The SouthWest Monsoon season runs May~October. This is about the only time it rains there. It can get a bit rough, but smart liveabaords will avoid this for a large part~ ducking around and behind the hundreds of atolls which constitute this wonderful diving opportunity. Southern Atolls do get most of the rain.
The East Monsoon Runs from December thru April. It is dry and the seas are calmer.
The North Atolls have a greater fluctuation in air temp, but the hottest months center around April, coldest just a few months before in December. It is considered to be the best time to enjoy the above water climate, December through April, but
each season brings different underwater delights.
Here is a general reference page that you may find interesting
Maldives Weather Explained
Remember- these 1100 small islands that constitute a nation are far flung and spread out. Your arrival in Male may well be in pre-dawn hours and you may not fully understand that you have flown to
an island that is exclusively the airport.
From this airport, you may be placed on a water taxi that could take you to Male (the city on the island next door) or it might take you to a waiting float plane aircraft. You may, alternatively, be placed in a "fast boat" (cigarette boat) and zoomed out to meet up with a liveaboard or to a distant atoll's resort. In that it is so far flung,
you will hear from many (equally spread out) dive operators and liveaboard companies that are quite assured that they are nearest to the best diving.
It's a little different. Some of the liveaboards have great variations into the edibility of food as women are not part of the crew. On land, women handle the cooking. See where I'm headed with this?
Bring a safety sausage with 20' of line secured to it. If you do not know how to deploy it from depth while offgassing, take this as a life-lesson opportunity to acquire that much needed skill. Diving is done from smaller boats known as Dhoni's- they have the noisy compressor and such. They request that at the end of your dive, that you stay at 15fsw and blow bubbles until the Dhoni works its way, in a logical progression, towards you. At that time, they ask that you then swim out from the reef so that they can pick you up. If you surface and hug your SMB, they view it as somewhat of a sign of distress (you must be OOA, right?) so they will often disrupt the orderly process of plucking out divers in an orderly fashion. Learn the process.
Sometimes you can leave gear on board the Dhoni as you go to the main boat for dinner or an overnight, sometimes they will direct you to take it off as they will not be servicing you the next dive, The point is- do not "secrete" your gear under the seats without first asking. If you leave it out in plain sight, they will remove it and place it aboard your mothership.
There are some unusual and large liveaboards that are in Maldives, there are some simple and small boats as well. I have been aboard one that held 85 Japanese divers... and me. And a few other ships, as well.
A lot of Maldive's traditional tourist flow became disenchanted around 1998 due to extensive coral bleaching. This was kind of ridiculous since you really never went there for the Coral anyway. That bleaching lead to a boom in larger creatures as the Corals became covered with goo that tasty little animals like to feed upon. You will see what you will see, but just have an open mind, move intelligently to maximize bottom time- and keep looking out into the blue. It has since rebounded to a great degree, but we still see large dumps of boat trash on the ocean floor and spiderwebs of 90# monofilament lacing the reefs.
I highly recommend a dive trip to the Maldives. For most SCUBABoard readers, it involves flying from North America to London, then South... waaaaay South from there. I fly Emirates Air so we do have a 3 hour layover in Dubai. Let your eyes pop at the commerce at the duty free shops~ even at 3 a.m.
If I drilled a hole through the Earth from Chicago, Male is close enough to where I would pop out. Try it yourself:
Dig a Hole through the Earth
