tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-75931583814736377942024-03-13T09:17:35.854-07:00Vance's Dive bLogsVance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.comBlogger193125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-19038450869719305452020-07-21T22:29:00.053-07:002020-07-30T19:57:50.553-07:00Five days diving in Perhentian Islands, Malaysia<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, tahoma, helvetica, freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Vance's logged dives #1617-1626, Perhentian Islands, Malaysia, July 8-11, 2020</b><br />
<br /><div>Malaysia is not a bad place to have to ride out COVID-19. The pandemic is being well managed here. There was a lockdown from March 18 where we had to limit our excursions off our compound to forays into grocery stores, when we couldn't arrange food deliveries (they were hard to arrange back then, partly because movement controls were in such force that trucks coming from distribution centers in Butterworth weren't allowed to cross the bridge into Penang). For exercise we were walking up and down the 3 towers in our complex, 60 vertical steps in all, but a good 1-hour workout.<br />
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Eventually the country got a handle on its covid situation. Deaths leveled out, new cases continued to diminish, and travel between states was allowed starting in June <br /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Malaysia_movement_control_order">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Malaysia_movement_control_order</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7d-lKqL9huc/Xx1II-v-qsI/AAAAAAAARyA/Xth-0Tp5pSUAbjDIM550W_NTRZzLV-LpQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/2020-07-09_Dan_Lisa.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" height="351" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7d-lKqL9huc/Xx1II-v-qsI/AAAAAAAARyA/Xth-0Tp5pSUAbjDIM550W_NTRZzLV-LpQCLcBGAsYHQ/w625-h351/2020-07-09_Dan_Lisa.jpg" width="625" /></a></div><div><i>Dan and Lisa at breakfast at Bubbles</i></div><div><br /></div><div>The island of Penang had had only one death due to COVID-19 and very few new cases in the weeks before we were invited by Dan Miles to join him and his wife Lisa Low on a dive trip to Sabah. This turned out to be impractical, since it's a detached part of Malaysia on the island of Borneo and operates on rules different to the mainland. In fact the neighboring state there, Sarawak, is one of the few loci of new infections in the country. But Dan and Lisa had limited time for their holiday, so they shifted their plans to the Perhentian Islands and booked a room at Bubbles resort for the week of July 4-11. </div><div><br /></div><div>Bubbles is in a remote location on Perhentian Besar, both a charm and a drawback, the only way in and out for tourists being by boat. And we discovered it was also filling fast with locals realizing they could travel there at a time when covid was under control and interstate travel was now allowed. We were told that Kuala Besut, the port where you catch the boat for Perhentian, had had only one case of covid throughout the entire pandemic; the Perhentian Islands themselves had had none. So now there was a sudden influx of tourists from in-country, and when we tried to get reservations at Bubbles the day after Dan and Lisa got theirs, we were only able to book rooms for two nights midweek, the 7th and 8th.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-w3wT8CXgesE/Xx-SM7KcnEI/AAAAAAAARyY/TuPSKDE-bccI30fdF2bULxSyR22Qvg9fQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1292/perhentians.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="784" data-original-width="1292" height="380" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-w3wT8CXgesE/Xx-SM7KcnEI/AAAAAAAARyY/TuPSKDE-bccI30fdF2bULxSyR22Qvg9fQCLcBGAsYHQ/w625-h380/perhentians.png" width="625" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>
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Meanwhile we learned that one of our favorite dive instructors, Fizzy in the Sea, whom we used to dive with frequently in around 2013 at Nomad Ocean adventures in Oman, was visiting Malaysia, on holiday from where she had been working for the past several years in the dive paradise of Timor Leste. From her Facebook posts we learned that she had been visiting her family in Kuala Lumpur but was prevented from returning due to covid restrictions on flying there. So the owner of Turtle Bay Divers on Perhentian Kecil had invited her to come help out there for a while. Turtle Bay Divers was on Longbeach on the small (kecil) island, a busy dive and tourist beach, still charming, with an appealing choice of meal options and and despite its being high season, there was still a good chance of finding accommodation there.<br />
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So we made plans to fly to Kota Baru on July 6, get a taxi from the airport to Kuala Besut a little over an hour away, and spend the night a Grab ride away from the jetty where we could get our boat to Perhentian on the 7th (as it turned out, the lady who managed our bungaloes gave us a lift there in the morning). We would dive from Bubbles that afternoon and all day next day, do a morning dive at Bubbles on the 9th and get a boat over to Perhentian Kecil that afternoon. Then we could dive with Fizzy at Turtle Bay Divers on the 10th and as it turned out do two more dives on the 11th before getting the last boat back to Kuala Besut and catching an overnight bus back to Penang.<br />
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<b>Three days at Bubbles Resort on Perhentian Besar, diving with Dan Miles and Lisa Low</b><br />
<b><br /><i>d/Lagoon</i></b></div><div><br /></div><div>This was our first dive out of Bubbles Dive Resort located in a small bay on the southwest corner of Perhentian Besar. Shortly after check-in we reported to the dive center for our first dive with Bubbles at d'Lagoon, in the north corner of the bay just to the north of Longbeach, near the northern tip of Perhentian Kecil, not far by boat, about 15 minutes.</div><div><br /></div><div>We got lucky, dropping right in on a school of humphead parrotfish gnawing up the reef all around us. This was our best dive of the trip, humpheads followed by blue spotted and Jenkins rays, batfish, a moray concealed in a crevice, wrasse operating their cleaning stations in structures on their way to becoming artificial reef, and many other creatures. At various times on the dive I took to filming clams and clownfish reacting to the ominous approach of an unknown creature.<br />
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<br /><b><i>d'Barge</i></b></div><div><br /></div><div>
Next morning's dive was to The Barge, a sunken once-seafaring vessel lying in around 25 meters of ocean water a half hour's boat ride from Bubbles. Due to the depth we were encouraged to dive it on nitrox. I said I could do that if they wanted me to, but I was happy diving on air, and Bobbi wasn't certified for nitrox. No problem, we were told, she could do a discover nitrox course. </div><div><br /></div><div>This came up at the end of the last dive that day as we were putting away our gear and thinking to get cleaned up for dinner. Everyone was busy, so no one seemed inclined to pull her aside right then, and the dive would be at 8:45 the next morning. In fact they came to our breakfast table and told us they were advancing the meet time to 8:30, which meant we were going to have to rush through breakfast, and briefing Bobbi for a discover nitrox dive seemed not to be included in the time calculation. She wasn't motivated to do it all that much anyway, and when I found out we'd be paying extra for the nitrox tanks, neither was I. Finally we discovered that one of the other divers on the boat was doing a discover nitrox course so he could dive on nitrox with his wife.</div><div><br /></div><div>Although we'd be on slightly different dive profiles, another part of the calculation (taking 4 divers vs 6 on the trip) was if they wanted us to go we would have to be on air, and Bobbi relaxed a lot when we found that everyone was ok with that. I think I went into a little deco on the dive, though it was the kind that would burn off on a normal ascent with safety stop. Oddly, Bobbi, with the same kind of dive computer as mine, had plenty of no deco time, both of us at about the same depth throughout the dive.</div><div>
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It was a dive well worth going on. The local dive guide Derek showed us where the bamboo sharks were hiding (for the first one, I thought he was pointing out the red-banded shrimp under the lip of the wreck, and I only saw the bamboo shark in the video later - I didn't have to tell you that; you'd have thought I had brilliantly captured both). We saw a scorpion fish in the sand, which I didn't frame properly, and a moray hiding in the wreck. At one point I followed around a black-banded sea snake as he poked under objects in the sand and then decided he might do better if he explored inside the wreck. We also found a fish with its tail bit off lying immobilized in the sand. It was still breathing, so it had been a very recent attack. We looked around for whatever it was that had just attacked it and, as we were at the end of our dive, ascended before it got us next.</div><div><br /></div><div>I wasn't happy with the thumbnail that YouTube's algorithm selected for the video I posted above. It showed the snake but missed out its head. Snakes are tricky to capture on film because they are constantly moving, wriggling around so much. So I uploaded the original video into Camtasia and sort of took it apart frame by frame in order to find the best image that could serve as just the thumbnail for this video.</div><div><br /></div><div>Having found what I thought would make the best shot, I decided to take all 8 frames I had teased out and put them here so you could enjoy what the snake looked like as I got a little ahead of it and it headed up at me but not dangerously. It just brushed past me and headed into the wreck. Makes a nice photo sequence:</div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YNgqzHEffhM/XyJxmRWwnFI/AAAAAAAAR1M/a_OhP5omttUqC67H8iuieMi4IWKCDPuVACLcBGAsYHQ/s587/snake01.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="587" height="256" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YNgqzHEffhM/XyJxmRWwnFI/AAAAAAAAR1M/a_OhP5omttUqC67H8iuieMi4IWKCDPuVACLcBGAsYHQ/w500-h256/snake01.png" width="500" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qsxyzFmEnjo/XyJw_StCr1I/AAAAAAAAR0w/pLtXvxrebjQbSoIoW6A3R8DvW-bzpcOqQCPcBGAYYCw/s573/snake01.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="314" data-original-width="573" height="275" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qsxyzFmEnjo/XyJw_StCr1I/AAAAAAAAR0w/pLtXvxrebjQbSoIoW6A3R8DvW-bzpcOqQCPcBGAYYCw/w500-h275/snake01.png" width="500" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WVi1kneUL8U/XyJw_WF780I/AAAAAAAAR04/gqB7Uppe2-gP7JF_6VYwLcCpYZkr54IoQCPcBGAYYCw/s659/snake03.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="317" data-original-width="659" height="241" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WVi1kneUL8U/XyJw_WF780I/AAAAAAAAR04/gqB7Uppe2-gP7JF_6VYwLcCpYZkr54IoQCPcBGAYYCw/w500-h241/snake03.png" width="500" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YuU9wXAWshE/XyJw_2WGsyI/AAAAAAAAR04/6Di2ttiX1DUWH6iiQ1X4eWXN9yUoEj00QCPcBGAYYCw/s713/snake04.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="314" data-original-width="713" height="220" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YuU9wXAWshE/XyJw_2WGsyI/AAAAAAAAR04/6Di2ttiX1DUWH6iiQ1X4eWXN9yUoEj00QCPcBGAYYCw/w500-h220/snake04.png" width="500" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oBJzv4Vn96U/XyJxAcMYReI/AAAAAAAAR1A/iqj7wnZgndoupgX_yMyyjHwZIbBDmVeBQCPcBGAYYCw/s609/snake05.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="310" data-original-width="609" height="255" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oBJzv4Vn96U/XyJxAcMYReI/AAAAAAAAR1A/iqj7wnZgndoupgX_yMyyjHwZIbBDmVeBQCPcBGAYYCw/w500-h255/snake05.png" width="500" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6UoR5WxtNFM/XyJxnYtQCdI/AAAAAAAAR1w/Hw8mSKujX7AhVWTjTU1l_3sI1ZThBlZSwCPcBGAYYCw/s707/snake06.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="315" data-original-width="707" height="223" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6UoR5WxtNFM/XyJxnYtQCdI/AAAAAAAAR1w/Hw8mSKujX7AhVWTjTU1l_3sI1ZThBlZSwCPcBGAYYCw/w500-h223/snake06.png" width="500" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TrcW1qZNzEQ/XyJxnniz_bI/AAAAAAAAR10/FtOsyxN7goEO5ITWE87rjhoOPoGYKE-fACPcBGAYYCw/s713/snake07.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="310" data-original-width="713" height="218" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TrcW1qZNzEQ/XyJxnniz_bI/AAAAAAAAR10/FtOsyxN7goEO5ITWE87rjhoOPoGYKE-fACPcBGAYYCw/w500-h218/snake07.png" width="500" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C5Ay3GmYLd8/XyJxnzRnw9I/AAAAAAAAR14/c_eT8Gj1xqoZvN3t2C1Z0M-xUzTsASdEwCPcBGAYYCw/s804/snake08.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="306" data-original-width="804" height="191" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C5Ay3GmYLd8/XyJxnzRnw9I/AAAAAAAAR14/c_eT8Gj1xqoZvN3t2C1Z0M-xUzTsASdEwCPcBGAYYCw/w500-h191/snake08.png" width="500" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>I would categorize the Barge and d'Lagoon as great dives. I like to joke that diving is a bit like sex: there are two kinds of dives, good dives and GREAT dives. This next video is a compilation of the remaining good dives we did during our stay at Bubbles Dive Resort, starting with videos taken at Takong Laut the morning of July 9, before we moved over to Longbeach on Perhentian Kecil. </div><div><br /></div><div><i><b>Takong Laut with Bubbles</b></i></div><div><br /></div><div>This dive was compromised by very strong current (it had been only 5 days since the last full moon). Consequently we had to stay in the shadow of the current on the south side of the island; every time we turned a corner to the north, we were beaten back. There were a lot of other divers on the site as well; in one of my video clips you can hear tank banging which we believe was one of he nearby divemasters trying to corral and control his divers. We didn't see much of particular interest on the dive, so I didn't take a lot of video. Also my camera had started to take on moisture causing fog to cloud the lens, so the videos were disappointing. </div><div><br /></div><div>We had a much better dive with Fizzy on the same site two days later, only one other boat on the site, and we experienced a diminished current giving us a wider shadow of still water, though the current was still stiff from the north and prevented us rounding the island, as we had done on two dives on a previous visit there in 2012. Also Fizzy knew where the bamboo sharks lived.</div><div><br /></div><div>The account of our diving there in 2012 can be found here, though I didn't have an underwater camera at the time: <a href="https://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2012/06/diving-off-perhentian-islands-malaysia.html">https://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2012/06/diving-off-perhentian-islands-malaysia.html</a>. We have some family vacation pictures taken at the time here, where you can see the beach as it was then before the jetty was built there (all boats just pulled up on this beach): <a href="https://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2012/06/diving-off-perhentian-islands-malaysia.html">https://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2012/06/diving-off-perhentian-islands-malaysia.html</a></div><div><br />
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<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>Batu Tabir, between Batu Butuh and Siegi, and two video clips on Little Tiger Rock</i></b></div><div><br /></div><div>
This video also contains clips from two afternoon dives we did on Batu Tabir and for the last dive of that day in the area in between Batu Butuh and Siegi, after our great morning dive on the Barge on July 8. There wasn't much here to photograph so I focused on clown fish on these dives, testing their reactions to having a camera poking at them almost up to their anemones. One of them attacked the camera; you can hear the clicks when he hits it. Others were more timid. </div><div><br /></div><div>Clown fish have varied response to divers. There was a dive I used to do off Pearl Island opposite Ras Morovi in Musandam where I would lead divers around the island and then head east on a beeline over the sand to try and reach the submerged reef a couple hundred meters distant. This beeline took us over a lone anemone in about 15 meters of water with some very lonely clown fish living in it. On this stretch, I wanted to conserve air so I used to swim at about ten meters, and whenever I passed over their anemone these clown fish would charge up to meet me. I'm sure I have some videos of that. Some clown fish barely poke their heads out of their protective anemone but others can be almost aggressive (how aggressive can a clown fish be, really?) or in the case of the ones in Musandam, maybe a combination of bored and curious. </div><div><br /></div><div>Amazingly I found some video of these guys. I've queued to where you can see them: <a href="https://youtu.be/-_h6bukCS2g?t=181">https://youtu.be/-_h6bukCS2g?t=181</a><br />
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The last two clips in the video posted above here are from the dive we did on Little Tiger Rock after our great dive at d'Lagoon on July 7. My battery died after two clips because the time between dives was short, it was my first day there and I didn't know the routine and hadn't brought my recharging gear with me to the dive center on that day, and I had shot so much great video at d'Lagoon I had mostly expended the battery (but I don't recall that much to record on the rest of that dive anyway).<br />
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We didn't leave Bubbles over any dissatisfaction with the accommodation or diving there but only because they were about to rent our room to someone else. So after our Takong Laut dive the morning of the 9th, we cleaned our dive gear and stashed it wet in a net bag, and then we picked up our dry gear from where we'd left it behind the reception desk (since we'd had to finish breakfast quickly and check out of our room before diving). They called us a water taxi to take us over to Longbeach, just 20 minutes away on the next island over, and we pitched up on a scorching hot sunny beachfront in front of Turtle Bay Divers, where we were greeted by our good friend in diving, Fizzy in the Sea :-)</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UvL4tTLzCpA/Xx1HLW7eT9I/AAAAAAAARx0/Caece_DCWt07LyhuqaTvU7I0uriBznB0wCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/2020-07-10_fizzy.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="469" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UvL4tTLzCpA/Xx1HLW7eT9I/AAAAAAAARx0/Caece_DCWt07LyhuqaTvU7I0uriBznB0wCLcBGAsYHQ/w625-h469/2020-07-10_fizzy.jpg" width="625" /></a></div><div><br />
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<b>Two days at Turtle Bay Divers at Longbeach on Perhentian Kecil, diving with long lost dive buddy Fizzy in the Sea</b><br />
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On the morning of July 10 the islands were being pummeled by rain, and the trees where we were staying at the Cocohut complex were whipping in the wind. We texted Fizzy and ended up sitting out the first dive that morning. Later we found that all dives to the south had been cancelled, and Dan texted us from Bubbles on their south-facing beach that the only way out of there, by boat, was problematic, and they were trying to leave a day early. Also the storm had damaged the jetty on Perhentian Besar, impacting boat transport from there back to Kuala Besut. Nevertheless, Dan and Lisa managed to get away that day, and made it to Kuala Lumpur the next<br />
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After chilling in our room that morning, we moseyed on down to the dive center around ten. The weather had subsided by then and boating between Longbeach and the dive sites right across the channel was possible (as you can see from the map, protected by the big island, besar, from the seas punishing Bubbles), so a'diving we did go. </div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>Batu Layar</i></b></div><div><br /></div><div>My apologies for the annoying haze in the center the videos, from condensation inside the lens of my camera, which had been developing since our last day at Bubbles. There was nothing I could do about it at the time.<br />
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The video above is of our first dive in years with old friend and dive buddy Fizzy in the Sea, our perfect guide on this by now improving day at Batu Layar, off Perhentian Besar just across the channel opposite Turtle Bay Divers on Longbeach, on Perhentian Kecil. In this video you can see me attacked by a trigger fish, happens occasionally, but rarely videoed. I like to video around fish cleaning stations, and here I got shots of a puffer fish being administered to by wrasse. No one ever gets bored swimming with turtles or pulling up alongside a school of, barracuda, teasing clown fish, or checking out the varied coral formations.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>Police Wreck</i></b><br />
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Our second dive the same day was with Fizzy on Police Wreck, The "Police Wreck" is actually a trio of boats sunk by the police off the northwest corner of Perhentian Besar. The diver proceeds from one sunken boat to the other. Rays hide under hulls or wherever they can. Wheelhouses are home to unique pipefish and other macro creatures, and swimthroughs are possible inside the wrecks themselves. In this video, the annoying haze in the center of my Rollei lens was getting more apparent.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><i>Takong Laut with Fizzy</i></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Next morning we revisited Takong Laut, which we had visited two days before with Bubbles, five days off full moon. Now, one week after the full moon Takong Laut still had stiff currents, but not as bad as before, and Fizzy managed to keep us in a larger and deeper shadow from the current than we had experienced on our previous visit. And she knew which rocks the bamboo sharks were under. There were a few morays under those rocks as well, and puffer fish being cleaned by both wrasse <i>and </i>remoras, and clown fish dancing in bright orange anemones. All in all, approaching great diving, our next to last on Perhentian with Fizzy in the Sea.</div>
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Our second dive that day and last of our trip before being shuttled off to the Longbeach jetty for our trip back to Kuala Besut to catch the overnight bus to Penang, was on one of the Tiger Rocks, which was labeled on our briefing chart as Turumba Tiga T3. On this dive Fizzy led us through a myriad of tunnels between which we found rays, angel fish, gopis protecting pistol shrimp, a nudibranch, and other tiny creatures.</div>
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While I was focused on the sand capturing poor images of a pistol shrimp coming out of its hole and brushing past the gopi guarding the entrance, you can hear muffled shouting in the background. That was Fizzy trying to get the words JENKINS RAY past her regulator. Bobbi was with her and saw it, but the two of them had chased it off before I was able to join them. You can see Jenkins rays in the first video posted on this blog, soon after the humphead parrotfish.</div>
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<br />Now we've been back in Penang for two weeks, no covid yet, so we managed to thread the needle. We were as careful as was practical in the Perhentians, but there was no observance of social distancing or masking around the dozens of divers we bumped up against each day, and almost no one wore masks in the islands, since they hadn't had any covid. On the other hand, they had visitors from all over the country, where covid is pretty much under control, new cases each day in the teens and single digits. Still, that influx could lead to a first case in the Perhentians, and when the borders are open to international travel, let's hope there is a vaccine by then.</div><div><br /></div><div>Our best chance of getting the virus was on the bus going back to Penang. Mask were optional, which is to say, not worn. But when we were in Kuala Besut the week before, we had purchased our bus ticket for the night of the 11th, arriving back in Penang on the 12th. Since we had our choice of seats on the double decker, we chose the top deck, two seats in the very front of the bus. There's lots of room up there and we were right above the driver, staircase to our left, and all the passengers coming up that staircase headed toward the back of the bus, so we didn't see any of the other passengers during the trip. We reclined our seats so far back that no one sat behind us either; I don't think anyone was inconvenienced, the bus was hardly half full. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>Getting there and away</b></div><div><br /></div><div>For anyone thinking to visit Perhentian, you need to reach the jeti at Kuala Besut. There's a bus station there walking distance to the jeti, but with luggage or dive gear you might want to take a grab. Make sure you have the app.</div><div><br /></div><div>You can fly to Kota Bharu and get a grab or a taxi from there, same price, 80 RM, about $20 for the 1.5 hour trip airport to jeti. Or if you take a bus to Kota Bharu just stay on it if its next stop is Kuala Besut (and if you bought a ticket to there). If staying overnight try and find a place near the jeti for local color, pleasant seascape, and best choices of places to eat and drink (Chinese restaurants have beer; others don't).</div><div><br />On July 6, 2020<span style="white-space: pre;"> w</span>e bought plane tickets from Penang direct to Kota Bharu (KBR). We booked online. They took our money and our booking but contacted us later to say our flight was canceled, but we could re-route ourselves through Kuala Lumpur, Sebang. This turned our noon arrival at Penang airport and disembarking a couple hours later at KBR into a dawn departure from our flat to catch a flight to Sebang and a connection to KBR a couple hours later for arrival in KBR only a little earlier than we could have got there by bus -- and we could have slept an hour or two later and then gone from Penang all the way to Kuala Besut (and it would have cost us 50 rm each instead of almost 400 for the plane). </div><div><br /></div><div>Also when we arrived at Penang airport and saw the departure board, we saw that over half the flights were canceled. All passengers to other cities in Malaysia were being re-routed through KL, and I image the airlines knew this when they took our booking.</div><div><br /></div><div>If you are starting your journey in KL then the flight from there to KBR is not expensive and it's the least painful way to arrive. Bus distance between KL and KBR is about 450 km. But if you're flying from Penang and have to change planes in KL then you are competing with a bus journey of 350 km due west across the peninsula. If you are arriving in Kuala Besut after 4 pm then you will have to spend the night anyway, and a bus trip would be the most pleasant way to go, especially in the daytime, passing through Bandung Island in the Terenggor Lake district in the center of the country. </div><div><br /></div><div>Once you're in Kuala Besut you can easily get transport to the islands through one of the many offices at the jeti complex, or you'll have likely arranged transport through whomever you're staying or diving with. That way you'll be taken exactly to the right spot on the islands you're trying to reach, though if you do end up at one of the jetties, you'll be able to get a boat taxi to wherever you want to go, about 35 rm per passenger, under $10.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VG_yDLUR2Sk/XyFTeApuGLI/AAAAAAAARz4/Ea8uHhYfGW4t7Y07vDG9hxPsVQV1xwk9ACLcBGAsYHQ/s1156/longbeachmap.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="825" data-original-width="1156" height="445" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VG_yDLUR2Sk/XyFTeApuGLI/AAAAAAAARz4/Ea8uHhYfGW4t7Y07vDG9hxPsVQV1xwk9ACLcBGAsYHQ/w625-h445/longbeachmap.png" width="625" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Just a word about accommodation at Longbeach.</div><div><br /></div><div>As many of us do when traveling, we use Trip Advisor reviews to help us choose where to stay in tourist locations such as this one. Of all the accommodations mentioned Harrera cottages stood out in reviews. In price they were close competitors with Cocohut just up the beach, but Cocohut had the usual variety of satisfied and dissatisfied customers, whereas Harrera customers raved about the views, the friendliness of the owners, the cleanliness of the cottages. There was nothing bad said about the place, and in case this could be a noisy beach, we didn't mind that it was up the hill behind the beach front. So we booked it for 200 rm a night, around $50.</div><div><br /></div><div>When we arrived on Perhentian Kecil, the water taxi took us to the beach in front of Turtle Bay Divers, and we left our things there. It was a really hot day and we cooled off before heading down the beach and up the hill, without luggage, to check out our new place. We arrived at a veranda where there was a restaurant and reception and the proprietor, who was indeed friendly, checked our booking and offered water, and told us to wait while his wife cleaned the room. We were then taken to one of the cottages, standing alone on the hillside and were warned about the steep steps. Inside it was bare bones, smaller than it had appeared in the promotional images. There was a bed and a fan. I tried the fan but there was no electricity. Did I mention that it was really hot out? We were informed that we would have electricity only from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. It didn't seem very secure. We could see bright sunlight though the cracks in the walls. That night it poured down rain, really a storm, and I wonder how dry our things would have remained in that room.</div><div><br /></div><div>We told the proprietor we needed to go get our things. He said he would send someone, but we intended to jump ship if we could find better. Back at the dive shop we told them our predicament. There was someone there who had a room, something similar to what we had looked at but only 80 rm, $20. We thought we would ask at the Cocuhut nearby, the place we had almost booked instead of Harerra. It was well off the beach up a path to the other side of the island. It was a modern cement block complex of rooms. They had a room but only for that night. We had a look. It was American motel quality, refigerator, a/c, 24-hour electricity, comfortable queen bed. The price was 250 a night, $10 more than Harrera. We decided we preferred to stay there and took the room for that night. The friendly manager explained that for the following night if they didn't need all their rooms they would call us. We were eating dinner with Fizzy when Bobbi's phone rang. We could have the room a second night. We forfeited the first night payment to Harrera but it was worth it getting into something slightly more expensive but a quantum leap better in quality. If you go there, be careful with Trip Advisor reviews that seem too good to be real.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mpsEl92QjbQ/XyJlG_5iU2I/AAAAAAAAR0E/bPrWMhU8S0EWKBTsGfs0F7bQedGY17LzgCLcBGAsYHQ/s960/107693086_10157245145416720_6169939274868830388_n.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="960" height="469" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mpsEl92QjbQ/XyJlG_5iU2I/AAAAAAAAR0E/bPrWMhU8S0EWKBTsGfs0F7bQedGY17LzgCLcBGAsYHQ/w625-h469/107693086_10157245145416720_6169939274868830388_n.jpg" width="625" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><i>The walk from Cocohut to the beach (at the end of the walk in this picture) could be entertaining. Here we've just encountered a monitor lizard coming up the path we were going down. He tried to escape into the jungle but couldn't force himself through the fence. I had to walk around him and drive him back up the path where Bobbi was taking pictures so he could find the gap and make his way slowly and deliberately into the underbrush. It's not unusual to see these anywhere in Malaysia. While eating at Kak Yah Local Food (recommended!) they might pass by our table. </i></div><div><br /></div><div>Getting off the island from Longbeach was no problem. The jeti is at the north end of the beach, which is a stretch of hot sand, not amenable for hauling luggage or dive gear over if it doesn't all fit on your back. But Turtle Bay divers had a group of divers they were taking over there to do an open water course, so they just piled our stuff on the boat and gave us a lift across the bay. At the jeti young lads appeared to help us get our gear up the steps. They looked after us and showed us our boat and didn't hassle us for payment, which is how the friendly local people normally treat foreigners in Malaysia. We were really well taken care of by Fizzy and Turtle Bay Divers.