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> travel > travel features > maldives special | appeared in DIVER May 2004 | ||||||||
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Intro | Liveaboards | Coral | Wrecks | Currents |
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"I'LL NEVER FORGET THE SIGHT OF YOU ROCK-CLIMBING," laughed William, my lawyer-buddy from Lisbon. "You were climbing that wall with your hook with such a determined look on your face!" We were safely back aboard the dhoni and heading for our mothership, Sea Spirit. We had been diving in a channel, or kandu, near Lankanfinolhu, which is otherwise known as Paradise Island, in the south of North Male Atoll. It had been one of the last dives of an entertaining week. Currents had been rolling in relentlessly from the north-east over thousands of miles of open ocean until checked by this side of the Maldivian archipelago. We had expected a roller-coaster ride, and had not been disappointed. It can be quite relaxing to let the wall of the channel roll endlessly by as you go with the flow. But stop to photograph something and you find yourself working very hard. It didn't help that my other buddy, Rob, kept dragging me down to 40m to see something he felt I shouldn't miss. I had clocked up lots of deco-stop time (Rob had an old bendy computer that didn't seem to care) and my air was getting low. But still we helter-skeltered along. Just when you think you should drift calmly out into the blue for 15 minutes at 6m, you realise that the sea above is exploding with action. I was at the confluence of two currents. One was the one we had been riding but now a second was pouring over the top of the reef and into the depths. My exhaled air spiralled off in many directions. Air from other divers produced a blizzard of small bubbles in deep water. Talk about confused water! That's where the rock-climbing came in. I decided to use my reef-hook to pick my way up the reef wall and onto the top. The current would batter me but I would be able to tie myself on safely in the shallows and expend as little effort as possible. Damn cameras and those last vital shots! I hate it when my air-integrated computer says I have less air-time left than I have stops to do. Thank goodness manufacturers always build in a safety margin for the less-disciplined, and thank goodness I have the presence of mind to reduce my breathing rate accordingly. Computer finally cleared, I crawled up near where the water was ripping over the shallows and let go, bobbing to the surface on a fully inflated wing and a short prayer. I put up my yellow flag and, once clear of the area of extreme choppiness, the dhoni was brought to wallow alongside. Our previous dive had been at Embudhu Express. "I remember it clearly," I had told our dive-guide Jason. It had been on my first trip to the Maldives more than 10 years before. "I wouldn't give you tuppence for warm tropical diving," a bumptious BSAC demi-god had told me shortly before that first visit, when I had mentioned my impending trip. "It's like diving in an aquarium. Too easy!" No-one had warned me that the aquarium was on the back of a Kawasaki going flat-out round Hard Knot Pass. "I remember Embudhu Express," I continued. "I know the plan. I go down, fight my way to the middle of the channel where the grey reef sharks hover over the edge of the abyss, get low on air, let go and get tossed through a washing-machine, all the time worrying that the boat doesn't have a hope in hell of finding me when I finally bob up with the needle of my pressure-gauge banging on its end-stop." It was OK, of course. The boat was waiting because these Maldivians live all their lives on the water. They know the currents like city boys know streets, but Embudhu Express lived up to the memory, even if my air-supply management has improved. In mid-channel a group of whitetip reef sharks were surfing on the inward rush of water. I made my way along the front edge of the channel lip with my air bubbles streaming away from me, pushing the sharks away too. I could imagine fellow-divers cursing my enterprise (or folly), and let go to be swept into the hurly-burly of the channel. In the shallows, I met a small green turtle. It was doing much better than the one I had seen recently in a similar flow at Angaga Thila, caught on a table coral by the skin of its neck. That one had looked uncomfortable but seemed resigned to its fate. I freed it and, like Androcles, found that I had a new best friend. It's amazing that turtles normally handle currents so well. This second one was dodging about in the lee of a few big coral boulders, almost oblivious to the force that sent me tumbling helplessly onwards. Another place with almost impossible currents is Girifushi Thila or HP Reef, which is presumably named not after the brown sauce but "high power". A riot of colourful soft corals, seafans and black coral trees relish the oxygen and nutrients that are delivered in a never-ending surge. This sort of place renders colourful photographs, but although they look as if they were taken in an aquarium, nothing could be further from the truth. You can't tell that the photographer is braced against the rocks, his camera straining in his arms and mask threatening to be dragged from his face. Currents can be very strong in January, but earlier on the trip we had mostly dived the thilas, or little reefs, of Ari Atoll, where the flow was more manageable. At Mushimasmigili, sometimes called Fish-Head, we watched the grey reef sharks cruising at the current point while, in a strange exchange of roles, a big super-male Napoleon wrasse watched the show alongside us. Later, on a shallower part of the reef, Rob and I quietly fed bits of red sponge to a passive green turtle while its mate amused the other divers. At the southern point of the atoll, near Rangali island, the manta rays put on a matinee. They never ceased to entertain us as they performed their ritualistic ballet over cleaning stations of industrious tiny fish. I try to visit Rangali every year, and noted that masses of new-growing table corals indicate an early recovery of the hard types. That's the advantage of a liveaboard. You can cover a large area and no two dives are the same. It makes getting out of bed at first light something to anticipate. Every dive was full with colour and quantity. I enjoyed the huddles of oriental sweetlips in their striped pyjamas, outclassing their cousins the spotted sweetlips with the audacity of their garb. Bright red blue-lined squirrelfish loiter, thinking they're unseen, in every shadowy overhang, while even redder soldierfish stay well inside the caverns. Indian Ocean bannerfish huddle against a coral outcrop in the hope of not being noticed. A large saddleback coral grouper hunts for smaller fish, looking slightly embarrassed in its Wolver-hampton Wanderers football-jersey colours. Blue-lined yellow snapper school in hundreds, bedazzling the reef in great swathes of golden light reflected from their scales. I revel in insinuating myself among them until lost from sight to other divers. I try the same trick with glittering crowds of Bengal and five-lined snapper. We even had some dives with virtually no current at all. I enjoyed photographing the jolly giant frogfish on the wreck of a small supply boat at Kudagiri. Though about 30cm long it was tough to see, let alone photograph, but I struck lucky when I returned after the other divers had departed, and found that it had strolled into the open. Some of the most spectacular encounters happened when we were not scuba-diving at all. The southern edge of Ari Atoll, near Rangali, seems to offer the perfect conditions for juvenile whale sharks. We often encountered solitary specimens in the shallow waters of the reef-top as we made our way back from a dive, and it was a great opportunity to snorkel with them. These babies will grow to 18m long, but we saw only tiddlers of 4-6m. The crew of Sea Spirit seem to make it a matter of honour to ensure that each safari week is highlighted by these encounters and when in a likely area, travelling back in the dhoni, they would scan the water for tell-tale shadows. We counted seven animals in our week aboard. |
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