Cybercaptain: Maldives

Showing posts with label Maldives. Show all posts

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Diving Furana South

My diving days are soon over for awhile as I'm due to return back to Indian Empress in a few days. This morning decided to revisit the Furana south site and we started well inside the Kudakalhi Channel as the current was slightly outflowing. Earlier diveboats had tied a white canister to the reef as a marker so we tied up there and geared up. Down we went just South of the Full Moon Maldives resorts lagoon and started heading East.

BA chart 3323

After awhile at 15m depth we came to a huge cave that had a swimthrough. I went inside to have a look and there were huge groupers hunkering inside. Of course my flash decided to give up the contract when I was needing it the most and after some fiddling I got it to flash again. The sound inside the cave was awesome, one could hear the reverberating noise of waves crashing onto the atoll.

Madagascar butterflyfish

Cave dwelling grouper

Cave dwelling grouper, see the friend behind

After a few shots I swam out to the other side of the swimthrough. There were more groupers and a shy Stingray that went straight for the bottom once he saw us coming. I also got a few shots of a 2m Giant Moray that was wrapped around the rocks in front of the cave.

Divebuddy Dubey

White spotted grouper

Yellowfin surgeonfish (top) & Harlequin sweetlips (bottom)

Further down the Channel we came into another overhang/ cave kind of thing and I got some more shots of big fish cowering inside the darkness. After this it was pretty much a vertical wall dive with coral becoming more scarce due to us approaching the edge of the atoll and the Ocean. Now we were down to our last 50bars and we did our ascent, we had reached the corner of Furana South.

Blue-faced angelfish

Feather stars on a Fan coral

Kashmir snapper

Black-spotted puffer

Imperial angelfish and Banded shrimp om right

Regal angelfish

Lionfish

Grouper

Raccoon butterflyfish

Maldive anemonefish

Giant moray

Midnight snapper

White-spotted grouper

Redmouth grouper (below) and Vanikoro sweeper (right), Whitetip soldierfish (top left)

Klein's butterflyfish and Threespot angelfish

Threespot angelfish

Lobster

Titan triggerfish

Bicolour cleaner wrasse

Gold striped emperor

Big eye bream (top) & Philippine damselfish (bottom)

Giant moray

Slender grouper

Divided wrasse

Brown-blotched sandperch

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Diving reef West of Aarah Island

For this mornings dive we chose to go to an unnamed reef West of the Aarah Island. There are 2 reefs next to each other and in between there is a narrow channel. Once you get there on the spot you realize the channel is not so narrow, it is rather several hundred meters wide.

BA chart 3323

Google earth

The reef that was our target has on the west side an opening inside the lagoon and it was not very shallow either. We went in the channel to the opening to the lagoon to test the waters and discovered a South going current so we decided to drift south and keep to the south of the reef.

Philippine damselfish

Axilspot hogfish, juvenile

In we went and the dive started. The bottom was mostly sand here and the current grabbed us and we were gently floating by the reef in a Southerly direction. After awhile the corals became more plentiful and fish was more but not really ever abundant. The visibility was good but started to deteriorate once we got out of the channel current.

Humbug dascyllus

Cardinaldish (?)

After awhile the current more or less subsided as we were in the lee of the reef and the visibility got worse as the current was pushing sand off the reef and it was almost like snowing. Also the corals got less and less and were more of the dead variety although there was still living patches and fish around. I saw a turtle shortly but he swam further away so was not able to make an acquaintance.

Weird red fish I saw only when I looked at the picture afterwards

Blue-green chromis

The dive was not an impressive one for an experienced diver but I could say a beginner might enjoy this. We spent 70 minutes underwater as the average diving depth was 11m and I still had 20 bar left to red margin. What I also saw a lot was many different Cod and Black saddled puffers and some Emperors. To my surprise I did not come across Moray eel but that does not mean there weren't any around.