</div><div><br /></div><div>It was an uneventful boat ride the half hour over to Kuala Besut, the best kind. Arriving on the jeti there it was a short walk over to one of the Chinese restaurants to have cold beer and a snack before catching a grab to the bus station for our 8 pm bus overnight to Penang.</div><div><br /></div><div><div>We really like bus travel in Malaysia. There are frequent, comfortable buses; you can book online, but all you usually have to do is turn up at a bus station to get one leaving within half an hour. There's a lot more legroom and surrounding space on a bus than on a plane, and our mobile hotspots work on buses, so we have data throughout the trip and can can even connect our computers. Of course if you want to take a really first class bus, like Aeroline, then you need to book ahead and pay more, but it's worth it.</div><div><br /></div><div>The bus we were on advertised wifi, but there was none, and there was a mains point at each seat, but no electricity there. Often there are USB ports at each seat, but not on our trip. We had our USB chargers and since we slept half the trip, we weren't lacking for power. Back in Penang, we reached home before dawn.</div></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QuPnHOs4dqU/Xx_DkG02H8I/AAAAAAAARyk/6Tou3gmL4QIYvIi0uIoD86lUuzBLNiNAgCLcBGAsYHQ/s918/Bubbles2longbeach.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="811" data-original-width="918" height="443" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QuPnHOs4dqU/Xx_DkG02H8I/AAAAAAAARyk/6Tou3gmL4QIYvIi0uIoD86lUuzBLNiNAgCLcBGAsYHQ/w500-h443/Bubbles2longbeach.png" width="500" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">We're really glad we went on this trip. COVID-19 is on the rebound now in Malaysia. People really need to wear masks but the government is only edging toward making that mandatory. People are being detected covid positive on arrival at the airports. They are given pink arm bands to wear and told to go home to quarantine. Their pictures are turning up on Facebook, out in public wearing their bands. I think the goverment might arrest and punish them. It's serious. The number of new cases is starting to inch back up in the country, 20-30 a day. We're so glad we got away when we did.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-23200218425963703652020-02-13T23:02:00.000-08:002020-05-30T20:26:51.917-07:00Three days of diving off Khao Lak, Thailand<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Vance's logged dives #1611-1616, Khao Lak, Thailand, Feb 11-13, 2020</b><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Things have been so busy for Bobbi and I since the MCO, Movement Control Order, went into effect in Penang. On March 17, when we learned it would start the following day, we went for <a href="https://hikingpenang.blogspot.com/2020/03/youth-park-to-rest-stations-3-5-and-39.html" target="_blank">a last walk on Penang Hill</a>. Just before that, COVID teaching had been keeping me working more and more intensively online since giving my <a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/" target="_blank">workshops in Thailand in January</a> and then following those up with an <a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138546024/Create_Your_Blended_Learning_Classroom" target="_blank">eLearning course</a></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;"><a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138546024/Create_Your_Blended_Learning_Classroom" target="_blank"> from February 20 to March 11, 2020</a>. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Why would I mention this in a blog about diving? While details of my eLearning course were being finalized, Bobbi and I had flown to <a href="https://learning2gether.net/2020/02/09/teaching-english-through-coding-using-collaborative-projects-that-dont-require-specialist-skills-or-even-a-computer/" target="_blank">Phnom Penh for the CamTESOL conference</a>, and on February 10, and for obvious reasons, we had booked a flight to Phuket, one way. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;"><b>Phnom Penh to Phuket</b></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">The departure board at Phnom Penh airport that morning was alight with red cancelled notices, mostly flights to China. But our flight was not affected and we proceeded normally to Phuket where we got a taxi and headed north, not south into Phuket proper, but this time to Khao Lak about an hour's drive north of the airport. We had heard the diving was good there.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">We had booked a hotel just near <a href="https://www.wetzonedivers.com/en/" target="_blank">Wetzone</a>, the dive center where we had booked our dives. Casa Cool was a conveniently located place,right opposite the sprawling night market, and reasonably quiet, when the a/c was running. We were quite pleased with it. Wetzone turned out to mount a superb dive operation, with personable guides leading dives in a highly professional, yet appropriately flexible, manner. We had booked them for three days with the possibility of diving with them a 4th.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Here was the schedule of the diving we'd planned, two dives per day at ...</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;"> - Tuesday, Feb 11 - Koh Bon</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;"> - Wednesday, Feb 12 - Richelieu (Wetzone visits this place Sun / Mon and then every other day)</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;"> - Thursday, Feb 13 - Koh Tachai</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;"><i>Friday, tentatively, return to Richelieu, but decided we needed to leave</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">I don't remember exactly when I was informed by RELO Bangkok that they had announced publicly that my eLearning course would go ahead and started recruiting participants for it, but by that time I had already booked the dive trip and had made advanced payment. I had decided to run the course in Schoology and during the days we were diving I had run into problems with the finer points of Schoology and was downloading manuals to my cell phone and reading them on the boat between dives. That got me over the technical issues but I had agreed to start the courses on Monday Feb 17. Diving three days in Khaolak through Feb 13 meant flying to Bangkok the 14th and landing in Penang via Kuala Lumpur around midight that nightt, so I'd be unable to work solidly on the course.until the morning of the 15th, after a night's sleep. This was one of the reasons we decided not to dive a 4th day with Wetzone, even though it would be on Richelieu Rock, their best dive site, which would unfortunately have got me home only two days before I was supposed to begin the course. By 'decide' I mean we made up our minds and booked our return ticket from Phuket to Penang on Feb 14 just two days before the flight after our return from Richelieu Rock. In the end RELO Bangkok postponed the start of the course to Feb 20,thereby relieving the pressure aggravated by their late announcement and my having taken advantage of there having been no announcement by squeezing in a dive holiday, so in the end I had sufficient preparation time.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">That was the main reason we had decided to forego our tentative booking for the last day of diving (dive bookings not paid for in advance are by definition tentative, though it appears we could have gone had we wanted). Other reasons were that we were there just days after an unusually large full moon, causing high tide changes and strong currents that were compromising the pleasure in our diving; and if that was bringing up any big fish, it was bringing up a lot of particles in the water, and the visibility was too poor for us to see very far off the reef. Richelieu Rock was known to have manta rays, and when we were anchored there, we could see some kind of rays jumping in the waters around us, but we never saw them on the dives. Finally diving is getting very expensive in Thailand, over $150 per person per day. By day three we had been on the three sites Wetzone was visiting at that time of year. Given the need to return to business and the unfavorable currents and visibility, it didn't seem worhwhile to toss another $300 into the hat based on what we had experienced thus far.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Meanwhile, let's keep in mind where we are ...</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;"><b>Wednesday, Feb 12 - Richelieu</b></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">So, now it's time to show you what we saw. As we've brought up Richelieu, a dive site that we were told was named by Jacques Cousteau for the captain of his boat when he had been the first to dive it. However, this according to Wikipedia, is "demonstrably false". </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Find the more likey explanations here, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richelieu_Rock">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richelieu_Rock</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Let's have a look at what we saw there. We did two dives, the first having the most current, so we pretty much rushed through that one. You can see in the videography that I am having trouble keeping the camera steady. The sites were teeming with fish life and I was particularly interested in the jacks, large, sleek fish in the family Carangidae</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">, that were almost always present, and I trained my camera mostly on them. There was also a seahorse on the seabed in the first of the dive. You can see, though, that the vis was poor (by clicking on the button below).</span><br />
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The second dive was better, more sheltered from the current, and more relaxed. I videod over a third of the hour we spent underwater. We saw the same parade of jacks as before, but I was more easily able to swim in amongst them, and I had the leisure of looking under rocks on this dive, where I found barracudas and crayfish lurking in overhangs and lairs. Thanks to the improved conditions, I had time to pan my camera on the scorpion fish, and spend some time with the batfish at the end of the dive.</div>
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<b style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, tahoma, helvetica, freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Tuesday, Feb 11 - Koh Bon</b></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Koh Bon was where we went on our very first two dives with Wetzone. Many people dived the sites around Khao Lak by going into dive shops that would line you up with dive outfits according to where they were going when you wanted to go. Therefore the clientele on the boats changed from day to day depending on who the </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">clearninghouse</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"> shops had booked for that day. We were a little unusual in that we had selected Wetzone based on its reviews and booked to dive with them in advance by paying half up front, before we got there. That way we could select a hotel in the vicinity of the shop. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">It didn't matter where you stayed though because Wetzone sent a tuk tuk around each monring to collect everyone booked on the dives that day. On these rides we got a tour of the area. We got in the gates of some very impressive and remote resorts isolated from the madding crowd in the center of town. Down one back road we came out on a boxing school, active each morning with dozens of boxers paired off in rings or working at punching bags. A prim young lady joined our tuk tuk there the first day and the next. It turned out that she was enrolled at the school. She must have had a story that would make her decide to do that, pretty girl in the midst of all those men. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">We were also joined that first morning (and the next) by a trio of Brits, one of whom had an incessant cough and sniffles that she spewed over everyone else in the back of the </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">van at close quarters. In tuk tuks the benches line the sides and everyone coughs toward the center. She wrote it off as "just a British cold" but we had been taking precautions ever since our arrival in Thailand in mid January. We had masks and wore them on the tuk tuks as we did at airports and on planes, but of course we understood that the lady with the cough was the one putting everyone at risk. The pandemic was upon us, millions were about to die, and this would be our last dive trip for a while. Once safely back in Malaysia, we would not be able to fly anywhere but home to the USA, and once there would not be able to return to Malaysia until the pandemic blew over. We had acquaintences on Malaysia my Second Home visas who were in Thailand in mid March and are still there, almost in June now, unable to return to their residences, dependent on others to feed their pets.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Back to the dives; according to the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"> Wikipedia article cited earlier, Koh Bon was as far north as </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Jacques Cousteau actually got when he came to this area in hopes of getting permission to enter Burmese waters, which he was ultimately denied, so he turned back and missed Richelieu, according to</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">I've combined the video snippets from both dives on Koh Bon into one 14 minute video here. One reason for that is that the first dive had a bit of current making it hard to zoom in close on the critters, and so I didn't take all that much video. The second dive was calmer and toward the end became very relaxed with lots of big and little fish swirling in juxtaposition, creating tableaux that were quite mesmerizing. Be sure you stay right to the end, of fast-forward there, to catch the school of barracuda we saw at the end of that dive.</span></span><br />
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<b style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, tahoma, helvetica, freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Thursday, Feb 13 - Koh Tachai</b></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">On our last day of diving, we visited the third dive site in Wetzone's weekly rota while the seas were still feeling the effects of the super moon from just a few days before. You can tell the current was strong from how we are using reef hooks at the beginning, and from the jerky camera motions and the way I don't linger over the animals as I lose purchase in the current. You can see it from the ripple in the </span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">anenomes, </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">and from people finning and going nowhere. Also the fish behave differently in the current. The batfish like to ride flat in the water when the current is strong, and you can see one of them drifting off position even in that configuration, then regaining ground with a flip of his tailfin. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"><i>Full disclosure, the video with me deploying my reef hook was actually the last one on my camera for this dive, but I put it at the beginning to give viewers an indication of what we would be dealing with on this dive.</i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">There's not much remarkable in the sealife observed here, just the constant beauty of the marine environment. I'm particularly fascinated with the submission of the occasionally aggressive titan trigger fish and always coy batfish to the wrasse at the clearning stations.They seem to be torn between staying where they are or dealing with the large and unfamiliar creature that is moving in with outstretched camera. Eventually their concern for the latter causes them to break off their beauty treatment. That is why I sometimes write in my film credits, tongue in cheek, that "Some animals may have been slightly inconvenienced but none were harmed during the creation of this epic documentary".</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">The last dive of our trip to Khaolok and sadly our last dive in the pre-covid era now upon us, on Koh Tachai with Wetzone Divers, was about to transpire. You can tell from the videos that either we were in a more sheltered place and / or the current had abated, and we were having a more relaxing time of it. One feature of this dive was the swirling fish balls. There were plenty of fish around, but not so many jacks, and these tended to be near the surface easing in and out of the batfish hanging out there. Speaking of batfish, there were plenty of cleaning station antics on this dive. It was a long dive as I recall, and a pleasant way to end our three days diving around Khaolak.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">And at this writing, we are stuck in Penang, with no prospects to go anywhere in the near future. Interstate travel in Malaysia is banned without permits, which I doubt we could get if we just wanted to go diving on Tioman or Redang, or Perhentian. On the up side,it's just as hard to get into Penang, which is doing well in corona virus terms, as long as it makes it hard for tourists to flood back here. We feel relativey safe here, but hunkered down for the duration.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;"><br /></span></span>Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-47897855805985398362019-05-29T05:52:00.000-07:002019-06-18T05:51:46.094-07:00Diving off Koh Lipe Thailand: Whale sharks and more in 4 days of diving<b>Logged dives #1603-1610, Koh Lipe, Thailand, May 27-30, 2019</b><br />
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Bobbi and I did 8 dives around Tarutao National Park conducted from Adang Sea Divers on the island of Koh Lipe, Thailand, between May 27 through May 30. The dives far exceeded our expectations.<br />
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Choose which dive bLog entry you would like to view<br />
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<a href="#May27dive1">May 27 Dive 1: BARRACUDAS on STONEHENGE</a><br />
<a href="#May27dive2">May 27 Dive 2: Seahorses and bamboo sharks at STEPS</a><br />
<a href="#May28">May 28: WHALE SHARKS at 8 MILE ROCK</a><br />
<a href="#May29">May 29:Taru and 7 Rocks: a good diving day</a><br />
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7593158381473637794#May30">May 30: WHALE SHARK FEVER consumes two dives at STONEHENGE</a><br />
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May 27: BARRACUDAS on STONEHENGE</h2>
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In the first video, above, also available here, <a href="https://youtu.be/ZcIwZzTPkuM">https://youtu.be/ZcIwZzTPkuM</a>, we are on the Stonehenge dive site having been taken there by Adang Sea Divers on the morning of May 27, 2019. Ris Finale is guiding Rachelle Stylo, Markus Wallerich, Vance Stevens, and my favorite dive buddy Bobbi Stevens on our first ever dive in Koh Lipe. Due to our arrival date adjusted to dive as close to half-moon as possible, this dive was conducted in negligible current. Due to the almost ideal conditions, the dive lasts over 68 minutes.<br />
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In the water we see a nudibranch, a green moray eel, three scorpion fish, a lion fish, a crab, a black banded sea snake (most likely a yellow lipped krait), a sea centipede (or fire worm, perhaps), schools of fusiliers, barracudas, and bat fish, and colorful soft corals and fans, all shot on a single dive, our first on Koh Lipe, in the space of 68 minutes on my dive computer. We are impressed. At the end of the dive someone says it was something awesome. If you listen carefully at the end of the video you might be able to pick up what the 'something' was.<br />
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Here's what Adang Divers says about Stonehenge on their blog here<br />
<a href="http://www.adangseadivers.com/diving-koh-lipe/dive-sites/">http://www.adangseadivers.com/diving-koh-lipe/dive-sites/</a><br />
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Stonehenge</h2>
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<a href="http://www.adangseadivers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/stone-e1418113216991.jpg" style="color: #01a2ce; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"><img alt="stone" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-1646" height="130" src="https://www.adangseadivers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/stone-e1418113216991.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: left; height: auto; margin: 0px 20px 10px 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" width="130" /></a>Stonehenge is our favourite dive site because of its diversity of species as well as its topography. Its name is due to the large monoliths positioned like menhirs on the bottom. There’s a large hard coral reef and an incredible soft coral garden. While <a href="http://www.adangseadivers.com/diving-koh-lipe/" style="color: #01a2ce; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Diving Koh Lipe">diving</a> here, if you’re lucky, you may see mackerel, tuna, devil rays, seahorse & ghost pipefish. Depth: 5 – 25 m.</div>
Seahorses and bamboo sharks at STEPS
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May 27 dive 2: Seahorses, bamboo sharks, colorful coral & creatures at Steps, Koh Lipe, Thailand</h2>
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After a cracking first dive on Stonehenge on the morning of May 27, we moved over to nearby Steps, so named for the terraced nature of the terrain, though this was not obvious to first-time visitors. Here's the video, <a href="https://youtu.be/AuVvT00SY4E">https://youtu.be/AuVvT00SY4E</a>.<br />
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On this dive we descended over shallow sand where we saw cuttlefish, distant squid, and a couple of nudibranchs, only the second of which appears in this video compilation. We soon came on some fish traps whose netting was home to several seahorses. At the end of the segment, if you stop the video and release it slowly, you can make out another sea horse seen later in the dive, but that was just before the battery in my camera died, so I only got a few seconds of it. However, if you slow forward you can see it clearly (on subsequent dive trips, I was very careful to have battery packs handy to recharge my camera during the surface intervals). But before the camera died, I went on to film a playful clownfish darting up from an anemone, a den of bamboo (here, they're called 'cat') sharks, several lion fishes, a scorpion fish so huge we almost mistook him for the cabbage coral he was hiding in, some very interesting shrimps and a crab tucked inside a ledge, lovely soft corals, squids cavorting off in the blue, and some interesting foraging sea cucumbers (we see those a lot, but I rarely film them; don't know why, they are actually fascinating).<br />
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May 28: WHALE SHARKS at 8 MILE ROCK</h2>
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Here's the first compilation, two dives on 8 Mile Rock on May 28, 2019, with whale sharks,<br />
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8 Mile Rock is so named because it is that far south of Koh Lipe, Thailand. Adang Sea Diver says this about it on their website: <a href="http://www.adangseadivers.com/diving-koh-lipe/dive-sites/">http://www.adangseadivers.com/diving-koh-lipe/dive-sites/</a><br />
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8 mile rock</h2>
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<a href="http://www.adangseadivers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/8mile.jpg" style="color: #01a2ce; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"><img alt="8 miles Koh Lipe, Thailand" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-116" height="130" sizes="(max-width: 130px) 100vw, 130px" src="https://www.adangseadivers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/8mile.jpg" srcset="http://www.adangseadivers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/8mile.jpg 130w, http://www.adangseadivers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/8mile-55x55.jpg 55w" style="border: 0px; float: left; height: auto; margin: 0px 20px 10px 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" width="130" /></a>8 miles rock is <a href="http://www.adangseadivers.com/koh-lipe/" style="color: #01a2ce; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Koh Lipe">Lipe’s</a> Koh Lipes furthest – 8 miles south. It consists of a pinnacle in the middle of the sea. Its summit is at 16 m and from there it slopes down to a depth of over 50 m. It’s here that we have the best chance of seeing a whale shark or some large rays. Because this is a deep site we only take <a href="http://www.adangseadivers.com/diving-courses/" style="color: #01a2ce; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Diving Courses Koh Lipe">advanced</a> divers wearing dive computers on this dive. <span style="font-weight: 700; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">This is a special trip that we can only plan to go to at certain times in the year.</span></div>
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Our day Tuesday (as if we knew what day it was) began with whale sharks coming up to greet the arrival of our dive boat, and us snorkeling down to them (we only saw one at a time, but one was larger than the other).<br />
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The video above compiles two dives on 8-Mile Rock with descents and ascents through schools of dancing bat fish, jacks, fusiliers, and sightings of scorpion fish, clowns, a green moray, and a barracuda having its teeth cleaned by wrasse, plus the occasional appearances of whale sharks with their retinues of cobia and jacks throughout our two dives there.<br />
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The Rollei videography is by Vance Stevens, PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor #64181. I am diving here with Ris Finale guiding Rachelle Stylo, Markus Wallerich, me, and my favorite dive buddy Bobbi Stevens.<br />
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Here are some screen shots from Adang Sea Divers Facebook page after our first whale shark sightings:<br />
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<h2 id="May29">
May 29: Taru and 7 Rocks - A good, not great, diving day</h2>
Our third day at Koh Lipe, the diving was less pumping than the first two days and more what we had expected when we had started on our journey there. I often tell people diving has in common with sex that there are two kinds. There's good diving, and then there's (wait for it) great diving. Our diving on Taru and 7 Rocks was not great as in the previous two days, but it was good. We had decent vis, the water was warm, the sites were nearby and relaxed, though current was picking up a bit, 3 days out from half moon. However the sites chosen for this day were mediocre on the day we were there. Still we saw a titan trigger fish darting off a wall of green fan corals, schools of snappers, several green morays, a sea centipede or fire worm, darting clowns, some bamboo cat sharks, several scorpion fish, a shrimp under a rock, a flounder in the sand, nudibranchs and a puffer hanging out on a ghost fish-trap, an unusual leopard spotted eel, and teeming schools of fusiliers and delightful banner fish playing around salient sponge corals. The video tells the story exactly as it happened.<br />
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<iframe width="560" height="380" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CYg0Fmt1dcA" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
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Our first two days of diving were so surprisingly good that we had decided by our third day to extend our stay a fourth. However our third day diving morning wasn't as exciting as the days before and we were re-considering whether we should stay for that fourth day. The answer as regards diving is always YES, you are there, why not stay, no telling what will happen!?? And sure enough, the group that went out with instructor Dan on the third dive of the day, scheduled for a shallow sandy area since there was a DSD diver with them (PADI Discover Scuba Diving experience) changed its plan at the last minute on news that whale sharks had seen playing around at Stonehenge, and went there instead. And of course they saw whale sharks.<br />
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One of the next day's dives had been planned for Stonehenge, so the divers who turned up that morning were excited with anticipation of seeing the big fish that cannot be named :-)<br />
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<h2 id="May30">
May 30: WHALE SHARK FEVER consumes two dives at STONEHENGE</h2>
Today Ris Finale is guiding his friend Em, Markus Wallerich, Vance Stevens, and my favorite dive buddy Bobbi Stevens on a return trip to Stonehenge. Photographers Jovana and Dusan Brkovic are also with us, having requested specifically that we return to Stonehenge for the second dive because, well ... anyway, no one objected.<br />
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This video compiles shots from the two dives we did there that day, organized around footage taken on descent, on the deeper reefs, whale shark encounters, and ascent, <a href="https://youtu.be/JuzJgZ31R8k">https://youtu.be/JuzJgZ31R8k</a>.<br />
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<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="380" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JuzJgZ31R8k" width="560"></iframe><br />
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We enter the water in strong current and see a lion fish under a coral outcrop, a scorpion fish (notice how Bobbi uses her tank banger in sand to help her pull through the current), a rarely seen Pikachu nudibranch, a pair of dragon fish or sea moths (Pegasidae), a school of fusiliers swarming near the menahirs, or outcrops, that give this dive site its name, and a green moray, all taken in the same terrain at the beginning of the two dives, before we are visited by the fish we came to see, and its attendant remora.<br />
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When the creature moves off I show footage of reef fish and schools of snappers, before showing the whale sharks seen on the second dive. But this video is missing the very best encounter. My camera contains a few minutes of video of the sea bottom where I had somehow not switched my video recording off. That segment ends with two tank bangs. I lifted my camera and pointed it at the silhouettes of two whale sharks circling overhead. I ascended to join them and panned from one to the other as one disappeared into the limited vis to the left while the other approached from the right. But of course, nothing was recorded because when I thought I had pressed record ON I was actually turning the previous recording of banal seabed OFF. That's life when current and dopamine are abundantly present on such dives, but I still got other shots, and you can see that the last two whale sharks filmed are not the same, from the distinctively different shapes of their dorsal fins.<br />
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After seeing the whale sharks in open water just off the reef, we hide on both dives from disconcerting current, spotting a grouper, and ascending though graceful schools of bat fish, a couple of scorpion fish and a file fish among the shallow multicolored soft corals.<br />
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At the end of this video, Jovana swoops in to snap my new Facebook profile picture, having mistaken me for a whale shark perhaps.<br />
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Jovana's work can be found at <a href="http://jovanamilanko.com/">http://jovanamilanko.com/</a><br />
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Meanwhile, I'm having a bit of trouble working out where these dive sites are exactly.<br />
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Adang divers has a map of the area on their site, but doesn't actually mark the sites, which are described in the text found below the map (some of these re-printed in the diver bLogs above).<br />
<a href="http://www.adangseadivers.com/diving-koh-lipe/dive-sites/">http://www.adangseadivers.com/diving-koh-lipe/dive-sites/</a><br />
