Dibba Rock with Freestyle Divers, Musandam with Nomad Ocean Adventure
My logged dives #1249-1251
Vance taking the video below, photo by Dro Madery
Glenn was visiting from Doha with his wife Gulya and their daughter Gwenny. They came for the Eid Al Adha break, all week long. Toward the end of the week Glenn and I were wondering how we could work in diving. Gwenny can't swim well enough to stay all day on a boat, and it wasn't working out how to include mommy and bibi considering the need for someone to remain on the boat with Gwenny or back on dry land, so in the end Glenn and I just went by ourselves.
Here's Glenn's video on YoutTube
We left around 11 a.m. from Al Ain, a very reasonable hour in the morning, and headed for UAE Dibba. We could have left home at nooon as we were early for our dive with Freestyle, and about 3:30 we entered the water and had a nice swim around the rock, meeting many creatures such as flounders, moray eels, pipe fish, jaw fish, bat fish, a few small barracuda ... nice to see life returning to the rock.
Then we crossed the border about dusk, an easy crossing, no hassles, and arrived in time for dinner of chicken and shrimp at Nomad Ocean Adventure. We got a good night sleep (at least I did) and next day headed up north to dive Octopus Rock in almost no current, what a treat, and then Ras Hamra and around the corner to Ras Sanut, where we met up with this guy ...
Dro Madery in the thumbnail
Dibba Rock used to be one of my favorite dive sites. When Royal Beach Motel was built there a dive site was established by Terry Moore who attracted a following among the sportif expats. Royal Beach was at first trying to establish a clientele and offered accommodation at rates that have since doubled. We early on found alternate accommodation but the diving was superb, with Terry running boats three times a day to the rock right offshore and divers happily frolicking among consistently frequent sightings of black tip reef sharks, turtles, migrating devil rays, cuttlefish, and resident barracuda, just to name a number of the many animals we took for granted there.
Now Terry's son Andy runs the business, and runs it well, despite a deterioration on the reef wrought by the unfortunate after effects of cyclone damage and prolonged red tide, which starved what was left of the reef after the cyclone. Now the remarkable raspberry coral that was home to all the creatures has gone but the creatures are coming back to the substrates that remain.
Dibba Rock makes a relaxing destination if you want to get a late start on your way to Musandam or want to get back home in the afternoon and feel like a morning dive before making the cross-country trip. The coral rocks we call the aquarium remain, and jaw fish are returning to the back side. Here is a compilation of GoPro shots that Glenn and I made on the rock on Oct 17, 2013
I will soon complile a similar video for Octopus Rock Oct 18 and post it here.
Not sure if I ever did that ...
Meanwhile Glenn posted this on FB, not a bad shot ...
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