Simondmd
New
Just back from ten days family trip. The 'kids' (18 and 16 years) did their SSI Open Water and then we all did several dive days starting on the house reef and ending at the excellent Fish Head dive site. The dive school is called 'Joy Dive' and has a great set up with the calm lagoon on one side of its building and the house reef on the other. The kids loved it, and it was fabulous all then diving together. The house reef corals are all fairly bleached, but there is plenty of life and we spent many wonderful hours snorkelling when not diving; eagle ray, cow tailed stingray, sharks everywhere (huge nurse, black tip, white tip), turtle, porcupine, moray (my daughter spotted an exquisite little 'snowflake moray' (see image below), wonderful shoals of sweet lips, red toothed triggerfish and and and...
For beautiful fields of coral we went a short distance by boat to Madi Tila reef (image below). This is also a well known manta ray spot where we are told they will swim around you in the sandy shallows. Three manta were spotted in deeper waters but none crossed our path during the dive, but the coral was in great condition and once we'd 'let go' of the hope of seeing mantas it was fabulous.
Fish Head was the red letter dive; a mountain top 9m down with a decent current running over it. Sometimes you hook onto the reef, but we were able to hold position ok and watch the show of sharks and shoals in hunting mode - every now and again a shoal would split and accelerate as predators made their lunges. We came across plenty of turtle. Had a nice chat with a very inquisitive batfish during our safety stop.
I hope we go back and try some other part of the Maldives before too long. Oh, and loved the seaplane hops from Male to the resort.
For beautiful fields of coral we went a short distance by boat to Madi Tila reef (image below). This is also a well known manta ray spot where we are told they will swim around you in the sandy shallows. Three manta were spotted in deeper waters but none crossed our path during the dive, but the coral was in great condition and once we'd 'let go' of the hope of seeing mantas it was fabulous.
Fish Head was the red letter dive; a mountain top 9m down with a decent current running over it. Sometimes you hook onto the reef, but we were able to hold position ok and watch the show of sharks and shoals in hunting mode - every now and again a shoal would split and accelerate as predators made their lunges. We came across plenty of turtle. Had a nice chat with a very inquisitive batfish during our safety stop.
I hope we go back and try some other part of the Maldives before too long. Oh, and loved the seaplane hops from Male to the resort.
