodile fish and then lots and lots of other stuff. Most dive sites are walls going down to big depths.

All in all very good diving.

We stayed at manta reef lodge (www.mantareeflodge.com) which was a very nice place with good food and an absolute fantastic location next to a rain forest reserve on a deserted beach. There are two or three others to chose from on the whole island, but MRL seemed to be the best value to us. I know that the owner of MRL lives in Mombasa, Kenya and that he also own a resort in Shimoni, kenya. I know he organizes boat transport from mombasa to pemba for guests.

They try to plan as many dives as the guests wish, but normally there are two planned each day - you want to dive on an incoming tide and get the clean blue water from the pemba channel. The tide turns every six hours which means that you have favorable conditions about half of the day. And there the boattransport to the sites are 20 minutes-1.5 hours away. There are a house reef, which you off corse can dive whenever you like, but it's not very exciting compared to the real sites. We did three dives on a couple of days. There's a liveaboard also called the Jambo. Normally they do 6 day trips around the island, but perhaps it is possible to jump on and join for only four days as all diving is close to shore? They do 3-4 dives/day.

/good luck

 

[Goose75]

Thanks for the information. I've been going through links Rick left in earlier posts and Christian's information explains why 2 dives are common listing. How does diving in Watamu compare to Diani/Mombasa?

 

[Seadeuce]

It is a while since I did Kenya and Pemba. Mombasa diving, usually at Nyali beach, is only fair. Shimoni to the south is much better, as is Watamu.
But Pemba and Zanzibar would be better again, as the previous poster has said.
Don't make the same mistake as I did. I went on a three-day safari to Tsavo and Amboseli. Two would have been plenty. You see the same sights going and coming, and I am a serious animal lover. Wasted a good diving day I did.
And the drivers of those minibuses can be less than qualified ...


Enjoy,

Seadeuce

 

[Christian]

Goose

Please note that there is quite some difference between diving near the Kenya mainland and out on the Tanzanian islands. And there's a big difference between Zanzibar/Mafia and Pemba Island.

Pemba is situated in very deep water, in the middle of the Pemba channel, and have walls that plunge straight down into the abyss, several hundred metres. Zanzibar and Mafia sits on the continental shelf and maximum depths around these two islands are 40-50 metres. This makes the diving differ, even though the islands are only a few hours apart with boat.

If you're not able to make it to Pemba, I would check out Shimoni as a previous poster wrote as an alternative. It is the same guy who owns the Shimoni reef lodge and the Manta Reef Lodge on Pemba Island. They supposedly have the best diving on the Kenyan mainland next door.

good luck

christian

 

[Goose75]

Thanks for the inputs. I'll be checking into these.