I had a presentation in Ras Al Khaimah on Saturday morning. The weather had been kind of windy and unsettled lately, and the car had been covered with dusty rain splatters the past several days despite my having it washed each day. We were thinking to go diving on Friday and then overnight in RAK for the conference, but thinking the weather might improve if we delayed, Bobbi and I ended getting up at 5 a.m. Saturday and driving up to RAK that morning to do the presentation, and dropping down to Dibba when the conference ended at noon to make the 3 pm dive with Freestyle on Dibba Rock.
It was just Bobbi and I on the dive, literally. We had stopped by Lulu hypermarket to pick up a couple of their tasty mini-pizzas (less than $1 each piled generously with cheese and tandoori chicken chunks) and fresh fruit juice, and we were consuming those on the lanai at Freestyle and watching two crowded dive boats motor across the water full of divers just completed their noon dive, but some were in training, so when 3 pm came and they still weren’t ready for their second dive, Colin put Bobbi and I on a dive boat all by ourselves for the short excursion out to DIbba Rock. So for most of our dive, we had the site pretty much to ourselves.
The most interesting thing about this dive is usually sharks crossing right across your bow as low down on the reef as you are. We didn’t see any of those on this dive, but we came on several turtles, and at the southern tip of the V shaped reef, we encountered schools of devil rays, 4, 5, and 10 at a time, cruising just ahead of us in the water. There were barracuda there as well, and large jacks, and we even found a couple of moray eels, which we rarely see in the coral on the shallow south or ‘near’ side of the island. Also the purple raspberry coral that used to be there in abundance is coming back toward the east end of the L. I think it makes more sense to call it an L shaped reef to show the compass headings. When you look at it from shore, north is a little to the left, so from there it appears as a V.
Anyway it was a really nice dive. We surfaced after 55 minutes (we were asked to keep it to 50) with 100 bar in our tanks. I was tempted to ask if we could just go back to shore on a south heading on the bottom, we had the air for it, but I figured the boatman would, or should, not agree to that, so I didn’t suggest it.
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