Maldives Jan 1-8 Trip Report

[demonic_death]

Hi everyone,

I just got back from the Maldives last week but went somewhere else before heading home. Anyway, I was aboard the Baani Explorer on the said dates.

I spent my first night in the Maldives in Villingli View Inn, having flown from Singapore the night before. The Inn was small and tidy. They serve good breakfast, too.

I was on the boat the next day. First of all, the crew of the Baani was very professional. Their chef served delicious international cuisine. We even had steak cooked medium rare one night( sorry to those who only got fish there ).

The divemasters Hussen and Tipe were professional guides and they made sure
everyone was ok underwater. They mixed novice divers with
advanced ones, but advanced divers such as myself didn't really notice it as the DMs
were the ones who took care of them.

The dives ... some were good dives, some weren't. We had some strong current drift
dives particularly in the Embudhoo Xpress, but the rest were mostly calm seas.

The corals were slowly recovering from the bleaching, but some sites such as the manta points still didn't have much coral.

Our dives were concentrated only on Ari Atoll, North Male and South Male Atoll. I am
not sure if the other atolls have better sites, though. The bad part is that there are
a lot of boats so most of the time, there would be 6 or more dive groups in just one
site. Not the Baani's fault, though.

Overall, Maldives diving is ok. It did not overly impress me, as I come from the Philippines and do much diving here. But it wasn't bad either.

Feel free to send me a PM if you have any questions.

Dive Safe everyone!

 

[tazzmeyer]

Nice trip report.
I also have been diving on the Baani two Christmases ago. Hussen was having a bad week when we were there and we had to abort two dives because they missed the sites. However, to be fair they had glowing reports and raves on other trips.
What suprised me about doing a liveaboard in Maldives is that they ankor the boats at night so this really limits the amount of accessible sites - in GBR for instance you travel all night to get to the best sites. It sounds like you did exactly the same dive sites as we did.
We had a fabulous experience at Manta Point - true enough that the corals were pretty spotty but the Mantas put on an amazing show...huge graceful underwater UFO's coming in for a cleaning...took my breath away.
We had the chance to dive the Maldives in March previous to this trip and had much better dives just jumping on a dive boat at our resort (Full Moon). We had some spectacular wall drift dives. There are a couple of resorts that have their own house reefs (Full Moon is not one of them) so I am wondering if it just wouldn't be better to stay at these places instead of doing a liveaboard in the Maldives.....

Cheers!

 

[demonic_death]

Hi Taz,

We also did a couple of house reefs, such as the Kurumba and Paradise resort house reefs. We also did HP reef and banana reef.

Which resort house reefs did you dive from?