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Andaman Adventures publishes a map where dive sites are identified, here<br />
<a href="http://www.andamanadventures.com/scuba_diving_sites/lipe/aa_destination.shtml">http://www.andamanadventures.com/scuba_diving_sites/lipe/aa_destination.shtml</a><br />
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Note that 8 Mile Rock, #2 on this map, is given at the southern tip of Ko Adang, just west of Koh Lipe, but Adang Sea Divers and most other web sites put it at 8 miles south of Koh Lipe. Also Stonehenge, #7 on this map, is given as being just east of Ko Bitai. This web page<br />
<a href="https://www.gettingstamped.com/stonehenge-thailand-koh-lipe-dive-site/">https://www.gettingstamped.com/stonehenge-thailand-koh-lipe-dive-site/</a><br />
says it's off Taru Island, just east of Koh Lipe on the Adang Sea Divers map.<br />
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Judging from direction of travel, and the fact that it Stonehenge had buoys to the east and west of one another, I would guess that Stonehenge was correctly marked on the Andaman Adventures map but that 8 Mile Rock is well south of there, way off that map.<br />
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I wish people wouldn't play with our heads like that :-)Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-63843210845587244022019-02-24T23:15:00.000-08:002019-03-04T19:35:42.081-08:00Fun diving from Phuket on Koh Bida Nok and Turtle Rock on Koh Phi Phi Leh<b>Logged Dives #1601-1602 February 24, 2019</b><br />
<b><br /></b>Our dives today were here<br />
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Our dive sites, Koh Bida Nok and Turtle Rock, just north of Maya Bay on Koh Phi Phi Leh, are described at the link from which this map was taken, with attribution:<br />
<a href="https://www.phiphidiving.com/phiphi-diving-map.htm">https://www.phiphidiving.com/phiphi-diving-map.htm</a><br />
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We decided to dive today with Sea Fun Divers, <a href="https://www.seafundivers.com/">https://www.seafundivers.com/</a>. We chose them because we wanted to dive at Koh Phi Phi this Sunday and they were one of the only shops with their own boats going there. Also they immediately answered my email which I sent out on return to Patong from our half day diving with Merlin Divers in Kamala. I sent the mail while we were getting cleaned up from our diving with intent to go walking around to different dive shops in Patong, but I was able to arrange to dive with Sea Fun via email without leaving my hotel room. So instead of working up a sweat, we settled our next day diving with no hassle and celebrated with cheap beer from the downstairs 7/11 up at the pool on the roof of our Patong Mansion hotel, where we liked to enjoy the sundown from the lip of the waterfall pool there.<br />
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Sea Fun Divers had only booked a baker's dozen of divers on the trip. Dive groupings were made in teams of two to four divers. Bobbi and I were concerned at first about the other divers we were paired with but on the 2 hour trip to the site we got to talking to them and our concerns evaporated (they seemed to know what they were doing). Meanwhile our dive guide Jurgen had told us that if there was any disparity in air, since I was carrying a surface marker buoy, Bobbi and I could just carry on with our diving. In the end none of that was necessary, but it was nice to know that Jurgen was flexible enough to accommodate such contingencies, always appreciated when pairings are potentially inappropriate. Ours turned out to be fine.<br />
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<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Koh Bida Nok</b><br />
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<i>Jurgen telling us what to expect at Koh Bida Nok</i></div>
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Fortunately there was a professional photographer aboard the boat, named Johan Torfason. Johan was working for an insurance company in Sweden when he decided to take a leave of absence for 6 months to try making a living at underwater photography in Thailand. One Christmas day a snorkeling boat he was on sunk in high waves and he and 35 others were rescued by sea gypsies who live in south Koh Lanta. He stayed on Lanta for a while, must have liked it but went back to Phuket, went back to Sweden, asked for another 6 months leave, was refused, so he quit and returned to Thailand and now he is the resident photographer for Sea Fun Divers. His Facebook page is here:<br />
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<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.facebook.com/PhuketUnderwaterPhoto/&source=gmail&ust=1551280533083000&usg=AFQjCNEZW03dLhoRGLnngPk6WsUVAw1mOw" href="https://www.facebook.com/PhuketUnderwaterPhoto/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/<wbr></wbr>PhuketUnderwaterPhoto/</a><br />
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Johan asked everyone aboard, one by one, if he could take their pictures. When he came to chat us up he figured we'd be taking our own photos, and we thanked him and told him we were unlikely to want a complete set after the trip. Two things changed my mind.<br />
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The first was, as I was standing on the platform, all kitted up, about to make a giant stride into the water, I pulled my camera out and switched it on and got an error message, no memory card. This reminded me that when I was backing up photos the night before on my computer in our hotel room I had forgot to replace the memory card in the camera. Duh! I instinctively slapped my forehead. This jarred me back to the present so I left my hand where it was to hold my mask in place, and took a giant step into the water. Mai pen rai!<br />
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The second thing was, after the dives, when Johan showed everyone aboard his photos from that day in the dry cabin amidship, they were superb. He got some great shots of Bobbi and I after all. And he also got some excellent shots of the sharks many of us saw on that first dive. I had had missed an excellent chance to video black tips up close, but Johan got them, and us watching them.</div>
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These sharks were reminiscent of the black tips we used to see frequently in very shallow water at Dibba Rock in UAE, but the ones in Dibba were more evasive. These were on patrol. And Jurgen knew where they would be and manipulated our route, despite an unexpected current change that caused us to switch direction with reef on the left, not on the right as we'd been briefed, he made sure we ended up where the sharks were.</div>
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The sharks at Koh Bida Nok were the high point but there was more to see there than sharks<br />
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<b>Turtle Rock on Koh Phi Phi Leh</b></div>
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Turtle Rock was kind of a set piece dive. Diving is always great, and this would be a great site if you had it to yourself, but there were many other boats all congregated on the same spot so that there were dozens of divers in the water, making it necessary for us to be micro managed, for example when a turtle was found, we had to wait our turn to come around it. Johan got some great shots though; here are just two of many :-)</div>
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We anchored for lunch and surface interval off Maya Bay, now closed with a rope across it with floats, to try and get it to come back after the depredations of so many tourists since Leonardo de Caprio made it famous as The Beach. There were dozens of boats, speedboats etc. not just dive boats, all anchored at the edge of the rope. Here is one of the islands there.</div>
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When it was time to dive we moved a few hundred meters toward the north end of Koh Phi Phi Leh and dived from there to the south. Here's Jurgen explaining the plan. </div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"><i>I took this photo. All the other diving pictures on this page were from Johan's collection</i></span></div>
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We dived as a pack on this dive. Here are Bobbi and I swimming with the pack (green fins and black fins)</div>
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One of the first stunts was to have everyone swim through a tunnel. Johan had positioned himself to take pictures of all the divers passing into the tunnel. I decided to show off. These pictures, and the shark ones, are the reason I decided to buy Johan's pictures and put them here with his permission.</div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"><i>That's me, mask and reg back in place, disappearing down the rabbitfish hole</i></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"><i>and completing the manouevre</i></span></div>
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One thing that I missed filming, and Johan missed it as well, in fact only I saw it ... was a huge crayfish in a cave I discovered by shining my lamp inside. It was easily as long as my arm. It looked delicious, but there you are.</div>
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Next day, after a 24 hour surface interval, it was time to say goodbye, Phuket to Penang on Firefly, in one of these birds (my picture again). This saved us two days on buses, Phuket to Surat Thani to Hat Yai, overnight and from there next day to Butterworth and Penang.</div>
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Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-60409502907065840042019-02-23T23:08:00.000-08:002019-05-21T01:14:26.504-07:00Fun diving Phuket on Whale Rock and Tin Lizzie with Merlin Divers Kamala<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Logged Dives #1599-1600 February 23, 2019</span></b><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">Today we decided to dive from Kamala Beach, which appears in the upper left on this a map of our diving from Phuket Feb 22, 23, and 24, 2019,</span><br />
<a href="https://www.screencast.com/t/YufC3nOPd0" style="background-color: white; color: #888888;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">https://www.screencast.com/t/YufC3nOPd0</span></a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">Annotated after borrowing, with attribution, from this web page</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.phuket.com/diving/divingsites/phiphiisland.htm" style="color: #888888; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">http://www.phuket.com/diving/divingsites/phiphiisland.htm</span></a></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Why Kamala?</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">When we were making last minute arrangements in Siem Reap to go diving somewhere we could get into and out of quickly, and I started writing to dive shops to see what I could line up, Robert Klein, owner of Merlin DIvers in Kamala, was first to write back. I had focused on Kamala as not too far from the airport and possibly a less developed area of the island than some of the others, possibly a comfortable place to stay. Indeed we eventually found that it had a nice beach with some low key food and beverage establishments shoreside and reasonably priced accommodation inland from there. However, as I started to get more replies to my emails I came to realize that Merlin were booking us with other companies for trips to the standard dive sites shown in the map above, and we decided to base ourselves in Patong because there was a large cluster of dive shops there where I could negotiate prices directly with the ones who had their own boats, whereas there were only two or three operators in Kamala. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">On the other hand, Merlin divers offered diving from long-tailed boats to sites off their beach, a very different flavor of diving from the crowded cruises heading out to the busy dive sites, and a chance for a later pickup at our hotel in the morning (a chance to relax over breakfast) and earlier return from diving than that done from Chalong harbor, so we decided to set aside a low-key take-it-easy day for them.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">What we found</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #222222;">Merlin divers had a pleasant and professional setup in a cluster of shops fronting the busy main street but opening at the back of the shop right on the long sand beach. </span></span><span style="color: #222222;">Accueil, preparation, and execution of the diving was up to the expected standard. There were few diving customers that morning, only Bobbi and I and perhaps one other. Most of the dozen or so divers on the boat with us were in training for divemaster or on other professional level internships, which meant we were in good hands, almost too well looked after. But once we'd been in the water for a few minutes we were pretty much left to get on with the diving. The guides were good at pointing out creatures so we had no interest in doing anything but follow. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">As usual I'm with my favorite dive buddy Bobbi Stevens, today wearing a yellow mask. Bobbi is not to be confused with dive guide Luke, a South African who wore his long blond hair in a pony tail and was also wearing black mask with yellow trim face frame, similar to Bobbi's :-). If there is any problem with the video embed, the direct link seems to be working: <a href="https://youtu.be/jSLNAJSuvCM">https://youtu.be/jSLNAJSuvCM</a></span><br />
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We went on two dives. The first was on Whale Rock, resulting in the video above. The site isn't listed on Merlin's list of dive sites</div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://phuket-diving-thailand.net/scuba-diving-kamala-beach/kamala-dive-sites/">https://phuket-diving-thailand.net/scuba-diving-kamala-beach/kamala-dive-sites/</a> but it was a nice site for relaxed, unhurried diving, and here is what we saw: young barracudas right at the beginning of the dive, puffer fish, clown fish in the anemones, scorpion fish lurking on the rocks, nudibranchs, a cuttlefish, schools of snappers, a moray, and some Pearsonothuria graeffei cucumbers toward the end of the dive, among many other creatures of the not-so-deep.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The most salient moment of the dive for me was when I came across a little head poking out of a rock and turned around in the surge to examine it. Bobbi was hovering above me, but the others had moved on, so I gestured for her to call them back with her tank-banger. But having taken my eyes off the hole, I couldn't find it again but then I spotted a carefully constructed hole rimmed with rocks that could only have been placed just so by the animal who lived there. So I switched on my light and shined it into the hole. This provoked the resident mantis shrimp to come charging up to the rim as if to complain about the unwanted lighting, or perhaps just to see what the source was. Now I had a great view of him, but I had my lamp in one hand and my camera not in the other, and he had withdrawn back inside by the time I got my camera into position. Bobbi had joined me by now and when I shined my lamp into the hole we could see the mantis in there. But I was never able to juggle the light and the camera and deal with the surge in such a way that I could get a coherent video from it. Maybe these few hundred words will suffice in lieu of a picture.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The second dive was on Tin Lizzie, which Merlin's web site says is"the remains of a Tin Dredger at about 14 meters. Tin Lizzy is absolutely covered with marine life. You can find large numbers of Bat fish, Lion fish, large Puffer fish, Scorpion fish and Barracuda here. Many artificial reef blocks are placed around the wreck dive site and have become home to many fish." Our boat crew referred to those reef blocks as "cubes". Here is how my camera saw it: <a href="https://youtu.be/FESKm5lWxlk">https://youtu.be/FESKm5lWxlk</a></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;">The dive begins with dive guide Luke helping Bobbi descend on the rope and at the bottom telling us to get together and follow him but leaving us alone after that. He leads us to several forlorn puffer fish, nests of lion fish, lots of snappers schooling in the 'cubes', a few scorpion fish, a few banded coral shrimp (Stenopus hispidus), an eel, tiny flounders, a nudibranch, and through a big cloud of silt that settled over us toward the end of the dive, though most of it was in relatively clear water. </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span><span style="color: #222222;"><b>Overall impressions</b></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">This seemed to be a well-run dive shop, friendly, and well situated away from the madding crowd in Patong just over the hill to the south. The location was to our tastes, since we only drank beer at 60 baht ($2) in the tall 600+ ml bottles from the 7-11 near our hotel, the pleasant and quiet Patong Mansion. We avoided the 80 baht for half pint offerings in the bars and restaurants (120 for a pint, twice the price of the larger bottles in the 7/11). If like us, you're there for the diving and can do without the bars, Kamala struck me as a pleasant base, limited in scope and in diving, but earns points on relaxation. The two dive sites we tried were not the best Thailand has to offer, but we were happy with our half day out, nice to be catered for personally, and of course you pay less for that than you do on the boats going from Chalong Harbor. If you were staying in Kamala, the owner could arrange your diving on other days on the charter dive boats, with pickup from your hotel. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;"><b>About the videos</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222;">GoPro videography by Vance Stevens</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222;">PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor #64181</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">For best results, view these videos using highest HD setting on YouTube</span></div>
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Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-61485857379922775352019-02-22T23:08:00.000-08:002019-03-04T18:45:53.602-08:00Fun diving off Phuket on King Cruiser Wreck, Shark Point, and Koh Dok Mai wall with Local Dive Thailand<b>Logged Dives #1596-1598 February 22, 2019</b><br />
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Bobbi and I haven't been diving since we were on Tioman last September (<a href="http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2018/09/diving-from-salang-tioman-malaysia-with.html">http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2018/09/diving-from-salang-tioman-malaysia-with.html</a>), so we were itching to get down and get wet. Our choice of dive location, meaning where on the globe, was governed mainly by ease of access in and out of the area. Having just come from the CamTESOL conference in Phnom Penh we were considering diving off <span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit; white-space: nowrap;">Sihanoukville </span>in Cambodia, something I think we'll want to do at some point given the novelty of the sites there and the low cost of travel in Cambodia, but working out the time it would take to travel overland (from Siem Reap, which is where we were when making our plans) vis a vis the low cost of air fares in and out of Phuket from Cambodia and onward to where we live in Penang, we chose Phuket as our base for diving this time around.<br />
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It wasn't our first time to visit there. I dived in Phuket in my early pre-logged dive days way last century, but it's been some decades again since our trip to the Similan Islands which the four of us in our family reached on a liveaboard from Phuket in around 1990 (when Phuket was relatively cheap and not so built up), and its been a few years since we dived Koh Lanta, which brought us up to the southern reaches of Koh Phi Phi diving (<a href="http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2014/12/bobbi-and-i-on-holiday-fun-diving-on.html">http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2014/12/bobbi-and-i-on-holiday-fun-diving-on.html</a>). So we thought we'd give Phuket a go, for convenience and for old times sake.<br />
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Here is a map of our diving from Phuket Feb 22, 23, and 24, 2019,<br />
<a href="https://www.screencast.com/t/YufC3nOPd0">https://www.screencast.com/t/YufC3nOPd0</a><br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-s-OOBGiPqYA/XHjRsFT7uZI/AAAAAAAAJbM/VVYg8YNew38i6fE6y4qtf2Bcqg_xIGgNgCLcBGAs/s1600/2019-02-22-24local_merlin_seafun.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="387" data-original-width="994" height="248" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-s-OOBGiPqYA/XHjRsFT7uZI/AAAAAAAAJbM/VVYg8YNew38i6fE6y4qtf2Bcqg_xIGgNgCLcBGAs/s640/2019-02-22-24local_merlin_seafun.png" width="640" /></a></div>
Annotated after borrowing, with attribution, from this web page<br />
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<a href="http://www.phuket.com/diving/divingsites/phiphiisland.htm">http://www.phuket.com/diving/divingsites/phiphiisland.htm</a></div>
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<b>Why we chose Local Dive Thailand for our first dive this century from our base in Phuket</b><br />
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We chose to dive today with Local Dive Thailand, who graciously offered me a professional discount and matched Bobbi and I with one of their best dive leaders, Born. The program for the day was one of the Phuket set pieces: King Cruiser Wreck, Shark Point, and Koh Dok Mai wall. There were about 35 divers on the boat and a dozen staff, or about 47 people in the water on each dive site from our boat alone. Though there were also divers from other boats as well, Born managed to ingeniously conduct our dives so that we were detached from the mobs and felt almost as if we were diving alone.<br />
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<b>King Cruiser Wreck</b><br />
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Here are the videos I made from the first dive on King Cruiser Wreck (use this link if the embed doesn't work):<br />
<a href="https://youtu.be/hWbBW0XkkDc">https://youtu.be/hWbBW0XkkDc</a><br />
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In this dive the overriding consideration was deco time. It can be a deep dive down to 32 meters, but we planned to take it only to 24 so as to not be annoyed by deco problems on the remaining two dives. We planned to surface when we reached 7 minutes no deco time and after achieving depth we were constantly easing upward, chasing our computers against the agreed upon limit (or at least I was, mine being more conservative than Bobbi's). Consequently we were back on the line after 35 minutes diving, but we saw a lot of the wreck and its resident creatures.</div>
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In the video you can see that we encountered several lion fish, swirling schools of yellow snappers, a big grouper, a fishball devouring a jellyfish, some large fish I think were mackerel, a concealed scorpion fish, a moray eel, and picturesque whip and colorful soft corals. It was overall a pleasant dive, but the best was yet to come.</div>
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<b>Shark Point</b></div>
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The next dive was Shark Point, or No Shark Point as Born called it. She said there had been no sharks at that site for the last several years. As I mentioned earlier, Bobbi and I were just happy to be diving again, and this is what we saw (use the direct link if the video embed doesn't work): </div>
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In this video we descend on a nest of blue spotted sting rays and watch them abruptly change locations. We encounter lots of schooling fish, clowns, a couple of cowries on the seabed, and an orange ghost pipefish which is hard to see, partly due to my videography vs. midwater buoyancy control and inability to see clearly where I'm pointing the camera. This is followed by video snippets of various morays, schools of fish enjoying a jellyfish dessert, crabs in the anemones, more schooling fish, several ominously lurking scorpion fish, gorgonian fan corals, a bemusing cuttlefish, some lion fish, a school of large barracuda, more anemone crabs, more jellyfish abuse, a HUGE scorpion fish resting on a barrel coral, a puffer, more barracudas, a green seahorse that I couldn't see and didn't know what I was filming till the very end of the clip, more lion fish, and even more barracudas and other fish at the safety stop. This was our favorite dive of the day.</div>
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<b>Koh Dok Mai</b></div>
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Our final dive of the day was on Koh Dok Mai, on the dark side of the wall. Here's the video (and at this link in case of problems with the embed): <a href="https://youtu.be/JNFl8ev6Q50">https://youtu.be/JNFl8ev6Q50</a></div>
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The video begins with our lamps eluminating a free swimming moray on the dark side of the wall, a seahorse, a peek under a coral outcrop where there were 3 bamboo sharks that Born knew in advance would be there, a little eel that bites (Born demonstrated, and I mimicked; I can still feel the sensation of tiny teeth), a ghost pipe fish, more white-eyed eels, some glass shrimp, another swimming eel, schooling fish, a trigger fish, fan coral, a couple of nudibranchs, a couple more eels, a scorpion fish, and Born being surprised by a sea snake while showing us yet another grinning scorpion fish on the safety stop. The end of the video shows us surfacing to the beauty of Koh Dok Mai halfway between Chalong harbor and the Phi Phi islands.</div>
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<b>Overall impressions</b></div>
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Local Dive Thailand were a great outfit to dive with. They have their own boat, they conducted the trip competently, and there was a dive guide for every two to four customers, or maybe just three. The only problem was that they over-feed you on the trip :-). There's breakfast on the long journey out from Phuket halfway to Koh Phi Phi and something to eat between dives. The second surface interval is accompanied by a filling meal of delicious Thai food. And on the way back, if you can still consume more, there were pancakes. There was always watermellon and other fruits, and free flow tea coffee.</div>
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A few days later I saw their boat off Koh Phi Phi and snapped a picture of it there</div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UzTvPkJOBvs/XH0KXSmE7aI/AAAAAAAAJmk/707oMoIWRjwGrSBSZTgH2acrePm8Kfa2wCEwYBhgL/s1600/20190224_133623.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="360" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UzTvPkJOBvs/XH0KXSmE7aI/AAAAAAAAJmk/707oMoIWRjwGrSBSZTgH2acrePm8Kfa2wCEwYBhgL/s640/20190224_133623.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<b>About the videos</b></div>
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GoPro videography by Vance Stevens</div>
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PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor #64181</div>
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For more scuba diving videos </div>
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like this one, see </div>
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http://VancesDivebLogs.blogspot.com</div>
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For best results, view these videos using highest HD setting on YouTube</div>
