2. Sharks and currents - from the possibly mythical to the very real!

Thursday

The trip continues with 3-4 dives a day, which start with a 6.15 wake up call then tend to follow the routine of dive, get fed, little rest for reading (frequently turns into accidental nap) and repeat!

Yesterday we went searching for whale sharks … we didn’t see one so the elusive - maybe mythical? - creatures remain on my bucket list. They’re the biggest fish in the ocean, reaching up to 18m length and for many people, one of the most sought after encounters. Unfortunately, this means they have become quite the tourist attraction and in places where they are common, which includes the Maldives, they form part of the tourist industry - much of which seems to encourage dreadful practices that involving searching them out, crowding them with speed boats who drop snorklers in virtually on top of them and do who knows what damage to the marine life and environment. The dive boats aren’t much better - they just move a bit slower. Our morning spent chugging about trying to find one, which we would then had the option of snorkelling with was not one I felt comfortable with. Once the hunt was over, without a siting - which I was secretly relieved about, we headed to where one had been seen in the area and did a ‘finger’s crossed’ dive in the hope that one might cruise by.

That dive, in amongst the circus of speedboats and hoards of snorkelers and absolute chaos started with the instruction that when we jumped off the boat to dive, it was with a negative entry. This means that rather than jump (giant stride) off the boat with a jacket full of lovely floaty air, bob on the surface then descend once everyone is ready, you empty all the air out of your jacket pre-jump, jump with the air valve open to let any remaining air out on contact with the water and sink immediately down to around 5m to collect together as a group at depth. This is because it wasn’t safe on the surface to hang around because of the speed boats and propellers whizzing about in their attempts to decapitate unsuspecting divers - or one of the many life-jacketed, totally unable to swim Asian tourists. Once we were down, we finned like absolute crazy - like humans in the wrong world - to get through some current to see if we could catch up with or see the whale shark. It was a significant cardio workout …but no whale shark. Once we stopped, we floated along the reef hoping for a chance encounter. Once our guide starting pointing out tiny warty sea slugs and a baby angel fish then spent some time with his fin off & videoing the tiny cleaner wrasse fish giving a little pedicure, I knew we’d stopped hoping for the whale shark. We did however, get rewarded with a beautiful manta ray emerging over the reef and gliding right over the top of our heads!

The afternoon dive was a lovely wreck dive with all sorts of pretties and then as well as the boat snack station, we also got transported to a little local island for a beach BBQ to round of the day so it was all still excellent despite the lack of whale sharks!

Sadly, some of the reef in the Maldives is really showing the impact of warming sea temps and global warming … parts of it are utterly, unrecoverable dead and desolate. Heartbreakingly so. Some dives also seems to include a lot of time searching out a particular species or sought after fish. One dive, this included looking a ‘ghost pipe fish’. It’s a fish that’s very hard to spot because it looks like a leaf. When they find it, everyone is terribly excited by the leaf-looking fish and there was even ana amount of high-fiving and water dancing to celebrate. I bobbed about and dutifully took a photo of the leaf fish and other pretties I found along the way! Some of it though is still incredibly beautiful and teaming with life. Today’s morning dive was to a thriving, vibrant pinnacle that offered grey reef sharks in the blue, hunting trevally and dog tooth tuna and all kinds of pretty fish and schooling blue striped snappers (which are bright yellow fish!) around the pinnacles. Laura attempted to take my photos with them - some attempts were more successful than others. …

My boat mates are a nice mix of friendly and interesting people. Elke, the shark expert lady, gives us a presentation each evening so we learn about the sharks and rays we’ve seen, how to identify them, how to recognise their behaviours and some of the research and information about them. There’s a gang who know each other from a dive club back home, to which it appears that the male members entry requirements are to be middle-aged, bald and slightly beer-bellied so they are allowed to join. They obviously all talk to each other at volumes no less than ‘shout’ and have humour that ranges from ‘teenage boy’ to ‘I’m the big-bollocks and put downs of each others’. The ladies are all, of course, much more civilised and lovely! They are a really nice group and very welcoming and kind though and have all been excellent to me and looked after me. There is an Irish chap called Paddy who seems lovely but has such a thick accent, I struggle to understand him at all. He also talks at amplified volume but all I seem to be able to make out is ‘blah blah blah, fucking blah, blah blah boat, you know’. I’ve taken to nodding and laughing because he’s most excellent but entirely incomprehensible!

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Friday:

The trip has gone on in the same cycle although there has been one or two slight hiccups along the way. Prior to this section, I will give spoiler alerts to assure you that everyone survived all dives and there were no major incidents….

