DIVING IN THE MALDIVES
If you are into macro, Maldives is not for you. Big fish are the stars of the show here – white and black tip sharks, nurse sharks, gray reef sharks, whale sharks (though we didn’t see any), manta and eagle rays, tuna and giant trevally. A lot of the diving is deep (80 – 95’) and the currents are often stiff. A reef hook is mandatory.
There are no coral reefs as we know them in the Maldives. Maldives is a series of 26 atolls; formed by the collapse of volcanos. That said, some very fine soft and hard corals have grown on a few of the sites we dove. One site in particular had table corals as far as the eye could see, growing in rows, as if planted there by a farmer.
Many of the dives involved hooking into a rock at depth and watching the shark show swim by. They did not disappoint. There were sharks on nearly every dive. One very memorable dive at Alimatha Jetty brought us to a site where nurse sharks come to lay in the sand and wriggle around like puppy dogs to clean their bodies in the sand. There were too many nurse sharks to count and they would come very close to us as we were hooked in to watch them.
Fish were plentiful. Lots of banner fish, Moorish idols, parrot fish, butterfly fish, surgeonfish, sweepers, oriental sweetlips, wrasses, including Napoleon wrasse, chromies, damsels, anthias, pufferfish and many more.
Also plentiful were moray eels. We saw them on nearly every dive, many variations – black spotted, black cheeked (aggressive little bugger who bit one of our friends), white-eyed, and giant eels.
Another very memorable dive was at the Fish Factory – a tuna processing plant that dumps the heads and carcasses of the tuna into the sea, which attracts more kinds of fish than you can imagine, It was there we saw many, many eels – sometimes five in one hole together. It was also there that we were treated to a sighting of a guitar shark.
If you are into sharks this is definitely the place for you. Just know that the diving will be deep and the currents will be strong at times.
Ginny DeMattei