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Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-4921323692811631742018-09-14T08:53:00.003-07:002018-09-15T08:36:07.186-07:00Diving from Salang, Tioman, Malaysia with Scuba Guru Grahame Massicks<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Logged dives #1591-1595 September 10-11</b><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Bobbi and I have just arrived in Malaysia and set up residence in Penang. We had a hankering to get wet so as soon as the opportunity presented itself we arranged a trip to Tioman. We googled diving there and found Scuba Guru Grahame Massicks, and as we often do, chose to dive with him because his blog at <a href="http://tioman-scuba.com/">http://tioman-scuba.com/</a> showed a depth knowledge of the area, and basically because he answered his emails and kept us updated daily on various aspects of our getting there and diving with him. He asked if he could team us on boat dives with his advanced open water students, but it was really no big deal to us, and I don't know what our alternatives would have been with most of the diving on Tioman being focused on training, but we enjoyed our five dives with Scuba Guru </span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">over the three days we were there</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"><i>Bobbi checking out the swing at the end of the jetty on arrival in Salang, Tioman</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">We arrived on the island at around lunchtime Sunday September 9, 2018. It happened to be an eid weekend and the boats to Tioman the day before had been full, so we had spent an extra night in <span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Malacca</span>, taken a bus to Mersing on Saturday, where the harbor is, and made our way to the harbor after breakfast Sunday to catch the 10:30 a.m. Bluewater ferry, which made several stops on Tioman, Salang being the furthest north and the last stop. Grahame had emailed that he would meet us at the Salang Dreams restaurant right at the end of the jetty, where he suggested we take some lunch on the breezy veranda. Wherever we decided to eat in Salang, all options were at tables under shady roofs open on all sides to the pleasant weather.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Grahame had arranged our accommodation. The first night we stayed in an air-con room at the Mutiara Resort, through it was more like, and was in fact, a last resort. The Mutiara was almost as far out the paved surface as you could walk from the jetty, but still only about 5 or 10 minutes. There were campers on the beach just outside our room, and immediately opposite there was a table with fixed benches and a shade overhead, where local lads liked to congregate and play hip hop at high volume on their cell phones. The cottages shared walls with the neighbors, so we heard them as well, but at night the place was quiet, and the air con could be set at 24 degrees and it would keep the room at exactly that without blowing all over us, so it was ok for sleeping at least. But the facilities were poorly maintained, the toilet spewed water all over the floor when flushed (clean water, but still ... ) and the hairballs covering the drains and on the floor of the bathroom could easily have been removed before new guests checked in. The Mutiara also had the distinction on Trip Advisor of having no 'excellent' or 'good' ratings. All their ratings when we checked them out </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">before we got there </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">were 'average', 'poor', or 'terrible.'</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">But Grahame said it was the only room left in Salang that night in that price range, 130 ringgit because it was air con. And it was right next to Ella's place, the farthest place up the paved walk, where he had booked us into a fan cooled room for 80 rm a night the next two days. It was near the cottage where Grahame stayed, and also just steps from the dive center. Ella's was a much more pleasant and quieter place, with stand alone cottages providing some privacy from the neighbors (who happened to be Oscar and Frances, the advanced students whom we dived with Monday and Tuesday). Ella's Place took us back to our hippy travel days with colorful sunsets from our porch which we enjoyed over beer that Grahame kept cool for us in his fridge in his cottage, and banana pancakes in the morning from the rustic restaurant about ten paces from our room (no music or late nights there, thankfully, and any noise in the morning got drowned out by the whir of the fan).</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"><i>Posted on Facebook September 11: Sunset from our bungalow and breakfast views from Ella's Place, where we shifted after a night at Mutiara (last) resort. Note the archetypical banana pancakes and fruit platter, throwbacks to a simpler era of travel. One more day of diving then we ferry back to the mainland and grab whatever buses will get us back to Penang via KL BTS.</i></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">So once we were settled in at the Mutiara our first day there, we walked with Grahame down to the dive center where he proposed a choice of shore dives, one off the jetty (a lot of boat traffic there, didn't appeal) and another about 100 meters due west from the dive center, where a confiscated boat had been sunk in the sand. It had mostly decomposed, but it had attracted a lot of fish, including a school of young barracudas. Grahame describes the site on his blog, calling it the Salang Bay Wreck dive, <a href="http://tioman-scuba.com/salang-bay-wreck-2/">http://tioman-scuba.com/salang-bay-wreck-2/</a>. As this was my first dive since last June, I didn't really care where we went as long as it was wet, and we ended up enjoying the dive and getting to know Grahame and his methods. And of course, he was checking us out as well.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Our first boat dive the following day was on the Sipidan Wreck, deliberately decommissioned and sunk recently to create an artificial reef as a substrate for the propagation of fish life. Here is Grahame's write-up of this dive site: <a href="http://tioman-scuba.com/km-sipidan-wreck-2/">http://tioman-scuba.com/km-sipidan-wreck-2/</a> and here is the link to our video, </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">On this dive, </span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Grahame was guiding his PADI advanced o/w students Oscar and Francis </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">on their deep dive down to 30 meters. Grahame brought his students up after 20 minutes but he told us we could stay as long as we liked on the wreck as long as we avoided deco. It was similar to the Inchcape wrecks in the UAE, and </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">we basically descended and looked around it. It's a pretty typical wreck, with a fish ball of jack fish off its bow and more jacks at the stern. The video is here</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">, <a href="https://youtu.be/jnx4ZSEoj28">https://youtu.be/jnx4ZSEoj28</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Our second dive of the day was at Rengis Island. The video is here, <a href="https://youtu.be/3mVfKD7_mTw">https://youtu.be/3mVfKD7_mTw</a>, and here is Grahame's write-up of the site: <a href="http://tioman-scuba.com/rengis-island-2/">http://tioman-scuba.com/rengis-island-2/</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">This video shows me, Vance, diving as usual with my favorite dive buddy Bobbi and with Grahame's PADI advanced o/w students Oscar and Francis. On this dive, Grahame points out a small critter in the sand, not sure exactly what it is. This is followed by a remora looking in vain for a host. Then suddenly a blacktip shark makes a surprise appearance and vanishes. Then I film a puffer enjoying a wrasse cleaning station, and pan to an unusually curious cuttlefish who seems to be fascinated with the camera. At the end of our dive we spend our safety stop in a long visit with a turtle</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Videos from our next day diving on Tiger Reef and nearby Labas Island are posted on YouTube here: <a href="https://youtu.be/eRiou839JNI">https://youtu.be/eRiou839JNI</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Grahame's write-up on Tiger Reef is here: <a href="http://tioman-scuba.com/golden-reef-and-tiger-reef/">http://tioman-scuba.com/golden-reef-and-tiger-reef/</a>, and for </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Labas Island, with its swim-throughs: </span><a href="http://tioman-scuba.com/labas/" style="font-family: arial, tahoma, helvetica, freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">http://tioman-scuba.com/labas/</a>. <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Mine follows:</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">On Tuesday September 11, 2018, the five of us dived together on </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Tiger Reef and Labas Island. Visibility was </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">limited on both dives, but t</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">he first site, Tiger Reef, had a stiff current, which proved challenging for the just-certified in open water advanced students. The dive was short but nice and featured juvenile barracudas, morays, and blue spotted rays. The site is approximately mid-way between Sepoi and Labas Islands, which explains the current in the channel.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Back on board the boat, we motored over to the shelter of Labas Island, and after a brief surface interval we dived from where the boat was, which I presume was not just any place, but a place where </span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Grahame knew we would find </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">numerous swim-throughs. For the next hour he led us in a world of </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">pretty blue anemones and </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">a variety of soft and hard corals. Here you can see for yourself:</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Bobbi and I spent all day before our trip booking bus tickets to <span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Malacca</span>, accommodation there for two nights, and the onward bus from <span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Malacca </span>Sentral to Mersing, and accommodation in Mersing. Then we had to figure out the Tioman ferry schedule (changes daily according to tide, or sometimes cancelled or delayed due to weather) and book the trip out, confusing if you haven't done it before.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">There are several options leaving Penang. We live between Georgetown and Batu Ferringhi so in order of distance we would have to travel to catch the bus, we could go to the Georgetown jetty on a public bus or Grab and get the boat to Butterworth where there should be many buses to KL or all the way to <span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Malacca</span>. Timing on this trip would be difficult to gauge, since we'd have to catch a ferry, frequent, but hard to book the bus in advance. Or we could try to get a bus in Komtar, the business district on the far side of Georgetown from the Jeti but not that much further from where we live, and go to Meleka or KL / Meleka from there, or we could go to the main bus station in Sungai Nibong in the south of Penang Island, where there were numerous buses to Meleka or KL. That would be the most distant ride from our house.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">We decided to book a bus all the way to <span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Malacca </span>from Komtar. We woke up early and packed and got down to the gate to our compound in plenty of time we thought, but it took almost half an hour to get a Grab driver to come up there. We still made it to Komtar with time to spare but there was construction on the roads in the area that had consumed the address we had for the bus station. We ended by going to a street with bus ticketing agents to see if they could help us find our bus. It turned out the bus would stop right there, so we were relieved, and even had time to run over to a food court and pick up some nasi lemak, rice packs in banana leaves, and some other snacks we could try out on the bus to <span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Malacca</span>, unfamiliar to us but delicious. After all you can hardly go wrong on Penang street food.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">We had booked a homestay place in <span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Malacca</span>, a bit of a risk, but this one turned out to be a jewel. It's called The Paradise on Booking.com, at $35 for two nights. It was a short walk to the Jonker Street heritage area but was in a quiet residential part of town with many restaurants nearby. Our room had a bath and was air-conditioned, one of just three or four bedrooms in the house. We could use the kitchen and relax in the common living area. The manager was friendly and helpful when he was there, but most of the time there was no one there but us.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">We spent two nights there so we had a full day in the town. We walked as far as the floating mosque a few km away but mainly spent time along the river. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">One little Thai restaurant with tables on the river bank had a promotion on pints of beer, only 8 ringgit each, which is just a ringgit or two more than it costs in the supermarket. It was very tempting to relax there watching the bateaux mouches go up and down the river carrying tourists who thought taking a boat ride might be a good idea. That didn't appeal to us but there was much about <span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Malacca </span>that was appealing. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"><i style="font-size: 13.2px;">The riverside restaurant with the beer promotion was just down to the left from this building in Malacca</i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Other things worth noting in Malacca were the street art and the ridiculously decorated hello kitty pedicabs (another kind of street art),</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">At dinner time we noticed that one of the best hotels in town had a buffet of Thai and nyonya food for about $25, but half price for seniors over 60. That's not bad for an all you can eat buffet, see <a href="http://www.casadelrio-melaka.com/special/riverside-bbq-buffet">http://www.casadelrio-melaka.com/special/riverside-bbq-buffet</a> (and you can also get half price if your birthday falls within the month you eat there), so that's where we ate, and just a short walk back to our homestay.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">There were only two buses a day to Mersing from Malacca, one early morning, and the other at 12:45 pm. We had booked the latter so we had a leisurely start to our day with Malaysian coffee, bags dropped into cups of water heated in our kitchen, and then we caught a Grab to the bus station where we had time to have lunch in the food court. We had no trouble catching the bus, it wasn't full, and we arrived in Mersing well before dark. We walked out to the ferry terminal a km away from the station because someone told us there was an extra ferry sheduled that night, so we should be able to get our tickets for the next day. It was worth going there and showing them our voucher which we had to have printed (according to their web site, one of the many anxieties we expected to have to deal with to catch the boat). We found the man at "counter 21" actually an office, who helped us with an explanation of what to do next day. We should be there an hour early for a 10:30 ferry he told, us and assured us he would be there to help us on the morrow.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">The only problem was that we had taken a hotel, the Merlin Mersing, a couple of km north of the jetty complex. Tripadvisor feedback suggested it was quiet due to its isolation. In fact it was too far out of town for having to get back there next morning to get a ferry. Fortunately, the Merlin provided transport in the morning after telling us initially there was no one available to take us, relenting only when we showed them where they advertised on their web site transfers to the ferry terminal. It wasn't that quiet either probably because of the eid weekend. The hotel was crowded and families congregated at the balconies outside our room. Still after a nice meal and a couple of beers we slept well, and had a buffet breakfast before having to set off in the morning.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Next time we do this it will be easier. But once at the jetty we had to meet the man at counter 21 who guided us to the place where we would get our ticket and another window where we had to pay a marine reserve fee. Outside there were a lot of people waiting around but no obvious signage on where to catch the ferry. We asked at an agent's in the terminal building and she said we had to go to the next building over. Eventually we worked out that this was what we had just done, but someone showed us the departure terminal where a line was forming, so we got in it. This line was to exchange a ticket for a boarding pass, but the agent when it was our turn merely tore our ticket a certain way that only agents know how to do, and pointed us to gate 4, where the ferry was waiting outside. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Once on the ferry the whole process seemed simple and efficient. Next time we'll know how to do it and what to expect. Anyway, we had got that far, and next stop would be Salang on Tioman.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">To get back home, we got up at 4:30 a.m. to be sure and catch the boat leaving from this jetty to Mersing. We were told it would leave at 7 but in fact it left at 6:30, so good thing we were on hand for its departure. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">From the jetty in Mersing we got a taxi to the bas steson, good thing there as well because we were able to get a 10 am bus to KL we would have missed had we walked the km to the steson. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;"><i>Bobbi on the bus from Mersing to Kuala Lumpur</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">We arrived in KL at 4:15 pm. We bought a ticket for a bus to Penang leaving in 10 min, but KL TBS terminal is amazingly efficient. Buses less so because we didn't reach Penang, Butterworth actually, till 10 pm, then sat on a stationary shuttle bus for 30 min, to take us to the ferry leaving at 11:10 pm for the Georgetown jetty, That gets you to the Georgetown Jeti bas steson just in time to miss your last bus going wherever it is you're headed, because we weren't the only ones caught out by the unexpectedly long delay crossing the channel. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">Fortunately Grab provided a driver to take us way out to Tanjung Bunga and home for just $3.25. The whole trip home cost $10 each per bus or ferry ticket (except the shuttle in Butterworth was free and the Butterworth/Penang ferry is about half a dollar for two). Frankly, beats plane travel. There's no airport on Tioman anyway.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;"><b>Coda</b></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;">The videography here is by Vance Stevens, PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor #64181</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">For best results, view these videos using highest HD setting on YouTube</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"><br /></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Incidentally, I'm using a Rollei camera on these dives, a handheld camera similar to GoPro but different in some respects. First, it was a lot cheaper than a GoPro, and has markedly better battery life, but it is not as reliable and seamless to handle as is GoPro. If it's not monitored during the dive, it can switch off and possibly loose videos. When it switches off pressing the record button switches it on, and if your subject has appeared suddenly you might not notice that it's not yet recording. To use it effectively I've got to keep its display on throughout the dive. That means I need to check for display frequently and if I notice the display has gone off, I have to press record to wake it up. Only in that mode is it ready for quick deployment, but if you don't wake it up in time then it powers down and you have to essentially restart it, and functionality becomes unpredictable.</span><br />
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Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-13171747423078750702018-06-23T07:04:00.000-07:002020-06-27T00:26:04.485-07:00Turtles, Rays, Batfish, and Honeycomb Morays at the Aquarium, Daymaniyat Islands, Oman<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Logged dives #1589-1590</b><br />
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Diving was cancelled Friday due to bad weather, but had cleared enough by Saturday June 23 to make for a pleasant day out from Global Scuba in Al Azeiba, just behind the airport at Seeb near Muscat where I shot these videos mostly on the Aquarium reef in the protected Daymaniyat Island chain.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">This might have been my last chance to dive the Daymaniyats, something I have done often before. When we pulled up to the Aquarium anchorage, the boatman pointed to the water nearby and said there was a whale shark there. On most boats I've been on the boat would have gone over there and let us all snorkel with it, but our guide proceeded with anchoring the boat on the site. I figured we'd see the whale shark once we were in the water, but our guide made a fundamental error. He entered the water to check the current, and reported back that it was "small". However, when I entered the water, I found it was big, and I had to make a deliberate effort to fin myself to the anchor line and hang on. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">When I am in charge, I often enter the water without scuba, just as our guide did, to check the current, and when I detect one, I make a point to tell all the divers to go directly to the anchor line and hang on there, in order to prevent what happened next. My buddy entered the water after me, found himself in current, and tried to descend in it. However he was under-weighted and being unable to descend, was getting swept astern from us. The boatman should have thrown him a tag line, or been standing by to assist divers with any weight problems, but the boatman had entered the water with the mother of one of the divers, who had paid for a snorkel trip, so there was no one on the boat. I ascended back up the anchor line and got my buddy's attention and got him to swim to me at the surface and take my extended hand. I pulled his to the anchor line where he was then able to pull himself to the bottom, but by then all the exertion had cost him a lot of air, and buoyancy issues took a lot of what remained</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">There were three of us in our group. The third was a young lady beginning diver and the guide was essentially monitoring her (her mother had joined as the snorkeler). The Aquarium is a shallow reef about 6 or 7 meters at its top with walls to the north and sloping coral to the south. In order to manage this group, our guide opted to take us to the shallow side of the reef away from the wall where whale sharks like to hang out. As you can see in the video we enjoyed a lot of fish life as we rounded the reef and came up the other side. At one point I saw a marble ray at about 20 meters and popped down to it, but from there we spiraled back up to the top where at 35 minutes into the dive we had to send my buddy up the anchor line. The guide then led us back down the shallow part of the reef but returned us to the anchor line at 45 minutes because the young lady was low on air. I showed him my gauge with 110 bar remaining. He signaled me to swim around the top of the reef, so I stayed down.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">I understood that the guide would accompany the young lady on her safety stop on the line, and I expected he would come back to join me, but after some time I realized he was not returning. I had been wandering around the reef top enjoying the mesmerizing schools of batfish with mackerel circling overhead, the huge honeycomb morays, and turtles, and when I eventually left the reef top I found cuttlefish, sting rays, and a scorpion fish in the plateau below. Being alone I didn't want to push out to the walls and risk not being able to return to the boat in the current, but having a chance to thoroughly explore the top of the reef as the only diver on the site was a rare opportunity, and a unique way to dive the Aquarium, as you can see in the videos.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"><i>Map credit, Teresa Zubi (2013):</i> <a href="https://www.starfish.ch/dive/Oman.html">https://www.starfish.ch/dive/Oman.html</a></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Our second dive was at Guno's Trace, but visibility was poor there, compared to the clarity of the Aquarium. We found more turtles, rays, and honeycomb morays, and I included some of those videos in the one I posted to YouTube. I didn't take all that many. My camera battery was barely holding out, and I was using it abstemiously in case we came across a zebra shark (which we didn't). Still it was a lovely day out diving.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"><b>Cat saga</b></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Bobbi and I had an unusual reason for going to Muscat that weekend. We are leaving UAE, and we have been able to find no one where we live in Al AIn to offer a happy home to our gentle cat. The fact that most people we know are leaving soon for their summer holidays makes it inconvenient for them to take on a pet when they are anticipating being away for a month's vacation. However our son Dusty and his wife Michelle offered to come and get the cat and take him back to Doha with them. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Since Donald Trump's visit to KSA a little over a year ago, followed closely by the Saudi and other GCC countries announcing a blockade of Qatar, there has been no direct contact between UAE and Doha, making it difficult and expensive for us to see our children and grandchildren there. Oman has profited from this state of affairs in the year since the blockade was imposed since anything going from UAE to Qatar has to include a detour through a neutral country such as Oman, Kuwait, or Ethiopia (take your pick). Qurum Vet Clinic in Muscat has been able to capitalize on this by expediting shipment of pets between the two countries. It's expensive, but Dusty and Michelle offered to pick up the tab from their end and in response to such a gesture of concern and affection for our cat Lars (a.k.a. Lardy Bardy or simply Puddy Tat) we reciprocated by having the cat vaccinated, taken by a vet in Al Ain to the UAE border and back for paperwork and health check prior to our driving him ourselves to over the same border after work on Thursday and into Oman, where we had to import him (2.5 hours at the border and 400 dirhams in fees) and then drive him to Muscat where Dusty and Michelle had taken an apartment and were waiting for us with our grandson Kai, whom we hadn't seen since last Christmas. We used used to see both our sons and both grandchildren often when Doha was just a 45 minute flight away from UAE airports.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">The rest of the family were unable to make it on Saturday when I was finally able to go diving. Michelle was returning that afternoon to Doha with Kai and needed to be at the airport before my boat would return to base. Dusty would not have been able to do more than one dive since he was flying later that night, and he needed to help Michelle organize last minute documents for the cat and take her to the airport, and Bobbi opted to maximize her Bibi-time with Kai. So it was only me to pitch up at Global Scuba for the trip to the Aquarium and Guno's Trace, where I took the above videos.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"><b>Facebook comment</b></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"><span class="" style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><a class=" UFICommentActorName" data-ft="{"tn":";"}" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/hovercard.php?id=510619718&extragetparams=%7B%22is_public%22%3Afalse%2C%22hc_location%22%3A%22ufi_admin%22%7D" dir="ltr" href="https://www.facebook.com/vance.stevens.3?fref=ufi" style="color: #365899; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-weight: 600; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_self">Vance Stevens</a></span><span style="background-color: #eff1f3; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> </span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It's a problem everywhere. We've been diving in this area for 30 years. Oman and UAE used to have truly remarkable corals last century, but construction on the coastlines and encroachment of fishermen even in protected areas, their decimation of shark </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">populations, impact from shipping (bilge flotsam turns up on beaches) plus the impact of major storms and red tide (which in turn is a global warming issue) have all caused significant deterioration in what divers can still enjoy here.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"><br /></span>Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-82692005206427142802018-06-02T20:49:00.000-07:002018-06-10T10:21:24.802-07:00Diving Dibba Rock and Musandam with Freestyle Divers based in Dibba, Fujairah<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Logged dives #1586-1588</b><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">It's been a year now since our good buddy Chris Chellapermal closed up Nomad Ocean Adventure just north of the border between UAE and Oman and sold his operations there and in Dibba, Fujairah, to Darryl and Marine Owen, who restored the name Freestyle to the dive center originally established at the Royal Beach Hotel by our good dive-buddies Terry and Andrew Moore, and later sold to Chris, who changed the name to Nomad. Meanwhile, Bobbi and I learned in February that we would be leaving the UAE and in preparation for that have not been diving so much as before, but Darryl and Marine were interested in buying some of my equipment, and offered Bobbi and I free diving for a day if we'd drive it all over there. So on June 1, just a month out from our permanent departure from our home the last 21 years, we </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">loaded our car up with 500 kg of dive stuff</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">, and at long last dived once more with Freestyle Divers.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13.2px;">We drove up on Friday morning and made a dive on Dibba Rock that afternoon, just the two of us, Bobbi and I in the boat, plus the boatman, of course. Diving was decent and refreshing. We didn't see rays or turtles but we found the common reef and bottom dwellers amid schools of snappers, and if you're watching the video, did you see the two sharks? The last one was right at the end of the video.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13.2px;">We took a room at the Royal Beach hotel with a lanai view of Dibba Rock popping up out of the ocean, and dived the next day on a boat provided by Freestyle heading for Musandam from the Omani port of Dibba just over the border. There was just one other diver on the boat, Valerie Hickey from Ireland. Darryl had intended to join us but had to drop out at the last minute so I got to lead the trip, and direct the boatman to take us to dive wherever I thought would be appropriate, which is one of my favorite things to do in UAE and Oman.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13.2px;">Our first thought was Octopus Rock, but when we arrived there, I tested the water, and found a stiff surface current that pushed hard to the north, so I decided it might not be wise to dive there with so many other choices available.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13.2px;">We had Virage, the boatman, take us to Ras Morovi and put in at the bay there. It was a much easier entry, and a lovely dive. We saw</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"> the usual suspects, schools of blue triggers, jacks, a conch clinging to a rock, a batfish, a zebra shark egg case, a cuttlefish, a couple of rays, and finally, near the sea-chest rock cutout on the north side of Ras Marovi, a resting zebra shark. That was the highlight of the day, though I saw a zebra shark, what I thought at the time was a leopard shark, in almost the same spot a few years back in 2013 (though I didn't carry cameras back then)</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;"><a href="http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2013/04/certified-anand-padi-open-water-sting.html">http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2013/04/certified-anand-padi-open-water-sting.html</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.2px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13.2px;">Above is the video from the Ras Morovi dive. Our second dive on Saturday was at Lima Rock. We put in just west of the middle of the north side. Current was fairly benign, so we went all the way to the east point and rounded to the other side. In the video (below), we descend onto a fish trap with a trio of lionfish, then pan to the seabed where we found a feathertail ray, except the Rollei didn't engage to capture it. We return to the reef where we follow a free swimming moray that Bobbi pointed out to us, indicating with her tank banger. From there we move to the infamous point, now at slack current, where we encounter schools of jacks. We hang out there for a bit then cross from north to south where we are rewarded with more fish life and mesmerizing schools of jacks. These go swirling on for a long time in the video.</span></span><br />
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At the end of the dive Bobbi helped me deploy my SMB by sending a flood of bubbles into it from her alternate air source. This should have worked well except that the clip holding the SMB to the reel had closed outside of the plastic, so when the SMB headed it up, the force pulled the clip apart and the SMB went up independent of its reel. We had not been diving deep so I motioned the ladies to carry on and went up, slowly and safely, to retrieve the marker bouy, which had drifted with the current a little back toward the point. Virage saw me and came with the boat, and relieved me of my weights and gear, but I retained my mask, fins, and snorkel and swam off to the east to retrieve the marker buoy. Meanwhile the ladies surfaced further west and Virage went to retrieve them. I collected my SMB and was forced to drift with the current past the point while Valerie and Bobbi took their time getting back on the boat. The only down side was that my camera was with my gear on the boat, so when the school of a couple dozen huge barracuda that live out there came up underneath me to check me out, I had no way to photograph them, but that was a cool way to end the dive. Back on the boat I attached my SMB clip to the string on the reel in such a way that it would not come off again. Live and learn.</div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13.2px;"><br /></span></span>Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-53215836900110664862018-03-03T04:17:00.000-08:002018-03-05T07:33:18.212-08:00Diving from Khasab with Musandam Discovery, March 3, 2108<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Logged dives #1584-1585</b></span><br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Bobbi and I have had excellent dives in northern Musandam, either
going from Dibba on long boat trips to Fanaku, what Chris at Nomad Ocean Adventures used to call the far
north. We had also had good luck with Extra Divers, whose shop and guest house
occupied the promontory overlooking the camping beach just around the corner from the port, near town center, at Khasab. In the old
days when we used to go there before all this was built we used to camp on that
promontory to avoid the crowds on the beach. We could have it pretty much to
ourselves, the only noise being the 'putt putt' of boats passing by in the
morning, which we could watch overlooking the vast expanse of water while
sipping coffee heated from embers revived from our dinner campfire. <o:p></o:p></span></span>The promontory is visible, and just a short walk, from the luxurious Adana Khasab Hotel which has since been built on the spot where Extra Divers once stood. </div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Greg and Joyce Raglow were walking near our camping spot and waved to us from there when we pulled up to the hotel after the 4-hour drive from Al Ain, plus the double-border crossing less than an hour from Ras Al Khaima. Greg is one of my ex-dive students, open water and advanced. He's also an accomplished guitar player, and he and I have passed the guitar back and forth at many an open air evening outside at Nomad Ocean Adventure while sipping icy beverages churned out by Chris's infamous slurpie machine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We
can still enter Oman for 5 riyals visa fees paid at the border, special price
for GCC residents who fit certain job categories, teacher being one of them.