Last night, we did a second night dive, which since the brief didn’t entirely reflect what actually happened, I’m not sure we were fully prepared for. We went in at sunset, down to some rocks near one of the resort jetties (they must be thrilled at paying thousands for a mega fancy hut on sticks Maldivian paradise room only to find boards of noisy boats and divers turning up throughout the day and night!). As instructed by our guide, we hooked onto some rocks (as there was a bit of current and you needed to pin yourself down) then knelt in sand and found a spot. My group was great until all the other groups arrived and apparently, we all had to be within a very small area so there was much bashing into each other, accidentally kicking in the face with fins and a bit of a circus. Then the guides started inserting chum into rocks around us and in swept the nurse sharks - who are used to divers so continue their hunt for food uninhibited by the daft humans around them. This does mean that if you’re in their way, they just barge and bump around you to get to what they want.

By the time darkness had fallen, I’d had some fin kicks to the face and been crashed by a couple of tanks, ended up pinned right into a tiny spot with rocks on one side and too many people on the other side, I was beginning not to feel comfortable. Cheryl, the diver next to me’s, reef hook pinged off and caught my air hose and whipped that out my mouth as she floated up, unattached to the rocks. Fortunately, that actually doesn’t panic me although I was mightily annoyed. I grabbed her hook to keep her anchored, retrieved my hose from it and stuck it back into my mouth then spent a minute of two with a Cheryl shaped helium balloon floating above me. She was apparently unwilling or unable to right her self or put any effort into kicking back down to the retrieve her hook and get re-anchored, or perhaps just thought I was a handy rock. A guide came and took her hook from me then reattached her to save me the bother!

After that and then becoming far more intimate with a twisting and burrowing bloody massive nurse shark and being totally unable to get out of its way, I decided I was done and this dive was not for me. I signalled to Darren, my buddy, and we unhooked and swam away a little. Our guide came to check what the problem was and I signalled to abort the dive. He attempted to calm me, presumably with the hope that I’d rejoin the group. I signalled with what I felt was full clarity that by now I was calm, but that I was aborting and going back to the boat. He could either come with me or I’d shoot my SMB (surface marker buoy) and go anyway. I hate doing the SMB thing so to have got to that point, it was serious! He got the message and off we swam, in pitch black dark water back (another of my not entirely happy situations!) to where the boat could come and get us. Once aboard, I had a big cry and a tiny sweary rant about total lack of properly organisation, clarity or safety of the dive then I went and sulked upstairs. It seems as more and more people returned, they too were far from thrilled and a couple of other injuries had been sustained. We weren’t in any real danger - but all the potential risks that could cause an incident had not been mitigated and that was not ok. There were so many things wrong with that dive and the situation some of us ended up in was where I reach my limit.

Once back on the big boat, we all showered and changed and de-briefed over dinner. It was another one of the group’s birthdays so there was cake for pudding, which I had with a delicious cup of tea & all was right again with the world!

This morning, we had two ‘channel’ dives. This is where the ocean current runs along the side of a wall of a kind of underground island rising from the depths. Then through the middle of the island, there is a channel, running perpendicular to the ocean wall. When currents are running, the sharks and big fish gather in the channel entrance to feed and catch prey. For the first dive, the current was mild, we dropped into the blue over the ocean and dropped down to the channel mouth where we swam along the ridge from the ocean into the channel in incredible, clear visibility and watched the sharks and rays cruise by. Current was so mild, we didn’t even need reef hooks to hook on! Laura and I had plenty of air so after everyone else surfaced, we had a peaceful float down the channel, watching the world go by, watching the surface where there was apparently a torrential rain storm - it just looks pretty and makes a slightly weird noise when viewed from below - and apparently a miniature and brief tornado the others watched at the surface!

The second dive, we returned to the channel we’d done the day before with lots of lovely sharkies. The guides checked before the dive and classified a ‘medium’ current so in we went directly over the ridge of the wall and channel entrance….. by the time we’d dropped to abound 15m, it became clear that the current was far from medium but was in facts ‘mega fucking whooshingly strong current’. The idea was to swim down to the ridge and hook on but there was no way anyone in normal dive fins could do that. I thought my group were ahead of me and realised quickly that I wouldn’t be able to swim to them so dropped straight to the channel floor and hooked on then crawled and pulled my self hook … hand … hook … hand along the bottom until I got the ridge but only found Melvin, who’d also been dragging himself along the sea bed with me. It was just Melvin and me from my group and a couple of random stragglers from other groups. Everyone else, it seemed had been swept back down the channel, aborted the dive, resurfaced or made their way back to the boat. Melvin and I had both lost our buddies and our guide but another guide was there and signalled us to stay with him.

We hooked onto the edge of the ridge that we’d fought so gallantly to get to and were absolutely blasted by the current streaming over it. It was the kind that makes your skin pulse and vibrate, tries to take your mask off your face and pushes the button on your regulator to purge it. You can’t film it to show the intensity of the current although people’s bubbles were just streaming out behind them, perpendicular to the seabed and not upwards as they usually go. It was a current so strong that it became a genuine effort to hold my own head up, looking forward, and keep it from apparently just being blasted off my neck! You couldn’t turn sideways for a bit of respite as it would have likely taken your mask off! Melvin, who has done over 5000 dives says it was in the top 3 currents he’s ever been in so I felt quite proud that I managed it without a second abort within 24 hours! We were at max safe depth for the air mix we had (oxygen enriched nitrogen with a 32% oxygen concentration) so couldn’t stay too long before we reached our depth time limits. When it was time to unhook, we all waited and did it together and let go and absolutely flew and tumbled off the ridge and into and along the channel. It eased a little as we flew further in, shallowed up, did a safety stop at 5m depth to let the nitrogen dissipate, and made it back to the boat to commence another debrief to find out what had happened to everyone and collect back up. All accounted for and back aboard, we headed back again for a very well deserved lunch and afternoon nap before the final, much easier, dive to see another wreck, in minimal current and very little exertion required, thank goodness!

The weekend:

Our final diving day dawned with the usual 6.15 wake up call and two morning dives which were to be just off the harbour of the main city island, where for years, fisherman have prepared their catch and dumped the fish waste, innards and heads/tails into the ocean just before they sail into the port. As a result, the ocean dwellers have learnt that it’s a good place to hang out as there is an ample supply of easy dinner dropped into the sea at regular intervals. The tourist industry has picked up on this and dive operations have learnt that if they take a bucket of fish entrails diving with them, it attracts the fish and divers who like to watch. It’s officially a bated dive - and there is a lot of controversy and disagreement in the dive world about whether bated dives should go on. Some say yes and go and see, some say no as they feel it’s not the natural rhythm for the sharks and might disrupt their feeding patterns and diet and should not go on. Everyone on the boat had the choice and several opted not to dive. I decided to take advice from the shark expert who was diving with us, who’s a doctor in marine biology. She listened to the info and how it’s done (and is reassured that the sharks are not being hand fed or touched etc) and decided to dive … so I did too!

We had a dive brief that included all the reminders on how it would work, how to dive with sharks and general safety briefing as well as behaviours …. Essentially the rules are that how you usually position yourself and behave when diving (horizontal, arms still in front of you and knees bent with fins out behind (perfect trim - body position) is not the way for shark diving. When shark diving, you don’t stay at surface for and don’t ‘flap’ or splash (or in any way behave or make the noises that an injured seal (yummy shark dinner) might make). You stay calm (more easily said then done!), descend quickly and hang vertically in the water. This is so you look big - and less of an easy target for shark dinner. You don’t flap or ever swim away in panic (because that’s what prey do). You hang, look big and keep eye contact with the sharks - spin and turn carefully if they approach to check you out so you show you’re a big, unappetising sea creature who doesn’t present an easy blind spot for attack and isn’t prey! Simples ….. Our dive brief also extended to the expected routes curious sharks might making on scenting the bait bucket and how they might check out the area, where divers should stay and ‘safe’ spots ….

Fully briefed and ready, we descended for two shark dives. The good news is, everything went to plan, no one was eaten and we all returned in one piece to the boat. During the dives, we saw masses of grey reefs and spinner sharks and also a guitar shark and lemon sharks. There was also an abundance of a number of massive sting ray species and so many reef fish, you couldn’t actually see the bate bucket at times. There were a few lovely puffers who floated about (rather bravely I think!) to keep me safe and also some Titan trigger monsters but given the abundance of apex predators who were circling, they stayed in line and behaved very well!

Once the diving was complete, we spent a restful afternoon on the boat with ‘the big dry’ underway and dive gear hung from every available railing and surface as 20 of us dried all our kit, had happy hour and then last dinner. This morning, it was a horribly early wake up and departure times from the boat of 7.15am where we deposited back into port. I’ve got a day now, back in my blissful sea view room to relax, off-gas and drink tea back on land where the floor doesn’t move anymore but my body feels like it’s constantly swaying a bit after a week at sea! Early morning flight and big old travel back to the UK tomorrow!