The inexpensive transit visa has been canceled though and now tourists are charged 20
riyals for the month long visa even though they might want to stay only a day
or two. This creates a considerable hardship for parents traveling with children, so
the hotels offer special Groupon rates to attract customers. The Adana Khasab
Hotel had one for 35 riyals (about $100 a night) for a delux room for
two with full buffet breakfast and all the expresso we could drink, so we took
advantage of a three day weekend to book Friday and Sat nights at the hotel and
we booked diving for Sat and Sunday.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I can’t say we were impressed that much with the dive shops. There
were three I could find online. One of them, </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent;"><a href="https://www.scubashade.com/khasab-diving">https://www.scubashade.com/khasab-diving</a>,</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> gives a Dubai phone number but their
website didn’t have enough information for us to actually make a booking in
Khasab. We reached someone at Ras Musandam by phone, </span><span style="background-color: transparent;"><a href="https://www.rasmusandamdiver.com/">https://www.rasmusandamdiver.com/</a>,</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> who said he would pick us
up at the Adana Khasab Hotel on Friday, but he didn’t take our name nor ask
what kind of divers we were, and when I emailed with that information there was
no reply. My last email was to say that the days of our three day weekend had
changed and we would not be there Friday after all, but would dive starting
Saturday. Again, no reply.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Meanwhile, Rommel at Musandam Discovery, </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent;"><a href="http://musandam-discovery-diving.com/">http://musandam-discovery-diving.com/</a>,</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> emailed us back straight
away with answers to whatever query we had, and even whatsapped us weather
updates to help us go forward with our trip. There was a storm system hanging
out over the area especially impacting the Dubai, RAK, Abu Dhabi coastline with
rough shamal whipped seas, but impacting less the Khasab side of the peninsula.
When Rommel assured us they would be diving Fri/Sat/Sun we confirmed our hotel
bookings and made plans to dive with Musandam Discovery.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the end sea conditions were rough and the boat trips were awash
with cold wind-driven waves strafing the boat, soaking everything and everyone. The boat had to
hide in coves out of the wind for dives, and the dive profiles were not that
ambitious. On the first dive the divemaster started us in the very protected
and shallow end of the cove and told us we would work our way to the not so
distant point and then turn around and come back. Mishaps happened with some divers
in the cold water, one had to surface due to ear problems, but Bobbi and Greg
and I went on as instructed, reef on our left, and INTO the current, which took
a bit of our air at the beginning of the dive. We were down to a hundred bar
when we got toward the point where the diving was starting to get interesting
with deeper rocks down to 25 meters or more, better vis, more scope for play,
and no current. At that point the guide signaled we should go back, so most of
the dive was in effect in the uninteresting shallows. I have not been expected
to dive from a boat at anchor and return to the boat since diving with BSAC last
century; most boats follow divers on one-way trips in Musandam. So this dive
was unexpectedly disappointing.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This was followed by snack of paratha bread spread with cheese and
jelly and washed down with water. There were also bananas on board. It’s good
to have something to eat between dives, but this was again beneath expectations
when in a competitive business people want to attract you back for a return
trip.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The next dive was a little better. We had schools of batfish and juvenile
barracudas, and a sting ray that played for the GoPro. But one diver signaled out
of air at 35 minutes leaving Bobbi and I to go off on our own another 15 but
not very ambitiously, so we didn’t see much. Then it was back up the narrow
steep ladder onto Suleiman’s boat with the seats too low for divers laden with
kit to effectively stand up, and the worst part was the trip back in the cold
wind and waves, wetsuits being our only protection, clothing not really an
option unless it were a sou’wester.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">All in all the experience plus the fact that a repeat the next day
would cost us over $100 each caused us to cancel our diving plans and get an
early start from the hotel after breakfast to arrive home in time to go for
a jog before sundown in the oasis back
home in Al Ain. We enjoyed the trip but were not thrilled with the diving, and
we’re not sure where to book next time we go, having found no one there yet to replace the
quality of a really well-run dive center the likes of Extra Divers.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-5795496314643565462017-11-14T17:17:00.002-08:002017-11-17T07:04:16.952-08:00Daytrip diving Daymaniyat Islands Al Ain to Mussanah, Nov 10, 2017<b>Logged dives #1582-1583</b><br />
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As I said on Facebook,<br />
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<span style="color: #1d2129;"><br /></span><span style="color: #1d2129;">Bobbi and I were drying out at the gills. It had been a month since our last dive. Fortunately some of the best diving in the region is within three hours driving of where we live in Al Ain. We have to cross the border into Oman and drive hectically down the coast from Sohar after dark down a 4-lane highway with aggressive drivers, annoying road construction, and poor lighting. But given a quick border crossing, we can get to a place to sleep in just three hours.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1d2129;">It's getting cool this time of year and we decided to take bedding in case we needed to sleep in the car. We've done that often in the past. It's fairly safe and quiet to just find a remote spot a short drive off the road and sleep in the back of the car. But our plan was to drive to the Suwaiq motel about 2.5 hours from our home and try and get a room there. Normally few sleep there, the action is in the night club area of the property. We like to stay there - the beer is cheap, local patrons colorful, even comical, rooms are well insulated from noise, and rooms are 20 riyals, around $60.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1d2129;">But then Bobbi noticed that for members of the Millennium club (she always joins these clubs at hotels where we stay, airlines we fly) there was a dive package for room, dinner, breakfast, and a day of diving that cost just $100 more than the diving would normally cost us (45 riyals each for one day, two dives). That was almost the cost of the rack price of the sumptuous buffet dinner provided at the luxury hotel, 14 riyals per person. So for an extra $40 over what we were planning to pay for just a room in Suwaiq and the diving that was the impetus of the trip, we could sleep in comfort at the hotel adjacent to the Sea Oman dive center, and eat like kings and queens on the lanai overlooking the boat harbor.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1d2129;">Our first dive was on Doc's Wall Nov 10, 2017</span><span style="color: #1d2129;">, far west Daymaniyats</span><span style="color: #1d2129;">: Antonia pointed out a lobster in a crack in the wall, so I had to photograph it. Then I pulled her fin because she passed right over a torpedo ray. Next we were mesmerized by a fishball ballet. We saw a nudibranch, several honeycomb morays, a scorpion fish that's hard to spot, banners and snappers, a passing sea snake, a yellowmouth moray, and a lion fish hiding out with a shy puffer, all photogenic.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1d2129;">The second dive was on Sira island. Almost the same drop for Doc's Wall, different direction. Here we see scorpion fish, morays, what happens when Antonia liberates a bag of bait fish tossed by someone overboard and then she points out a leopard shark. Further on, we find a small turtle, puffers, coronet fish, a sting ray, butterflies on the shallow reef top, and a trio of cautious cuttlefish right at the safety stop.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1d2129;">GoPro videography by Vance Stevens</span><br />
<span style="color: #1d2129;">PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor #64181</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1d2129;">Diving with my favorite dive buddy Bobbi Stevens</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129;"><br /></span></span>Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-7227145398931214272017-10-07T00:38:00.001-07:002017-10-07T09:28:07.319-07:00Fun diving Dibba Rock and 3-Rocks Fujairah UAE with favorite dive buddy Bobbi<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Logged dives #1580-1581</span></b><br />
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Almost immediately after Bobbi and I <a href="http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2017/09/red-sea-liveaboard-diving-simply-over.html" target="_blank">returned to UAE from Egypt</a>, I had to surrender my passport for my annual UAE visa renewal. This meant I would not be able to travel to Oman or Musandam and cross borders or checkpoints for the next few weeks, so my diving would be restricted to UAE for the time being.<br />
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The weekend after landing on a Saturday night flight from Cairo we felt like resting, so the following weekend we were thinking to go diving because Sunday was supposed to be a day off work, but later in the week we found out we had to work that day anyway, but the NEXT Thursday was slated to be off in lieu, so we planned to go diving that following weekend. As it turned out, that day-off was canceled as well, but we were beginning to dry out around the gills so on Friday, October 6, after working as usual on Thursday, we at least got to sleep a bit longer on Friday. We were up by 7, had the car packed by 8:30, and a little after that we were on the road, driving across the desert and through the east coast mountain range, to arrive at the Miramar Hotel right about 11:30, just in time to get ready to dive with <a href="https://www.diversdownuae.com/" target="_blank">Divers Down</a> at 12:30. We had booked two dives, that one and again at 3:30.<br />
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We had been looking forward to renewing acquaintance with Paul, the colorful owner we had last dived with when I <a href="http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2016/06/certified-mohammed-chowdhury-as-padi.html" target="_blank">trained Mohammed Chowdhury there in May the year before</a>. We found the center to be under new management but many of the friendly and helpful Filipino staff were still there, among other old friends.<br />
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<i>In poor visibility on Dibba Rock, Fujairah, UAE, we nevertheless see schools of fish, lion fish, nudibranchs, flounders, batfish, rainbow wrasse, a puffer, and pipefish :-)</i></div>
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The diving wasn't great this weekend. There was a steady breeze from the sea causing small waves to wash on shore and some chop on the boat ride to Dibba Rock, our first dive site. Dibba Rock is normally one of our favorite sites in that area, but today the vis was soupy. We started the dive looking for rays in the sand around the deep anchor. We finned south against the current and then let it carry us back over the sand, always within site of the blurred shapes of rocks looming off the outcrops. We saw nothing but when we caught up with Rex and his group he asked in diver sign language if we had seen the ray that had apparently just taken flight from there. That was about it for excitement on that dive.<br />
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<span style="text-align: start;"><i>In this video from our Sharm (Three Rocks) dive, we focus on a couple of box fish, a banner fish ballet, a moray in orange soft coral, a trio of batfish, and schools of jacks, snappers and fusiliers</i></span></div>
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The next dive was at Sharm Rock, what Divers Down are now calling Three Rocks, as in the past, and before that, when I started diving in UAE, they used to call it the Pinnacles. In fact, in the old days we used to pull off the road just south of Sandy Beach and snorkel out to it on a compass heading dead east from shore, especially at night for advanced course night dives. There used to be resident school of barracuda there, lots of morays, and decent vis before they started building breakwaters from all the small harbors on the coast there, extending their ports, and building luxury villas on the coast with dedicated yacht harbors. There have been many impacts on the marine ecosystem in that stretch of coastline in the past 20 years, some of them natural, such as Cyclone Gonu and the red tide that one year persisted for 6 months, devastating the coral and many of the creatures who had lived on it. It's been bouncing back, but it's not like before. It used to be a pristine dive area, with lots of great sites with generally good visibility teeming with life and color.<br />
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Today the color was in shades of greens and browns, and even red as we went toward the south end of the rock. A thick red algae bloom had colored the water rust, and shades of orange where the sun was trying to shine through. It was disorienting because we couldn't tell if the darker patches were rock or just algae. I tried to aim us north toward where we'd put in but came upon a wall forcing us to head west for a seemingly long time, so finally I decided there was no rock there to the right, just algae, and headed through it to the north. Bobbi came away with itching from the mild toxin produced by the algae. At least the fish were plentiful. Though hard to see due to poor vis, there were often present swooping schools of jacks, snappers, and fusiliers.Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-44806669294965082492017-09-10T18:16:00.001-07:002017-09-23T04:30:04.899-07:00Red Sea liveaboard diving: Simply over-hyped?<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Logged dives #1564-1579</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Bobbi and I joined our good friend Nicki Blower on a dive trip she has repeated often in the Red Sea. The trip is billed as "Simply the Best" and has been recommended to us by other friends as well as something we should do at least once in our lives. It covers stops at Brothers, Daedalus, and Elphinstone reefs in Egypt's Red Sea, sites noted for pelagic sharks and particularly hammerheads. Our experience was more sanguine. We saw a couple of thresher sharks, three or four grey or perhaps white-tip oceanic reef sharks, and a few more easily identifyable and in-your-face longimanus oceanic white tip sharks. Some people from our boat sighted hammerheads on two or three of the dives, though only one or two at a time, and not nearby. Nicki said she saw one at a distance. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">She also saw this "</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129;">Carcharhinus Longimanus rushing over at a vast rate of knots!</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129;"> </span><span class="_47e3 _5mfr" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; line-height: 0; margin: 0px 1px; vertical-align: middle;" title="smile emoticon"><img alt="" class="img" height="16" role="presentation" src="https://www.facebook.com/images/emoji.php/v9/f4c/1/16/1f642.png" style="border: 0px; vertical-align: -3px;" width="16" />"</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It doesn't matter that our expectations of seeing schools of hammerhead sharks were not met. This happened with us also on Lyang Lyang where we had gone to see hammerheads, but that trip was remarkable for what we saw besides on the reefs of the atoll, teeming with other kinds of sharks and memorable fish-life, so despite the scarcity of hammerheads at that time of year, we were in no way disappointed with the trip as a whole, blogged here: </span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2016/04/my-logged-dives-1418-1429-sun-friday.html">http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2016/04/my-logged-dives-1418-1429-sun-friday.html</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white;">I've dived in the Red Sea many times since the 1970s and I've always found the reef fish life to be extraordinary. </span></span><span style="background-color: white;">From the videos at my post on Layang Layang you can see what we were expecting the Red Sea to be like.</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">If you compare with those below you could say that Layang Layang would be a strong competitor for "Simply the Best."</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">But others might find a much different experience. This blog post is meant to simply record what Bobbi and I found when we went there.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><b><i>First day out, Sunday Sept 3, Ras Toromi</i></b></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">We arrived in Port Galeib on Saturday Sept 2, 2017, in time to board the Okeanos Xplorer and settle in for the night. The boat departed early a.m. and took us to Ras Toromi where we did two check-out dives anchored at the same spot on a shallow reef on our way to the two Brothers islands another 6 hours distant. As often happens in Egypt, even with shore-based diving, several boats will anchor at about the same spot on <span id="docs-internal-guid-9eb7fdc4-88e5-68d2-f41c-f35adea7199f"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the part of the reef most sheltered from weather and seas</span></span>. Diving is done either by jumping from the boat or from zodiacs (each boat carries two on deck).</span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">On our first dive, first day, we did the easiest possible entry, jumping from the boat, and guided by the divemaster we'd be with the rest of the trip, we went down current (too easy) but then had to beat our way back against it, plus pass the test we had been given for the end of the dive -- EVERYone had to deploy their surface marker buoy, also known as SMB or simply the sausage. These are tricky to deploy in the best of circumstances. I sent mine up and then helped Bobbi with hers. We were trying to hold our place against the stiff current and also to keep our lines from getting tangled. When we surfaced we found ourselves in a spider web of mooring lines from numerous boats with both our SMBs needing delicate management to avoid entanglement with the ropes let alone from each other (normally we'd just put one up per buddy pair; this was an unusual complication). We managed to keep our lines free and make some progress against the current (our boat was the last one down, wouldn't you know), but my snorkel snagged when I tried to duck under a mooring line and got turned down into the water, causing me to suck salt. I tried to free it with one hand while grasping my reel and lines with the other but the mouthpiece came away from the tube and disappeared. I felt a bit clumsy, and meanwhile a zodiac appeared to collect us. Bobbi handed up her tank and was hauled aboard, and I put my sausage on the dinghy, and freed of that, it was easier for me to just fin myself to the back of our boat and climb the ladder. Not the most auspicious of starts, though.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">The next dive was done from the zodiac. The main idea was to get people accustomed to that means of entry in relatively benign conditions. I don't remember much from the dive, and the videos of what I thought noteworthy from both are captured in the video above.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Second day out, Monday Sept 4, Little Brother</i></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>The video shows</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>A parade of distant oceanic reef sharks and several barracuda, seen over the course of three dives on Little Brother, September 4, 2017</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">We spent the first part of some of our dives on the Brothers islands and Daedalus swimming into the blue in hopes of seeing hammerheads. On one or two of our three dives on Little Brother reef we saw white tip or gray reef sharks swimming in the blue which nevertheless made digital impressions visible to my GoPro. Apart from that I didn't find much of note to take pictures of, except for the barracuda that hovered high up off the reef. They didn't appear in schools here, just a few at a time. At some point a lion fish on the coral wall caught my eye and I photographed that.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Third day out, Tuesday Sept 5, Big Brother</i></b></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On our first dive of the day we went out in zodiacs and put in just short enough of the wreck we expected to visit at 30 meters that we had to fin hard against an opposing current to reach it. This was seriously hard work and I lost 50 bar doing that, and once we turned and went with the current, there was not much to see on the way going back to the boat at anchor. After that I decided to pay 30 Euros for use of a 15 liter cylinder for the rest of the trip, money well-spent as it kept me on even par with Bobbi’s air consumption, given her smaller lungs. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We conducted our second dive from the boat, which remained at anchor in the same spot during our three dives on Little Brother that day. This was one of the better dives of the trip for sharks. A longimanus oceanic white tip swam up to the boat as we were descending from it, as you can see in the video taken from below. We were heading into the current again, the same direction we had finning to the wreck earlier that morning, but we were closer in to the reef so it was more doable, but still it was a slog to reach the point where the thresher sharks were. I saw one quite clearly and got a shot of it, though it is more difficult to distinguish against the coral it was swimming against as it reached blue water and the limits of visibility. As we had to work up current to get there, and we were now at 30 meters, we couldn't stay long, so we drifted back to boat where we found a humphead wrasse and another longimanus that swam amongst us as we were approaching the boat near the surface.</span><span style="color: black; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="color: black; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="color: black; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For the third dive we were given two options. The dive leader suggested we take the zodiacs to the point opposite the one where the threshers were, drop in on another smaller wreck at 30 meters, and swim (again upcurrent) back to the boat. When I asked why we were always having to work into the current I was told the currents were mild and it wouldn’t be a problem, despite what we had experienced on the two dives earlier that day. Others wanted to repeat the first dive, which meant they would jump from the boat, and go again against the current. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A third option would have been to drop on the farthest upcurrent point where we had seen threshers earlier and easy swim back to the boat with the current, and work our way back up to the surface there with chance of seeing longimanus, but this option was not on the table. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the end our group decided to go to the wreck and swim up a new part of the reef. The current was perhaps diminished, but it was enough to keep us pumping the whole way back to the boat. We didn’t go onto the wreck because of our deco situation third dive of the day and as we moved along the reef, we saw little of interest until I notice a thresher shark moving about 20 meters down and dropped in on it. Again I saw it clearly and thought I got a nice video up close as it passed beneath me but the fish eye GoPro makes it look further. That was pretty much it for that dive. I managed to pump my way back to the boats just as I got down to 50 bar, Bobbi right behind, but complaining about having to keep up with me, while the others in our group were strewn behind.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><b><i>Fourth day out, Wednesday Sept 6, Daedalus</i></b></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>After diving on Daedalus some from our boat visited the lighthouse where they encountered divers from other boats. From this we had reports from one of the other boats that technical divers using tri-mix (and one who told our informant he had used air) found a school of a dozen hammerheads at below 70 meters off Deadalus. It makes sense that they were present, but at depth, because hammerheads stay below the thermocline and avoid the warm shallower water. Temperatures at the depths we were diving were no less than 26 (degrees centigrade) at Brothers and 28 at Daedalus (where the hammerheads were seen at 70 meters).</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222;">We went looking for hammerheads the first of our three dives there, but not much was happening for us diving to 40 on Daedalus reef, September 6, 2017. We saw only a few barracudas in the course of three dives on the reef, all to or from, or from and to, the boat at anchor.</span></span> </span></span><br />
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-9eb7fdc4-8946-136b-7621-a9e1627ac1bd"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Our last dive on Deadalus was oddly planned and executed. It was a jump from the boat and planned as a swim from the boat at anchor to Anenome City. The dive leader said in the briefing that many people start from zodiacs on Anenome City and work their way back to the boats, but he preferred we go from the boat at anchor and arrive at the destination where the zodiac would pick us up. He mentioned that it should take us 55 minutes to reach Anenome city, and that is exactly what it took Bobbi and I.</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We were the only ones in our group who made it that far, and on the way we encountered many groups of divers coming the other way, having been dropped at </span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Anenome City by zodiac, and hoping to end up back at or near the boats at anchor</span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">When I say that Bobbi and I reached </span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Anenome City, I mean we reached the approximate location, but did not know what we were looking for, so we did not round the corner where we would have found it. </span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">This is because the dive leader had mispronounced the destination during the briefing, saying it was an-en-ohm, making us think he was saying animal city. We didn't find out till later our destination was anenomes (an-en-ohm-eeez). He also did not brief us on one other important clue, which is that </span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Anenome City was just around the corner of the wall we had been on for 55 minutes of the dive.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I discovered this when I mentioned it to the dive leader back on the boat after the dive, and he said, oh, you were there! Had we known what to look for in advance we would have rounded that corner, but at the part of the dive where we saw the wall end we were right at the time we should start our ascent, so thinking we were looking for an animal city, and we might have passed it for all we knew, we commenced our safety stop. We were no longer with our guide, he had been surfacing the other divers for the past 20 minutes, and they were all on the zodiac when it came to collect us, an hour after we'd started our dive.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It was a little disappointing to have been so near and yet so far, and I feel that the experience would have been much improved if we had been dropped at the destination. However, I've since been on YouTube and found other people's videos of Anenome City. It appears to be a beautiful spot but anenomes and the clown and other reef fishes they attract are something you can see on many reefs in the world. Still I think we all would have appreciated better attention to customer experience in how this dive was carried out.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Other divers' views of Anenome City, Daedalus:</span></span></span><br />
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<li><a href="https://youtu.be/Y_efuPJfMGg"><span style="font-family: inherit;">https://youtu.be/Y_efuPJfMGg</span></a></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://youtu.be/SV5q9ya8dhM">https://youtu.be/SV5q9ya8dhM</a></span></li>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><i>Fifth day out, morning of Thursday Sept 7, 35 minutes at Elphinstone</i></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We had been very much looking forward to finally reaching Elphinstone reef after three days of swimming at depth hunting hammerheads on the two Brothers and Daedalus. Elphinstone is reputed to be productive for sharks and mantas. Divezone has this description of it, from</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://divezone.net/divesite/elphinstone-reef">https://divezone.net/divesite/elphinstone-reef</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Elphinstone Reef is also famous for being one of the few places on Earth where you can dive with the Oceanic Whitetip Shark as well as Harmmerhead Sharks. The best chances to spot an Oceanic Whitetip Shark (also called longimanus) are from October to December. Manta Rays (mainly from May to August), Dolphins and Tiger Sharks can also sometimes be spotted. In addition to these giants, there are also plenty of pelagic fishes like trevallies, Barracudas and Tunas. The reef life is teeming with myriads of fishes all around Elphinstone.”</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The next paragraph mentions that</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">“The best place to dive Elphinstone Reef is from Marsa Alam on a day trip. Many liveaboards also go there”</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is good advice. We saw speedboats full of divers coming from shore-based operations, making their way through the welter of liveaboards at anchor. One surprise on waking up on a liveaboard at Elphinstone is that you can see the shore clearly, an easy boat distance away. Speedboats can be flexible, drop in on any favorable location on the reef, and not be constrained to getting divers on and off pitching platforms in rough seas via zodiacs.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This was the problem this morning at Elphinstone. The wind was up, the boat had been rolling all night, and now we found ourselves in a welter of 9 other big boats, which meant, with ours, 20 zodiacs buzzing about in the water, complicating the logistics of getting divers in and out safely. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This led to disappointing diving due to controls designed to prevent any incident in waves. We were admonished to stay in our groups and with the guide, and we were in the group with the heavy breather who had to start his safety stop after only half an hour in the water. We barely had time to photograph a turtle surrounded by other divers photographing each other photographing the turtle on top of the plateau, and that was at 30 meters so when our guide signalled we should go deeper where the sharks were, Bobbi and I were down to our last minute of no-deco time and had to ascend, as the rest in our group were already doing. A big fish appeared suddenly as we were coming up, but we couldn’t investigate since our group was going to the safety stop. Nicki and I at least found the Elphinstone memorial before having to come up, see it close up here, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elphinstone_Reef_memorial.jpg">https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elphinstone_Reef_memorial.jpg</a>. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; white-space: pre-wrap;">And it’s in the video.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; white-space: pre-wrap;">But that 30 minute dive comprised our Elphinstone reef experience on this cruise. Our boat pulled anchor and retreated to the shelter of Abu Dabab where the cooks could at least work in the kitchen without spilling boiling water, and although we didn’t find the high powered diving we were expecting, there was much to entertain us in the calmer water there.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><b style="color: #222222;"><i>After moving the boat, afternoon of Thursday Sept 7, 2 hour-long dives on Abu Dabab</i></b></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><b style="color: #222222;"><i>First the pinnacles</i></b></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/xT7nZgotx9Y/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="380" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xT7nZgotx9Y?feature=player_embedded" width="540"></iframe></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><b style="color: #222222;"><i><br /></i></b></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><b style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In lieu of Elphinstone, we move to Abu Dabab, where we see blue spotted rays feeding in the sand, a turtle, titan triggers and reef other fish amid some lovely shallow underwater pinnacles</span></b></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><b style="color: #222222;"><i>Then the Wreck</i></b></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">Afternoon dive on Abu Dabab at the wreck, where we see a crocodile fish, a school of barracudas, green morays, batfish, and a cameleon scorpion fish at the end of the dive.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"><b style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><i>Sixth day out, Friday Sept 8</i></b></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">Thursday Night dive on Abu Sail, a day dive there the next morning, and snorkeling </span></span></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">at Marsa Shouna</span></i></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">The last video above is a compilation of two dives on Abu Sail and of a snorkel experience at Marsa Shouna. We cruised to Abu Sail in the afternoon after wrapping up operations at Abu Dabab. It was a short trip, and we arrived before nightfall and anchored near the rock sticking up above the gentle shore break near the newly developed resort. The rock was spelled Abu Sail on the dive site charts that the crew produced, and pronounced Abu Sayeel. The dive would normally be done as a shore dive.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Nicki and I dived it that evening. We found some small creatures but not as much as we sometimes see on night dives, except that there was a turtle we could follow around in the dark. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">After dinner on the boat and a good night's sleep, we rose early to dive it again in the morning. There were no sharks or adrenaline inducing creatures, but we found a turtle and some large green moray eels. Bobbi, Nicki, and I were accompanied on the dive by one of the French divers from our boat. Different approaches to photography are evident in the videos. Finding a turtle in a crevice, I ease myself over the rocks and use my reef hook to carefully support myself against my own momentum on a rock, avoiding the living coral. I use breathing to adjust my buoyancy to ease down on the turtle, get a good closeup picture, and then breathe in to rise away from it, leaving it undisturbed. Then the French diver, whom</span></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> we dubbed Pierre de la lumiere,</span><span style="font-family: inherit; white-space: pre-wrap;"> comes along with his bright lights which immediately cause the turtle to turn. He grasps the coral with his hands to get his apparatus into the crevice where the turtle was resting and lights it up like fire. He lays his body on the coral to wedge himself into position to film the turtle as it takes fright and makes its escape. Later, as I pass over a bommie to get a glimpse of a green moray there for my GoPro, the French diver again grasps the coral with his hand to better position himself for a bright-light shot of the moray at whatever cost to the ecosystem.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bobbi and I ended our diving with a parting shot of a blue spotted ray and an ascent to the Okeanos Xplorer anchored peacefully opposite Abu Sail. Our diving was over because we would be flying next morning from Hurghada to Cairo and on to Abu Dhabi. The boat would be going next to Marsa Shouna where there was a patch of sea grass and a chance we might see a dugong, we were told. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; white-space: pre-wrap;">Marsa Shouna was a huge bay with green water. Some of the dozens of boats anchored there were serving as platforms for diving schools. It was shallow and not inviting for diving from the boat. The dive leader gamely led a dive anyway </span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">for those not flying the next morning. The rest of us donned snorkels and puttered about the rocks and tried to find the patch of sea grass. There were no dugongs but we did find a turtle which I freedived down to and took pictures of similarly to if I'd been diving.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"><b><i>In retrospect</i></b></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">So, what was different about this Red Sea trip? Relatively sparse fish life for one thing, coral perhaps damaged by increasing water temperatures in the Red Sea? Is this true?</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">This </span></span></span><span style="color: #222222;">July 16, 2010 report from </span><span style="color: #222222;">Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found:</span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">"In a pioneering use of computed tomography (CT) scans, scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have discovered that carbon dioxide (CO2)-induced global warming is in the process of killing off a major coral species in the Red Sea."</span><br />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100715152909.htm" style="font-family: inherit;">https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100715152909.htm</a></li>
</ul>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">and a KAUST study published in 2011 reveals</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">"The Red Sea has experienced a sharp warming in its waters since the mid-1990s faster than the global averages, according to a recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters."</span><br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.natureasia.com/en/nmiddleeast/article/10.1038/nmiddleeast.2011.119" style="font-family: inherit;" target="_blank">http://www.natureasia.com/en/nmiddleeast/article/10.1038/nmiddleeast.2011.119</a></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">On the other hand recent studies suggest that northern Red Sea corals have been shown in a 6-week lab experiment to not only survive but thrive in water temperatures 2 degrees warmer than found at present</span></span><br />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2131313-corals-that-grow-faster-in-warm-water-could-beat-climate-change/" style="font-family: inherit;">https://www.newscientist.com/article/2131313-corals-that-grow-faster-in-warm-water-could-beat-climate-change/</a></li>
<li><a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.12356/abstract">http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.12356/abstract</a></li>
</ul>
There are many other factors to affect what you will see on your dives in the Red Sea. Bobbi and I are in our late 60s and despite our frequent dive activities, as can be seen from this blog, we tend to be grouped with the weaker and less experienced divers. As mentioned earlier, one of those divers was not able to monitor and regulate his air consumption and often hung above us where the dive guide would have to go to him and deploy his marker buoy, effectively cutting short the diving for the rest of us. The stronger divers will group around the more experienced dive guide and will be better positioned to get to the animals first and stay down longer, and it is axiomatic with animal viewing that success correlates with time spent where the animals are. Weather as we saw was not conducive to diving on Elphinstone, at least in the judgement of our boat crew. We were between seasons for many of the animals we had come to see. Global warming might be disputed by some, but anyone with a thermometer can detect an increase in water temperatures in oceans throughout the world, driving the pelagic fish to find cooler water deeper, and causing coral to decline with consequences to the health of the reef as a whole.<br />
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So whereas we enjoyed our trip, as we always do diving, our expectations ran ahead of what we experienced, and you can consider this when planning your trip, but also consider the factors involved and whether you can do something about them to improve your chances.Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-52665918422511095062017-08-27T00:55:00.000-07:002017-08-30T08:20:31.080-07:00Diving Daymaniyats with Global Scuba in Seeb - Bobbi and I and our son Dusty<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Logged dives #1560-1563</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">Diving in the Daymaniyats<i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Friday August 25 and Saturday August 26</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Friday morning at Global Scuba, we found that diving had been canceled the day before. Seas had calmed down by now but there was still enough of a chop on the water that the boatmen couldn’t see the telltale tips of the whale shark fins that are usually visible when seas are glassy. Next day the weather was calmer still, but enough of a ripple remained that again, we spotted no whale sharks. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Visibility on the dive sites was not good, but at the Aquarium, our first dive sight, the creatures were there. I spent the whole dive chasing after turtles, batfish, scorpion fish, pretty schools, and flitting shoals of fish life, shooting them with my new camera.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I was using the new camera I’d bought to replace the GoPro Hero 2 whose casing had flooded recently in Musandam, causing the demise of that GoPro. The new camera was a Rollei, a model that compared well to GoPro according to the comparison articles I pulled up on the Internet while standing at the display in the store, but at half the price (we can get the Hero 5 in UAE but surprisingly, not the underwater housings). I had bought it as my backup camera, but decided to give it a go at the Aquarium. It seemed to work well. I liked it. On our second dive, I used my remaining GoPro, my Hero 3. On that one I came upon a leopard shark early in the dive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Next day, I took the Rollei again to Hayoot Run and shot more films. At this location, Bobbi and I descended on top of a turtle. The Rollei battery was better than one in the GoPro, which can barely make two dives, so I used the Rollei again on the second dive, which ended in the guide finding us a nice leopard shark.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>On Friday Aug 25,</b> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">we dived the Aquarium and Titto's Run, both shown on these maps</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">On Titto's we were reunited with a dive guide named Arif who is distinctive in my videos from his black hood. Arif led us on one of our most memorable dives in Oman in October 2016. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The outstanding videos from those dives are posted here:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2016/10/diving-and-snorkeling-with-whalesharks.html">https://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2016/10/diving-and-snorkeling-with-whalesharks.html</a></span><br />
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On Saturday Aug 26, we dived Hayut Run and (I think) Three Sisters<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nXFQQ7omGiA/WaZ2aQVCMDI/AAAAAAAAETw/-ALphcgrrHYU-PzMwUze_ckLCrBjWuTpwCEwYBhgL/s1600/2017-08-30_1223daymaniyats.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="542" data-original-width="806" height="428" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nXFQQ7omGiA/WaZ2aQVCMDI/AAAAAAAAETw/-ALphcgrrHYU-PzMwUze_ckLCrBjWuTpwCEwYBhgL/s640/2017-08-30_1223daymaniyats.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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The maps come from scubatravel.co.uk, here<br />
<a href="http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/arabian-sea/oman-diving.html">http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/arabian-sea/oman-diving.html</a><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">Camera Woes</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">When I got home, I found ten videos in the Video folder on my Rollei SIM card, numbered FH00001 to 10. The first video was the turtle that Bobbi and I had seen on Saturday, the 8<sup>th</sup> was the leopard shark at the end of the 2<sup>nd</sup> dive, and 9 and 10 were pictures of Dusty and Bobbi and I ascending from our dive on Friday (Dusty was flying back to Doha on Saturday and couldn't dive that day though he came with us on the boat). How could that be, that the pictures were out of order, and where were the videos from the Aquarium and from the experimental footage I had shot when I’d unpacked the camera for the very first time?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The answer soon dawned on me. The camera was overwriting videos taken in previous sessions. There were no test videos I took when I unpacked the camera and tried it out because these had been overwritten by footage from the Aquarium on Friday. Then those videos were overwritten by the ones from Hayoot and Three Sisters on Saturday, but I had taken only 8 videos on the 2 dives, so only the last two, 9 and 10, remained from the day before, and appeared in sequence to have followed the videos taken Saturday.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">On one of those dives, we had encountered a huge black stingray heading up a wall. I caught up with it as I thought it was about to disappear over the reef but it turned and instead came down the wall and right at me. I kept my camera trained on it as it swirled in tight circles around me, biomass rippling everywhere, it's lethal spike safely stored as its tail passed just beyond my fins. It would have made great video, but alas, it was lost.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So, in my film for the weekend, I just compiled the videos I had from my Rollei, and from my reliable GoPro (which would all be from Titto's Run) into one film sequence. All tolled, there are a turtle, a couple of leopard sharks, morays, scorpion fish, cuttlefish, nudibranchs, lionfish … but no huge stingrays.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’ll get over it :-)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">Getting there and sticking around</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">It’s getting that time of year to do a visa renewal here in
UAE so I’ve been crossing borders at every opportunity lately. We were in Oman
diving from the Millennium Hotel in Musannah a couple of weeks ago (<a href="http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2017/08/whale-sharks-are-back-and-leopard.html">http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2017/08/whale-sharks-are-back-and-leopard.html</a>)
and this week we were planning to repeat the adventure diving again from
SeaOman, but Dusty was alone in Doha and decided to fly down to Muscat's Seeb airport for the weekend. Bobbi and I picked him up from the airport and we all went
diving Friday in the Daymaniyats from the Muscat direction. And next weekend
we’re taking advantage of an Eid holiday week to do a liveaboard in the
southern Red Sea, departing from Port Galeib in Egypt. After that I hand in my
passport to the UAE visa authorities and I’ll be without it for a month.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Mussanah is about 3 hours from Al Ain whereas Seeb takes at least another hour to reach, so Seeb is not our destination of choice from where we live, though diving
from Seeb is the closest way to get to the Aquarium, one of our favorite dive
sites in east </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">of the Daymaniyats </span>archipelago<span style="font-family: inherit;">. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We set out on Thursday from Al Ain at about 4:30, a bit late
because I was held back at work until 1:30 (we can usually leave earlier than that since the students leave are gone by 12:45). Dusty’s plane was due to land at 10:00 pm and we
figured we’d have time on our hands before we needed to go get him. </span><br />
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We felt so relaxed about time that we decided to go check out one of our favorite haunts on that coast, the Suwaiq Motel. We used to stay there often. It's an Omani night club on the road to Rustaq that has rooms of adequate quality for only 20 riyals (200 dirhams) and serves beer for a riyal a tall can (price varies depending on choice and may have gone up). Lately we haven't been able to book because no one answers the phone, and we assumed they had closed down. But now we had a chance to drive over and see, and we were happy to find it open and functioning pretty much as usual. They told us their phone had been cut off, but we can email Rakesh for room reservations. You can read about this locally colorful place from the previous times we stayed here:<br />
<ul>
<li>November 2010<br /><a href="http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2010/12/diving-in-oman-bandar-khayran-nov-17.html">http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2010/12/diving-in-oman-bandar-khayran-nov-17.html</a></li>
<li>October 2011 -<br /><a href="http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2011/10/diving-in-damaniyite-islands-with.html">http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2011/10/diving-in-damaniyite-islands-with.html</a></li>
<li>December 2013 -<br /><a href="http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2013/12/fun-diving-with-extra-divers-daymaniyat.html">http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2013/12/fun-diving-with-extra-divers-daymaniyat.html</a><br />and <a href="http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2013/12/fun-diving-daymaniyats-with-extra.html">http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2013/12/fun-diving-daymaniyats-with-extra.html</a></li>
<li>May 2014<br /><a href="http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2014/05/fun-diving-around-jun-island-damaniyats.html">http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2014/05/fun-diving-around-jun-island-damaniyats.html</a></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We continued another hour and a half to Seeb (another half hour short of Muscat proper) where we'd booked
in at the Novotel. We used to go a lot when we lived at SQU just up the road in Al Khod,
except now the hotel was called the Golden Tulip </span>(the Novotel had an infamous Break the Can night once a week, we'd drive there and weave home; don't drive like that any more ;-)<span style="font-family: inherit;">. We didn’t get there until about
8:45 at night, and as it turned out, roads have been reconfigured all over Oman to the
point where our GPS can’t guide us accurately. We were in sight of the hotel
just opposite from the airport in Seeb but our GPS tried to take us there on a
no-longer-existent road, which turned out to have been sealed off to make room
for a new overpass (interchange). We had to continue on the freeway (dual carriageway) for at
least ten km past the hotel exit and when we doubled back, now on the opposite side of the road
from where we wanted to be, we took a turn that we hoped would loop us back to
the correct side, but it veered off and took us the opposite way where they are
building the new airport. We managed to exit for Al Athaiba, take the beach
road again the opposite way we wanted to go, pass right in front of the Civil
Aviation Club where we’d be diving and sleeping the next day and night, and come up
through the town of Al Athaiba where we could get back on the dual carriageway
and track back again toward the Golden Tulip. We managed to avoid repeating our
error and ended up at the interchange on the bridge where we had been sidetracked before, but coming
from a different direction this time. This put us on the Muscat expressway
which would have taken us waaayyy inland except there was an obscure exit that
brought us out in a big loop and landed us at our hotel.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It was almost 9:30 pm by the time we managed to check in.
They gave us a lovely room with a big double bed right near the elevator, but
we had booked, as it said on our booking form, two twin beds, since unbeknownst
to them, we were bringing Dusty back with us. So we got the room changed to one
way down the hall. It smelled of smoke but it had the right number of beds. By now it was time to get Dusty at the airport. Seeb airport is chaos now that flights to Doha cannot use UAE airports or airspace - all that traffic is not funneled though such places as Muscat, Kuwait, and of all places Addis Ababa! I took advantage of the traffic gridlock outside arrivals to hold my place near the curb (kerb) while Bobbi ran in to collect Dusty. Half an hour later they emerged, just as I was starting to be hassled by traffic police.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Half an our after that we emerged from the late night traffic jam outside the airport and crept to the Golden Tulip side of that same interchange (normally a 3 minute drive from the airport). We found the obscure exit ok and stopped for pizza so we could have leftovers for breakfast. Back at the hotel we found our room </span>was next to a room of revelers who stayed up all night talking loudly and slamming doors. <span style="font-family: inherit;">I managed to sleep
thanks to white noise from my Kindle.</span></div>
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Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-13345036286054556062017-08-05T00:15:00.000-07:002017-08-13T07:04:54.060-07:00Whale sharks are back, and leopard sharks and rays in the Daymaniyat Islands, <b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Logged dives #1556-1559</b><br />
<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"><br /></b><b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Friday and Saturday, August 4-5, 2017</b><br />
<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"><br /></b>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Summer time in the Arabian peninsula and you could say the livin' is easy, except it's so darned hot out. But in such conditions one obvious solution is to take advantage of two facts. One is that a peninsula is surrounded by water 25 degrees cooler than its adjacent land mass, and the other is that hotels in the region offer bargain prices to attract customers during what here is their off season. So it was that on Thursday after work Bobbi and I packed our dive gear into our car and drove over the border to Sohar and then took the road east as far as Mussanah, about halfway to Muscat, where we checked into the Millennium Resort Hotel there, and where there is an excellent dive center, SeaOman, which has boats with engines powerful enough to get us to the westernmost Daymaniyat Islands in a little over an hour.</span></span><br />
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<ul>
<li style="color: #222222;">Here is a screen shot of the way from Al Ain to Sohar Airport, <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.screencast.com/t/Lg9iUIuhrmwM&source=gmail&ust=1502530529756000&usg=AFQjCNHZVdlnDhRGP7Wf2Elw7bx9ogL7lw" href="https://www.screencast.com/t/Lg9iUIuhrmwM" style="color: #1155cc; font-size: 12.8px;" target="_blank">https://www.<wbr></wbr>screencast.com/t/Lg9iUIuhrmwM</a></li>
<li style="color: #222222;">It's another hour and a half, 131 km, from Sohar Airport to the Millennium hotel<br /><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.screencast.com/t/yR05M1TP3JY&source=gmail&ust=1502530529756000&usg=AFQjCNGQ0CM3K4KWPoRjcl24R5Ejpf3PgA" href="https://www.screencast.com/t/yR05M1TP3JY" style="color: #1155cc; font-size: 12.8px;" target="_blank">https://www.screencast.com/t/<wbr></wbr>yR05M1TP3JY</a></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222;">If coming from Muscat, it's an hour by car, 88 km, from the airport at Seeb to the Millennium Resort hotel</span><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.screencast.com/t/TjZMXO4gFy&source=gmail&ust=1502530529756000&usg=AFQjCNHC-TDzA_gHStYmpjegQvbeXC6ENA" href="https://www.screencast.com/t/TjZMXO4gFy" style="color: #1155cc; font-size: 12.8px;" target="_blank">https://www.screencast.com/t/<wbr></wbr>TjZMXO4gFy</a></li>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Our trip on Friday Aug 4 took us a bit longer than an hour because whale sharks were spotted en route, so Richard, the manager of SeaOman, stopped the boat and let us scramble overboard to swim with them.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;"><b style="font-size: x-large;">Coral Garden off Jun Island and Doc's Wall off Little Jun</b></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">Once we'd enjoyed the whale sharks, we motored along past Sira and Jun islands to a site off Little Jun called Doc's wall. This can be a productive site for leopard sharks, who like to rest in the shadow of the schooling yellow snapper fish, so when you see those, you swim through them and look in the sand. This has been my experience before, but not today. Visibility was not particularly good, and we saw little to impress us apart from schools of fusiliers and grey and honeycombed morays.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">However, on the second dive, visibility still poor, our dive guide Saeed started banging his tank. When we found him just out of view in the murky water, he showed us a large leopard shark resting at an unusual angle on the reef. Saeed was leading an open water diver named Marco, but because of the poor vis all the buddy teams as they entered the water had moved off separately, out of sight of one another, so only Saeed, Marco, and Bobbi and I saw this particular leopard shark.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">Bobbi and I continued left around Sira Island but where we came to some boulders just off the reef we were supposed to keep on our left, I led us over to explore the boulders to the right, and I found more of them in a northeast direction, pretty, but not much of note, until we had rounded the end of them and were tracking back to the southwest, where we came upon a black marble ray. We went around him without disturbing him.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">I didn't get pictures of any of our second dive because one of my GoPros had flooded our last dive with Nomad Ocean Adventures, and so I was using just my Hero 3, so I had brought a charger on the boat to charge it between dives. Everyone was kitting up quickly and going in off the back of the boat as I unplugged the charger and put the GoPro back in its case and attached it to my BCD. But the charge light refused to go off, and in that state the camera would not function, would not switch on. I needed to get in the water, no delays allowed as the boat held its position in the surge near the rocky outcrop, so I hoped the charge light would go off, maybe when the camera cooled down in the water. But it didn't, the charging light remained on the entire dive, though it was not charging (the power source had been removed) and I couldn't take videos on that dive. Once we were back on the boat, I pried the battery loose from the camera, it powered down and switched off, and when I replaced the battery it switched on normally. That night I charged it normally, and the next day it functioned fine.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">So the video above has clips from the dive on Doc's wall, where we saw the interesting black and white nudibranchs on the top at 5 meters, and then clips from out first dive Saturday on Coral Garden, along the northeast corner of Jun Island. Once you arrive at the eastern point you have the option of continuing on around Jun Island, or heading east across the sand to come onto Little Jun after about 5 minutes of finning and 20 bar less in your tank than you started the trek with, so it's possibly not worth it, but it was on the other side that I saw and filmed the feathertail ray as I surprised him in the sand.</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">Creatures in the video above: </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">The two whale sharks we snorkeled with before our dives, and then a scorpion fish, several gray and honeycomb morays, a spiny rock lobster, the feathertail ray on the approach to Little Jun, schools of fusiliers on Doc's wall, and a black and white nudibranch on the top of the wall.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-size: large;"><b>The Mousetrap between Sira and Jun islands</b></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Our last dive on Saturday was on the Mousetrap reef between Sira and Jun Islands. We encountered a huge black ray early in the dive and then came on a smaller marble ray, both of whom entertained us with ripple effects. While some of our group were looking for small stuff, and finding it in the anenomes and on the rocks, Bobbi and I followed the guide Saeed, who was leading a couple of young shebaab on a mission which I presumed was to find a resting leopard shark. He succeeded and this time my camera was working, so we maneuvered about the shark, but left it undisturbed until the other divers arrived with their array of floodlights and then the shark took off and headed up and over the reef at the top of the wall. We found numerous nudibranchs and anemone shrimp, and we finished the dive with a turtle that almost kissed Nicki. This was our most lovely dive of the weekend despite poor vis, a great end to our 2-day, 4-dive weekend.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white;">This map of our dive locations is from </span></span><span style="color: #222222;"><a href="http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/arabian-sea/oman-diving.html">http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/arabian-sea/oman-diving.html</a></span><br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-p64lqxjZGqU/WY1RUzP8oRI/AAAAAAAAERw/WjfnFr3Adv0I16Lkt_tuG0Vgtgob2RL_QCLcBGAs/s1600/omanmapw.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="726" height="209" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-p64lqxjZGqU/WY1RUzP8oRI/AAAAAAAAERw/WjfnFr3Adv0I16Lkt_tuG0Vgtgob2RL_QCLcBGAs/s640/omanmapw.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;">You can find this map at this URL: </span><span style="color: #222222;"><a href="http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/arabian-sea/omanmapw.jpg">http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/arabian-sea/omanmapw.jpg</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We were diving this weekend with SeaOman from Millennium Resort Mussanah, Oman</span><br /><a href="http://seaoman.com/activities/dive/">http://seaoman.com/activities/dive/</a></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">The divers in our group were myself, Nicki Blower, Peter Mainka, Philippe Lecompte, Eric Courtonne, and my favorite dive buddy Bobbi Stevens</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">GoPro videography was by Vance Stevens</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor #64181</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">For best results, view these videos using highest HD setting on YouTube</span>Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-9280471918126268542017-07-09T21:46:00.000-07:002017-07-17T15:40:49.219-07:00Diving the S57 with Tvrtko in Pelješac, Croatia<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>Logged dive 1555</b></div>
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<h2>
July 9, 2017, diving on the German torpedo boat S-57</h2>
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Diving with Dive Center Barbara, Žuljana, Pelješac<br />
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The video here, https://youtu.be/QdVuPx2AZO8, shows most of the experience of diving on the S-57. I include the boat ride out, take you for a good look around the boat, and then show you what it looks like closer to shore. I don't know how representative of Croatia it is, because this was the only dive I did here, but this will give you an idea of what to expect in case you'd like to try diving in Croatia yourself, and of course you can go onto YouTube and find hundreds more videos like this one from the hundreds of dive spots around the coastline and islands in the Adriatic that grace this beautiful country.<br />
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This video gives the location of the S-57 as Trstenik</div>
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<a href="https://youtu.be/cS00NteEgUY">https://youtu.be/cS00NteEgUY</a></div>
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I met Tvrtko in Oman, on this dive, one of our
last with Nomad Ocean Adventure.
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<a href="http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.hr/2017/05/mobula-rays-at-ras-morovi-while-guiding.html">http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.hr/2017/05/mobula-rays-at-ras-morovi-while-guiding.html</a></div>
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As it was his first time in Musandam, Bobbi and I guided him on the dive and he thought
he might like to see us again in Croatia, so he invited us to come there
one day. Meanwhile Donald Trump and his flail-out-at-anything
administration had decided to ban laptops and tablets on direct
flights from the UAE to the USA. This ban was useless to begin with,
designed really to annoy Muslims, and it has since been lifted from
flights in and out of UAE, but it was still in effect when it came
time for us to plan our summer holiday from UAE.<br />
<br />
That plan was to fly Qatar Airways to stop off and see our grandkids in Doha on our
way from UAE to the states, but Trump's next brilliant ploy, in the
course of agreeing to supply billions of dollars in arms to the
Saudis, was to support his business partners in their stance that Qatar was a threat to stability in the region, and back the Saudi's blockade on
that country put into force just days after Trump's visit there, and which UAE joined, so we could no longer go to Qatar,
let alone use their airline to go anywhere, since it could no longer land in UAE,
and that is how we had little choice but to use a European carrier to fly us there to break
our journey (so we could carry devices on the plane and in the process take Tvrtko
up on his offer of hosting us in a dive venture).</div>
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Tvrtko was vacationing with his sister Žvjezdana as we progressed from Dubrovnik to Split, to Zadar, and as far north and east as Karlovac and Ogulin to meet an online acquaintance Marijana Smol<span id="docs-internal-guid-6401617d-51f7-da1d-5cd4-029ecda98554"><span style="font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">čec</span></span> and her family
before heading back to the coast at Rejka and then continuing south to Paklenica Park for a walk in the Velebit mountains before heading back to Split and catching a ferry to Korčula where Tvrtko met us at the ferry landing in Vela
Kula. In his car he drove us the length of the island (in a little
over half an hour) to Lumbarda, a quiet little town on a bay with
clean Adriatic waters lapping up on ubiquitous beaches. Tvrtko had
found us a lovely apartment with suite of rooms for just 60 Euros a night right in
the center of town, with fully equipped kitchen, foyer with bath, and
a bedroom surrounded by treetops that blew in the breeze when we
moved out to the balcony where, after a shopping trip to the nearby
supermarket, we drank Turkish coffee and took light meals European style of ham,
cheese, pates, fresh vegetables, and sweet watermelon.</div>
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Tvrtko drove us to the old walled town
of Korčula one day and the next managed to arrange diving off
Pelješac, a mountainous peninsula surrounded by azure waters which
had served as a theater of operations in many wars, including WWII,
where the S-57 was deployed to attack allied shipping, but was caught and sunk
by a British torpedo boat. Now its stern lies in about 40 meters of water on
a slope that brings its bow and topdeck up to 25 meters. It's well preserved in
reasonably clear water that was around 19 degrees C when we visited. Its
frame is clearly intact and its innards well exposed. It has a couple
of torpedoes (live, I am told) resting prominently on the stern of the ship. It has a machine gun turret on deck that
Tvrtko demonstrates (in the video) can be rotated and aimed at nothing in
particular, as there are few fish on the wreck, though a large sea
bream was seen fleetingly, and someone back on board after the dive mentioned an eel.</div>
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The dive had to be a short one at that
depth. Tvrtko and I got to within a blink-blinking minute of NDL around 25 minutes into the dive, as measured on Bobbi's Aladdin computer (though the Zoop I was wearing on my other wrist still gave me 3 minutes at
that point). Tvrtko and I took our time coming up alongside the ship,
and we could see the other divers hovering overhead. They waited for
us so as a group we could move into shallower water, and we took a
long time at 5 meters to have ample time for a conservative safety stop. Then the divers moved toward the dive boat where I spent another few minutes at 3 meters beneath the hull waiting for others ahead of me to get back on board. I guess we were
ten or a dozen in all. When I clamored back up the ladder, I had 48
minutes on my dive computer. I had come up from depth with half a
tank remaining and emerged with about 70 bar showing.</div>
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It was an enjoyable dive.
I had been concerned about cold. I had rented a full length 5 mm suit
and had requested an additional 3 mm shorty (which I
was assured I wouldn't need). I took it anyway for psychological reasons, asked for 8 kg
weight and was given 9 for the extra layer of wetsuit. Then it
occurred to me I was using a heavy steel tank and I considered
dropping the extra kilo, but then decided for this one dive I would rather be
overweight than sorry, and my weighting turned out to be about right,
though I could probably have managed on 8 kg. As far as temperature
was concerned, I was pleasantly cool throughout the dive, but never
cold, was never concerned enough to think about it.</div>
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The only down side to the experience
was that the somewhat worn but still serviceable shoes I had removed in order to replace them with dive boots, and left where I had removed them at
the dive center, developed legs of their own and disappeared of their own accord and were never seen
again by me. I'm pretty sure that this was not the fault of any
Croatian, surely not of any diver or anyone else at the dive center,
but the little beach town of Žuljana had a constant stream of
pedestrian traffic, most of it tourist, and I guess someone saw a
pair of decent Asics running shoes and decided to try them on.
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Fortunately I had a pair of flip-flops
with me, but these are not good for distance walking, and shoes are
one of those things, like a jacket in winter, that if you lose it you
feel the loss of what you had taken for granted, in so many decisions
about where you can go and what your limits are until you can replace
the vital item and put your life back on even keel. I managed ok with the
flip-flops getting to dinner in a half hour walk along the beach later that evening, and in the morning Tvrtko
brought me a pair of old shoes that fit perfectly and would serve
for getting me around the rest of the trip until I could get to
Houston and replace the running shoes I had lost with a new pair from
the same shop I had bought the old ones from two years previously (mission by now accomplished :-).<br />
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That's all about diving in Croatia. If you want to find out more about travel in Croatia, read on :)<br />
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<h2>
<b>Traveling in Croatia</b></h2>
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Despite the minor perturbation of lost shoes,
Croatia proved to be an overall nice experience. Bobbi and I got to Dubrovnik from Abu Dhabi by
way of Frankfurt and spent three nights in the district of Gruz a
couple of kilometers along the coast north west of the walled old city. Gruz is a good choice for staying in Dubrovnik, if you don't stay in the old city, because it's a healthy walking distance (45 minutes) but more importantly, Gruz is where the bus station is and where the ferries leave for most other destinations. It's also a good base for a day walk around Lapad, lovely for getting overheated and cooling off in the cool Adriatic on one of the many beaches along the way, in case you want a day-break from the summer crowds at Dubrovnik.<br />
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We
had booked a room in a guest house, what they call Apartmans in
Croatia, rooms in someone's house. Ours was called Katarina, and it
was midway up or down a hill, depending on how you approached it,
above the bay at Gruz. It was 35 Euros a night, had a shared bath,
and a double bed in a small room with aircon. Katarina and her
husband were very friendly but spoke no English, so were not much
help, except that they provided us with glasses and bottle openers
when we went walking in the heat and returned with beers and ciders
purchased for a dollar each half liter at the Tommy supermarket (a
ubiquitous chain in Croatia, there was one at the top and bottom of
the hillside where we stayed). We soon identified the beers we liked,
Crno (dark) and Rezano (the word means 'cut' and it was mid-flavor between a light and a dark beer; there were also similar ambers). Bobbi liked the apple ciders which,
unlike British ones, were light and tasted like fizzy apple juice.
They were very refreshing after walking.</div>
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Our first walk was along the road to
the old town of Dubrovnik, which was something of a circus at that
time of year, end of June, but apparently more subdued in June than in mid
July and August, when you probably wouldn't want to be there for long. It was
a gem of a town, with a gleaming clean pedestrian street and a public fountain of cool drinkable water just inside the north city gate
(one of the best things about Croatia, clean cool water for drinking and
swimming, everywhere; and there were other ornate fountains in the old city where people were gratefully topping up their water bottles). But businesses catering to tourists everywhere
detracted from the town's charm, with prices of which $20 each to walk the extensive
city walls was typical, a bit over the top. We tried climbing stairs in town but found it impossible to see over the walls unless you paid, but you could walk around the outside, and there you
found beach-goers, not on beaches, the town was built on rock, but
with ladders bolted into the rock so swimmers could climb down and
swim in the refreshingly cold water and then get back out without
getting any sand on their feet, and you didn't even need a towel,
you'd be dry in no time. This easy access to water was one of the
nicest things about Croatia, something that gives the entire country
a carefree Mediterranean atmosphere in summer time.</div>
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Other things I thought were pleasantly surprising about Croatia were its cleanliness everywhere, and the honesty, reliability, and friendliness of its people. The rooms we stayed in all adhered to high quality standards with even unexpected extras, like small bottles of homemade schnapps in one place we stayed in Korčula, and there was WiFi most everywhere, in our rooms, in the restaurants and bars we patronized, and in most though not all of the buses (but never on the ferries; wonder why not - and only 15 min of free wifi at Dubrovnic's Cipli airport, with an invitation to pay for something that was purposely broken after that, a last gouge at tourist wallets that seemed unnecessary and not the impression your country wants to leave on its departing guests who all get their browsing interrupted unexpectedly - in my case I had to save this post at the next airport in Frankfurt).<br />
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Many of our friends were visiting Croatia at about the time we were. Some got on ferries and traveled around the islands, and some got cars and drove to Montenegro and perhaps to Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina. We were thinking of doing that and then going by bus overnight from there to Zagreb and coming back through Croatia to catch our onward flight from Dubrovnik, but after a couple of days dropping now and then by car rental agencies and considering what was involved, we decided we'd be better off taking buses and avoiding the traffic jams, long border crossings, exorbitant petrol prices, and the sheer tedium of such a trip, even if you really did want to reach that small beach town, find parking, and then get a meal and (if you weren't driving) a glass of wine. Also, we had constrained ourselves to being in Ogulin not far from Zagreb at a certain time, and on Korčula toward the end of our trip, so there wasn't time for doing much more than visiting the salient cities of Split, Trogir, <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Šibenik</span>,</span> Zadar, and Rijeka, and making side trips to Krka waterfalls and Paklenica for hiking. Krka was beautiful and interesting, on a par with the natural phenomena in Yellowstone Park, but so crowded that we decided not to visit Plitvice Lakes, though we could have, but we didn't want a repeat of our Krka experience in high season.<br />
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We preferred to relax on buses, use the wifi to research our next destination, get rooms from Booking.com and Expedia pretty much on the fly, and eat where the food seemed good. In Dubrovnik, Gruz, we started off on pizza and risotto, not sure how far our money would take us in a land with some pretentious restaurants where you can spend a hundred bucks for two plus plus for wine or beer, but once we got to Split we found the Buffet Fife at the opposite end of the Riva from Diocletian's Palace, where there were more tourists than locals, but everyone eating authentic Croatian meat and potato dishes and enjoying Croatian beer for reasonable prices, and from there we enjoyed Croatian fare in Ogulin, but tended toward fish as we moved down the coast in Stari Grad (Paklenica) and Korčula, eating fresh oysters with Tvrtko and Žvjezdana, and ending our visit with a copious fish platter at a well-recommended restaurant in Cavtat, on the coast just 5 km from the airport.<br />
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Tvrtko also drove us around to wineries on Pelješac, and we often took red or white house wines in restaurants, which could cost 80 to 120 kuna, about $15 to $20 for the liter, but as we found out, we could get very good wine in supermarkets for just a few dollars, and beers there as well, for a dollar for the best ones. Schnapps are not hard to come by in Croatia as many people own their own stills. The <span style="font-family: inherit;">Smol<span id="docs-internal-guid-6401617d-51f7-da1d-5cd4-029ecda98554"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">čec</span></span>'s</span> gave us some home-made <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Š</span>li</span>evovic (plum liquor) to carry around on our travels out of Ogulin, and we tasted medvic (honey liquor) there as well. Our accommodation in Korčula came with a schnapps of some kind, enough that we could pour what we didn't drink there into a coke bottle and carry it to Cavtat with us.<br />
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So as we look back on our trip there, we found Croatia to be a thoroughly enjoyable country where you can travel as you like or as you can afford. We found it most interesting to visit when we had friends to visit there and could see the country a little through the eyes of its inhabitants. We found we could spend a lot of money if we wished, or we could avoid doing that and get some exercise walking a lot, swimming when we felt like it in the clean and bracingly cool Adriatic. We could balance dining in restaurants with shopping in markets for meats and cheeses to breakfast on in our room; and fruits and vegetables, garden fresh tomatoes, and watermellon to rival the 'arbus' in Uzbekistan, sweet and refreshing when kept in the fridge. Most of the apartments we stayed in had fully equipped kitchens, with stoves and pots for Turkish coffee, so we didn't even lack for our caffeine hype in the morning, before we could get out to the coffee bars and enjoy a cappuccino. We found progressively better accommodations the further we got from Dubrovnik, and slightly more expensive for the better quality. Our cheapest accommodation was Katarina in Gruz (shared bath, family noise) and our best was Shell Beach Apartments on Korčula, with a terrace overlooking a bay with boat traffic, noise blessedly damped by double glazing on the doors and windows, just a 15 min walk from the old town.<br />
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Our favorite town was Split, with its Roman ruins blended in with a living museum in the old market city, and the music and acrobats on the Riva corniche. Zadar was interesting for its sea organ and monuments on the peninsula with boats plying on three sides of the old walls and seawall. Trogir was similar but smaller, and <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Šibenik</span> </span>would have been a great place to base for Krka falls, another historic city with pristine countryside (but we had taken rooms in Split for 3 nights and so based ourselves there, slightly inconvenient with redundant bus rides). Paklenica was a great place to spend a day hiking, a little disorienting at first (too little signage, a common problem in Croatia) but once we'd worked it out, we understood the ideal way we should have done it, and still managed to get in an energetic but not at all challenging walk, and Stari Grad was a pleasant place to base and cool off in the sea after the walk. Days last forever in summer, so plenty of time for walking swimming, and having sunset meals by the sea.<br />
<br />Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-20719837535742085842017-06-02T06:36:00.000-07:002017-06-04T06:38:55.848-07:00Last dives at Nomad Ocean Adventures: Musandam Island, Ras Lima, and Lima North, June 2, 2017<br />
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<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">My logged dives #1552-1554</b><br />
<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">June 2, 2017</b><br />
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So <a href="http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2017/05/diving-on-nomad-ocean-adventures-last.html" target="_blank">last weekend in May</a> wasn't our last with Nomad Ocean Adventures after all. Chris decided to post to Facebook an invitation to his best customers to come out for one more weekend, proposing a three-tank dive to the northermost dive sites in the vicinity of Khasab on Friday. Gary and Sandra took him up on it, and Khaled Sultani, reknowned underwater photography. Our good friend Nicki got a ride with Steven Board, and she buddied with Bobbi and I.<br />
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These are some of the people in the video above showing the picturesque approach to Fanaku, the last island out past Musandam Island. On my left is Khaled with his mother of all cameras, though he also carries a GoPro in his pocket. Chris is sitting just forward of him, Bobbi to my right with guests Bruno and Kat, and Nicki next to me. Ahmed is the boat captain.Then I shoot another segment showing the rippling in the channel caused my some mighty strong currents, that throw up spray as the boat cuts through the multiple forces of nature, including wind and waves.<br />
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Unfortunatly it was not much better at Fanaku, so we didn't dive there that day, but retreated back to Musandam Island, or possibly Ras Hindi Qabr, where we took shelter in a bay and went on a nondescript dive in the water murky with algae. Nevertheless we saw a pair of nudibranchs, a flounder, and a green moray eel curled up in a rock.<br />
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The wind was stiff from the south by now, and we beat into it as far back as White Rock before taking shelter in a bay where we had gone diving with an Al Marsa liveaboard once. I don't remember the diving being anything special there, though it had been their destination for our first dive. But Chris was sensing stress in his two engines. The boat was loaded with three tanks per diver, seas and wind were against us, and wisdom precluded lingering that far north, so we continued our retreat all the way back to Lima Headland, where we found shelter an hour from help if needed, and did our second dive there.<br />
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Chris asked us to keep our dive time to 45 minutes, but I have to admit to cheating a little. The dive began in green water, but after we'd found a cuttlefish and a slipper lobster, we came on a turtle nearer the point, and here the water was becoming blue. The fish were getting bigger and I took my time getting my marker buoy up, and angled slowly up over the point getting into position for the safety stop. Three minutes into that by my most conservative computer (I was carrying three, long story) we surfaced with 55 minutes time elapsed.<br />
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We headed across the channel to Lima Rock north where Chris asked us to keep our dive time to 30 minutes, and depth to 18 meters. It seemed restrictive at the time but he had called it pretty perfectly, as his timings and the realities of getting home from there ended up getting us into the harbor just short of sundown. Also, we had reduced our surface interval to 40 minutes, so we didn't have all that much no deco time. The dive was pleasant. We saw speckled fish, a raging crayfish, a large honeycomb moray guarding a dive weight in front of a swimthrough (which bottomed out at almost 20 meters, woops). At 30 minutes Nicki pointed to her watch so I got my buoy out, kicked along just above the sand while I unfurled it, blew into it, and five minutes later had managed to get it up to the surface. Now we had to follow it up from depth, another 5 minutes, and then endure the 3 minute surface interval. Meanwhile a large jack scooted by, and I filmed fusiliers at the safety stop. At the surface the boat was still picking up other divers. I showed 45 minutes on my computer, so all us pros were balancing each other's needs pretty accurately.<br />
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This was all bittersweet diving considering the fond farewell to Nomad Ocean Adventures, doing their best, as ever, and last dives with Chris Chellapermal, getting in his last plunges with the company he founded and managed so remarkably.<br />
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We were planning to dive the next day, and get an early start on it, but the coast guard was delaying signing off on trips to the north. Eventually the huge ferry to Khasab returned to port, having had to abort its trip across the seas we would need to travel, and that was the end of diving that weekend.<br />
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We last saw Chris and his family and Nomad staff and their last customers who were waiting on a ride to the airport, all in the pool together, We headed back to Al Ain where it's been anti-climactic ever since.Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-91258960398470393792017-05-28T19:46:00.002-07:002017-05-29T10:44:24.670-07:00Diving on Nomad Ocean Adventure's penultimate weekend of operation: With Anand Mantri and Bobbi on Ras Morovi and Lima Rock<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">My logged dives #1548-1551</b><br />
<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">May 26-27, 2017</b><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Bobbi and I have been diving almost every weekend lately with Nomad Ocean Adventures. It's an hour glass with sand running out at this point. This was supposed to be the last weekend of operation, but owner Chris Chellapermal is having trouble breaking his diving habit and has declared one final outing the first week of June, just for his friends and past clients of the dive center, with Friday scheduled as a 3-dive trip to the far north Musandam, and Saturday, no telling.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">Most of Chris's staff have left so Chris has been inviting me and other instructors down to guide boats and teach students in return for free diving and room and board, so Bobbi and I have been making hay while the sun shines, going every weekend, and can't get enough of it frankly. We're all going to be in serious withdrawl in June as we hunker down and prepare our escapes for summer break in July, something we need to start planning sooner than later.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">We've dived 6 of the past 7 weekends, pausing only for a weekend off to run up to Doha and see our new grandson. We're planning to dive next weekend as well but that will likely be it for a while. Enjoy the videos.</span></span><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Lima Rock</span></b><br />
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The above set of video clips were taken while diving on Lima Rock, mostly the south side, in Musandam, Oman, accompanied by former dive student Anand Mantri, and my favorite dive buddy Bobbi Stevens<br />
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The first clip is from the boat on Friday, actually on the north side. Next clip is our descent on the south side on Saturday with batfish, bannerfish, and devil rays passing by at 25 meters. Then more batfsh, jacks, pretty corals, nice visibility. There is a clip from the north in there as well, and a moray that lives on that side.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Ras Morovi</span></b><br />
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Devil rays were cruising the peaceful bay where we usually put in at Ras Morovi. Three of them appeared at various points on our southern leg heading around the point. The feather tail was on the other side, near the grotto, but the terrain there is very similar to the bay, and we often see these rays there, so I edited accordingly.<br />
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The puffer was sitting in front of the crayfish cave. He headed over the shoulder where the beautiful corals are that lead into a world of blue trigger fish, angel fish, sergeant majors, and fusiliers popping in and out of the black and green whip coral, with moray eels down in the sand where the ghost fish traps are turning to rust. As we head back over the reef a third devil ray passes and takes flight.<br />
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Grey morays appear from under the brain coral, often in pairs, and a yellow mouth pokes out from coral on the sea bed. The videos end with good shots of Bobbi and Anand Mantri hovering in the water.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Farewell to Nomad</span></b><br />
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These videos were made while diving this weekend on Nomad Ocean Adventures' last publicly announced commercial weekend in business, May 26-27, 2017. We will miss the special ambiance that Chris Chellapermal has bestowed on operations at NoA, and we wish him the best in his future endeavors.<br />
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The picture below was taken by Anand Mantri in the Nomad majlis while I was trying to crank out some writing before Saturday diving. Click on the pic for a peek into my computer screen.<br />
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Chris kept telling me he was seeing Mobula rays this week and last when I thought they were devil rays, and it turns out we were both right.<br />
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According to Nine facts about devil rays from the PADI website<br />
<a href="http://www2.padi.com/blog/2015/10/31/9-facts-about-devil-rays/">http://www2.padi.com/blog/2015/10/31/9-facts-about-devil-rays/</a><br />
"<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">There are actually nine different species of devil ray, all part of the genus </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Mobula"</em><br />
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and from Wikipedia: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobula">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobula</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_fish">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_fish</a>Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-13080349574514926142017-05-20T08:23:00.000-07:002017-05-28T09:26:45.119-07:00Certifying divers in PADI Scuba Diver and Open Water at Nomad Ocean Adventure - Congratulations Niaz Basheer, Léa Morin, and Julia Resnicek<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">My logged dives #1544-1547</b><br />
<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">May 19-20, 2017</b><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">Nomad Ocean Adventures had me working intensively this weekend in return for free diving, meals, accommodation, and even a few Nomad special super slushies for both Bobbi and I. It was a great weekend; we enjoyed it immensely. Sad to know it's the next to last for our favorite dive center on the east coast UAE and Musandam, Oman. We've had great times and great diving here, and absolutely the best in that area since Dibba Rock got wiped by cyclones and red tide, </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">Knackered from a day at work that started for me with 4:30 reveille Thursday and transitioned with a 3 hour drive from Al Ain to Dibba, I went to sleep before my open water student Niaz Basheer arrived at midnight, but I met him at 6 am for briefing and pool work. He had little trouble with the pool modules, and our boat wasn't leaving until 10. As it was just the two of us, we managed to get modules 1-3 done in the pool that morning, get ourselves dockside by maybe 10:30, and we were on our way to Ras Morovi before 11:00. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">My video shows feathertail rays everywhere in the sand at the start of the dive and once Niaz had completed his skills, we rounded the reef on the northbound leg. We had a heck of a current sweeping us over the saddle and around the corner, where we came upon yet another feathertail, and then clownfish, blue wrasse, and an eel as I moved into the grotto, just checking the cave there, but no rays were at home in that spot. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">Next stop was Ras Lima, where we dropped in on a mottled eel in shallow water, then moved down to depth and found a blue crayfish in the deeper wall. An eel emerges nearby but doesn't eat the kind of fish that shares his hole apparently. Bobbi and I ended the dive in the company of an unconcerned turtle.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">We spent the evening with Chris and his wife Manesha and their two sons at dinner in a majlis where the old furniture had miraculously re-appeared, with the </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Nomad special super slushy-maker whirring away on a nearby table. Chris's mom Sylviane was there, so nice to see her again, and Pawlie from Norway, one of the staff, and Léa Morin, an intern from France, who would be my dive student the next day. She had completed all but her last dive and I was to be granted the pleasure of completing her course with her, and also with Julia Resnicek, with whom I had spent till almost 11 pm in the pool. I had just trained Niaz earlier that day, and met Julia, who was transitioning from the SSI system to PADI, and Chris had let me take her on as well, starting from about 6 in the evening, so by the time I sat down to dinner in the Majlis, I was working on autopilot, and ready for some slushies.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Léa had already completed her pool work for her course. For her it was only the last dive to do. Julia would be doing dives #3 and #4 with me to certify as a PADI open water diver on Saturday, May 20. Our dive sites were Octopus Rock, normally an advanced dive site, but today fortunately devoid of current, and Ras Morovi, where the current was present but not like the day before. You can see how it went in the video below.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">Our first videos are from Ras Morovi, on Julia's final 4th dive for PADI o/w certification. Chris and Tareq are seen looking for small stuff just at the edge of our normal dive sites, which we're exploring on open water compass exercises with the two lady o/w candidates, <span style="background-color: white;">Léa </span>and Julia. We are diving with Mike, Julia's buddy, and Bobbi, mine. Our compass work turns up sting rays at the start of the dive, and rounding the corner past the saddle we stumble on yet another one. This is just short of the Grotto, where we come across a puffer, but checking the cave, no rays in there again today.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">Next in the video is the start of our dive on Octopus Rock, which we actually did as the first dive of the day, <span style="background-color: white;">Léa </span>'s 4th and final o/w dive for certification, and Julia's 3rd. It's not long before we come across a number of moray eels, including a large honeycomb one. Trigger fish are everywhere on this dive as usual, and tiny blue wrasse have set up their cleaning stations. First customers are a pair of angel fish. We move into a school of yellow striped fusiliers, and follow trigger fish and angel fish and parrots who lead us eventually to a batfish clearning station, but I pan out to the schools of jacks so as not to miss them, then back to the batfish getting the backscratch. Fusiliers burst back on the scene. The trigger fish are ever present. We move toward a school of snappers and find a pair of blue crayfish hiding in the rocks. More fusiliers blast by. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">Now we find another batfish enjoying a complete makeover and descend on him from above as fusiliers partially block our view. At our safety stop we find an eel hiding in the rocks and jacks passing overhead, and trigger fish schooling in the distance. We head toward the jacks as we count down our final three minutes of the dive, fusiliers bursting in from the left. Jacks and fusiliers end our dive, quite beautiful there on Octopus rock here at just 5 meters.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">These video clips were taken while certifying PADI divers, diving</span><span style="color: #222222;"> with Nomad Ocean Adventures on May 19-20, 2017, accompanied by favorite dive buddy Bobbi Stevens</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">GoPro videography by Vance Stevens</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222;">PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor #64181</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><br /></span>Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-24364757133070101352017-05-13T18:44:00.000-07:002017-05-17T07:07:45.409-07:00Mobula Rays at Ras Morovi while guiding dives in Musandam for Nomad Ocean Adventures<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">My logged dives #1540-1543</b><br />
<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">May 12-13, 2017</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This weekend I was invited again to guide boats on diving trips for Nomad Ocean Adventures. Bobbi and I went up to Dibba and crossed the border into Oman right after work on Thursday. We checked into our room at the Nomad guesthouse, which the owner Chris calls the 'Vance Special'. We had a nice meal in the majlis and got a good night's sleep. In the morning Friday I helped guide a boat where Chris was on board, but so was his family, wife and two kids, so I relieved him of having to focus on the diving the whole time, and allowed him to take them snorkeling while we did our second dive.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Chris's choice of first dive site was Lima Rock south, one of my favorites. It can be a challenging dive if there is current present, and there was on this day, so we started at the west end of the south side and set to drifting to the east. About mid way we encountered a back-current and I let it push us back the way we had come, but then I decided we could push through it, it wasn't that strong. So I led us out to the point, where the ropes are in the video above, and there was some resistance there, but not a raging current, so we were able to round to the other side and come up there. We were guiding a diver from Croatia named Tvrtko, and he thought it was a great dive.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The video contains views from our second dive on Ras Sanut as well. The last clip from Lima Rock is the batfish in the orange and blue soft corals at our safety stop, and after that we are diving at Ras Sanut, which we also call Wonder Wall. There were a lot of moray eels there, and in one segment, we found three different kinds in one small rock space. The video ends with me leaving my camera running inadvertently. I edited most of that away, but it gives you an upturned perspective and a closeup of the equipment we carry on our dives.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Next day, I was guiding the advanced divers on our boat on Ras Morovi and Lulu Island. The Ras Morovi dive was ONE OF THE BEST WE HAVE EVER HAD THERE. In particular we saw a flight of MOBULA RAYS right at the start of the dive, and I caught up with 4 of them and got decent video (above). </span><span style="background-color: white;">We also saw friendly clownfish and a feathertail ray in the sand of the bay, crayfish, a turtle, various morays, a nudibranch, more rays, pipefish, scorpion fish, and lovely reefs. We were d</span><span style="background-color: white;">iving again with Tvrtko, and also Roman Kvasnyj from Russia, and another advanced diver named Sandie.</span><br />
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Our last dive Saturday was on Lu'lu' Island (the video above). There are a number of ways to do this dive. When I lead advanced divers I start on the west side of the main island, round it to the north, and then set out east over the sand bottom at around 16 meters. This takes us to the underwater base of an island a little less than ten minutes distant. We round that to its north and then follow it south outside a ring that, if you followed it around to the west and then turn north, would take you back where you started.<br />
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We didn't get that far. Our dive ended on a south facing western leg of the reef sadly covered in ghost nets, with fish trapped live in abandoned pots. <span style="font-family: inherit;">Cuttlefish were out in force today. We also saw scorpion fish, morays, lionfish, and clowns so lonely they fly in the face of oncoming divers. Brittle stars were out walking around, and my camera captured an interesting orange star. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">On these last dives, Bobbi and I were d</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">iving with Sandie, Roman Kvasnyj, and Tvrtko. Tvrtko enjoyed his dives so much that he offered to host us and show us his favorite dive sites in Croatia. We'll have to take him up on that one day.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">GoPro videography by Vance Stevens</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor #64181</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">For best results, view these videos using highest HD setting on YouTube</span>Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-45288617762706687942017-04-29T06:48:00.000-07:002017-05-09T09:14:22.150-07:00Guiding dive boats for Nomad and fun diving with Greg Raglow, Musandam, Oman<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">My logged dives #1536-1539</b><br />
<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">April 28-29, 2017</b><br />
<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"><br /></b><b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"><i>Guiding dives again at Nomad Oman Adventures, Musandam</i></b><br />
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It's official, what we have known for some time, that Chris Chellapermal is closing down Nomad Ocean Adventures effective end of May. He has let staff go and this is why he has asked me to act as dive guide the past few weekends. Of course I am trying to make myself free as much as possible in order to help out, and to enjoy the unique atmosphere at Nomad Ocean Adventure for as long as Chris can sustain his business. But he seems happy with his decision to move on to projects that will allow him to spend his time close to his family in Dubai.<br />
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<b>First dive Friday, Lima Rock north</b><br />
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Guiding boats means that I can choose the dive sites, but it also means I have to choose the sites responsibly, since I need to make sure that everyone is comfortable in the water. My choice of first dive was Lima Rock but when I entered the water to check the current just after arriving at the south side, I found myself being swept to the east. This was not going to be a good day to dive that side, so I had the boatman take us to the north side and put us in at a more sheltered spot where the current was not so bad. When I give briefings for Lima Rock I always explain about the current and how it can sneak up on you and take you on a one-way ride, not only in the direction of Iran, but also down deeper if you don't watch your depth. Some divers seemed uncomfortable and wanted to dive with Greg and I; e.g. wanted to be guided on the dive. For this reason I took it conservatively. When we entered the water I led to the east, but when I felt the current pick up I turned the dive and moved us up the rock faces back the way we had come. We ended the dive in the same sheltered cove where we had started.<br />
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One of the divers on the other Nomad boat, Stewart, went with the current to the point and said afterwards he had never seen so many barracuda. This is the nice thing about Lima Rock in a current. Current attracts big stuff, including whale sharks that like to fin facing into it while filtering plankton in over their gill rakers.<br />
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Video here on YouTube: <a href="https://youtu.be/HVUA-Ip18xc">https://youtu.be/HVUA-Ip18xc</a><br />
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This dive was a rather tame one. In the video, we start with a banner fish making a meal of one of the jellyfishes that were stinging some of the divers when they surfaced from their dive. Next an electric torpedo ray is found, and alongside it a pair of nudibranchs that not all our divers notice despite my trying to point them out. Next up, we enjoy a lion fish ballet. Then, a gopie guards a hole where a shrimp is excavating. The shrimp tries to move a load beyond his capabilities, I edge closer to get a better look, the gopie retreats suddenly, and the house of card collapses. A yellow mouthed moray appears amid pretty pink and blue soft corals in a garden terrain. Around a corner a bat fish is enjoying being administered to by cleaner wrasse, and a green moray peeks out from blue soft coral. Pinks and blues adorn these rocks as we move our way shallow, into the natural light. We encounter needle fish, chase yellow snappers into swim-throughs, and toy with clown fish in anemones waving in the current.<br />
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<b>Second dive, Lu'lu Island</b><br />
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Video here on YouTube: <a href="https://youtu.be/-_h6bukCS2g">https://youtu.be/-_h6bukCS2g</a><br />
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We entered the water behind Lu'lu Island to find a fishnet on the reef and a live lobster trapped inside. We tried to free it but decided it wasn't worth the time - a snorkeler who wanted it for dinner probably rescued it after we left. We rounded the rock and kept on an easterly heading over the sand to arrive at more islands a couple hundred meters distant. I brief this part of the dive by telling people there are clown fish there so bored that they rush up from anemones on the bottom to meet approaching divers, which is what you see in the video. We looked for rays in the sand but found only flounders. On the far rocks we found morays and pretty corals tableaux, and Greg and I ended amid schools of reef fish on the south end of the island chain. Unfortunately algae in the water compromised visibility there.<br />
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<b>Diving Saturday April 29, Octopus Rock and Lima Rock</b><br />
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Our first dive was on Octopus Rock. I was keeping an eye on Dr. Bob, who was working through some buoyancy issues following recent surgery. As dive guide it was my responsibility to look after him, but Chris had sorted him out nicely the day before, and he was fine while diving with us. We stuck close to Pascal, a.k.a. PQ de Nomad, because he was taking care of open water students and would not go deep, which seemed an appropriate pairing for us. I buddied with Greg Raglow. We filmed moray eels, pretty swim-throughs with schools of blue triggers, a scorpion fish, banner fish, bat fish, cray fish, jacks, and schools near the top of the reef where there was a dead parrot fish caught in a ghost net. Due to uncertainties with this group of divers I didn't follow my normal route, got confounded by the terrain, and ended up mistaking a shallow reef for Octopus Rock, so we ended the dive stranded to the west of the preferred end point.</div>
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Stewart wanted to return to Lima Rock to see if he could revisit the barracuda he had seen the day before, but on this day, current was not so pronounced. As we began our dive, a pair of high tech divers passed us with their scooters. Moving more slowly, we found lion fish, a puffer, and arrived at the ropes at the point with Greg and I still had a good hundred bar, half a tank. We decided to explore, and filmed an angel fish on our way down to 24 meters, where circling the rock, we found barracudas off the point. We returned to the ropes and followed them up before letting ourselves go with the current to our safety stop. At 5 meters we drifted through the school of barracudas you can see in my video.</div>
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Back on the boat all were accounted for except the divers with the scooters. We found them on the far side of the rock, blabbering about a mola mola they had seen just past where Greg and I had ascended from 24 meters after swimming with the barracudas. I guess you miss the small stuff with your scooters, but you can catch the big game.</div>
Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-63943907295259173882017-04-22T03:13:00.000-07:002017-05-08T06:49:58.481-07:00Diving on Earth Day weekend: Guiding dives for Nomad Ocean Adventures and for the Earthcasting students at Rye Jr.High New Hampshire USA<b>My logged dives #1532-1535</b><br />
<b><br /><i>Guiding dives at Nomad </i></b><br />
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Owner Chris Chellapermal needed help again this weekend at Nomad Ocean Adventures, on the Musandam side of Dibba, just across the border in Oman. He wanted me to guide a boat each day to accommodate those wishing to dive on the long Islamic holiday weekend. It's a non-paid position but it comes with free meals and accommodation and free diving for me for two days, which is what I like to be doing anyway with my weekends.<br />
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<b><i>Earth Day 2017</i></b><br />
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This weekend was a special occasion. Earth Day was on April 22 this year, <a href="http://www.earthday.org/">http://www.earthday.org/</a>. It's not the first time I have participated in events on the occasion. In 2011 a group of friends and I walked over to Aqabat Talhat in Oman and cleaned up a bunch of Isostar cans left there presumably by soldiers on a military training exercise. See<br />
<a href="https://curiousvance.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/earth-day-april-22-2011/">https://curiousvance.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/earth-day-april-22-2011/</a><br />
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But this year Earth Day proper fell on a Saturday, so Sheila Adams at Rye Jr. High School in Rye, New Hampshire celebrated by streaming her 10th annual Earthcast on Friday, April 21, for five hours from noon to 1700 UTC, when the kids could stream from school. There's more information about that, including links to her recordings, here:<br />
<a href="https://learning2gether.net/2017/04/21/sheila-adams-streams-earthcast-2017-the-annual-earthday-webcast-once-again-live-from-rye-jr-high-school/">https://learning2gether.net/2017/04/21/sheila-adams-streams-earthcast-2017-the-annual-earthday-webcast-once-again-live-from-rye-jr-high-school/</a><br />
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Sheila asked me if I would participate and I agreed to do what I could. I decided to make a video of our diving on April 21 and dedicate it to the earthcasting students at Rye Jr. High in Rye, New Hampshire, USA. I hope they enjoy this video, showing the state of one part of the planet in great need of protection on the day they were about to start webcasting from another part of the planet half a world away.<br />
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<b><i>April 21, 2017: Diving at Ras Morovi and Ras Sanut</i></b><br />
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Because they might not be familiar with the animals seen in the video I'll explain a little about what we are doing here. First of all, as guide of the trip I made sure that all divers were in the water and knew where they were going. All buddy teams were diving independently, as they liked, and we were last in the water to begin our dive. As we started out we caught up with the team of Fahad and Yousef, both from Kuwait, Yousef Alwazzan is waiting for me to publish the video on YouTube where they are pictured in the first clip.<br />
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The reef we were diving on is called Ras Morovi. It has a beautiful top side just 8 meters deep full of reef fish and colorful blue and orange coral. In the second frame, a trigger fish tries to hide in the rocks. If he finds a hole he can hide in he'll lie hidden, only his blue tail will be sticking out. Enemies fail to notice this apparently. Trigger fish also have another interesting habit. When they lay eggs, they will circle the humps of sand where the eggs are and swim menacingly at any fish, or divers, that come close. The blue triggers are not that aggressive, but the larger titan trigger fish will bite divers (usually they go for the swim fins) and will even remember them on a later occasion and zero in on them if they return to the spot where the eggs are.<br />
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In an alcove we encounter a school of batfish. These are interesting fish that like to come around divers in midwater. They come quite close and appear curious about divers ascending or descending. But on reefs they appear shy and can be herded in unison. Here the school escapes over tufts of orange coral. I continue filming as we pass over the reef teeming with blue (red-toothed) triggers, blue angel fish with vertical yellow stripes, yellow, white and black striped sergeant majors, banner fish with arched white top fins sweeping back, large rainbow-colored parrot fishes, yellow snappers, and schools of jacks.<br />
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Coming down off the reef to 15 meters or so we find sand and green whip coral, among which we find a flounder, or moses sole. These fish have evolved with both eyes on one lateral surface, so they can crawl across the sand bottom on the other surface. They have also evolved camoflage with the sand, but can easily be spotted if disturbed.<br />
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Meanwhile Nicki has come upon an unusual spotted eel with orange whiskers on white snout. Later I find a pair of them. She is also filmed poking a clump of anenomes to expose the tiny anemome shrimp hiding there.<br />
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In the whip coral I find a green moray, much more common than the spotted ones. Moray eels try to look menacing, but if they aren't provoked, they are not dangerous to divers.<br />
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Later I film a pair of lion fish under a ledge, causing an invertebrate that was feeding on the opposite rock to shorten his straw and pull in his feeding head. I'm not sure what this invertebrate is called. If you can identify it for me I would appreciate it.<br />
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Our last film from this dive is Nicki finding some spiny crayfish under a rock. Some people call them lobsters, but these ones don't have claws, so I think they are crayfish.<br />
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The next frame is from our second dive of the day on Ras Sanut, which we also call Wonder Wall. Here we find a pair of pipe fish, distant relatives of sea horses but much more common. Leaving the pipe fish, I chase a blue wrasse manning his cleaning station. Bigger fish come where these wrasse hang out to get parasites removed, a symbiotic relationship that benefits both the big fish and the tiny wrasse.<br />
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We begin to move among picturesque schools of snappers. Kelly waves in passing. We follow the snappers into an alcove and notice a huge marble ray on the reef above. He reappears from around an undersea bolder and leads us along the reef. He is faster than we are and can easily move away. He isn't afraid of us, and as he's lost his tail in a prior encounter with something he should have been afraid of, he isn't dangerous to us. Actually nothing in the water is particularly dangerous as long as you respect it's space and don't provoke it.<br />
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<b><i>April 22, 2017: Diving at Octopus Rock and Lima Rock South</i></b><br />
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The next video was taken Apr 22, 2017 on a dive on Octopus Rock in Musandam Oman. I was diving with Nicki Blower, Kelly Harris, and my favorite dive buddy Bobbi Stevens.<br />
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We started to the east down to almost 30 meters looking for sea horses, found none but worked our way up to the base of the rock at 18 meters, crossed to and rounded the next rock over..There we came up through schools of blue triggers to find jacks, fusiliers, barracudas, and preening bat fish in the shallower parts of the ridge and on our return to the rock proper.<br />
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The final video from this Earth Day weekend shows our dive on Lima Rock South. It was a nice dive, starting with a cleaning station at 25 meters, with a lone fish being administered to near a big boulder with blue coral and green whip. Bobbi and I went ahead but Nicki caught up to us carrying a dancing flatworm in its little rock home, which we then set in motion. In the same video segment I pan to a lion fish, and then to a feathertail ray in one single video segment. Suddenly we were caught in a current that nudged us onwards but would not let us return where we'd come from. We were careful with it, but passed several honeycomb morays. Deco was becoming an issue as well and we were soon caught in a box no deeper than 10-12 meters and with an envelope of only one direction. But soon we were gingerly rounding the point to the north side of Lima Rock, where we surfaced amid jacks. It was a tricky dive because I didn't know everyone in our group, and my ladies in general don't like strong currents, but this one turned out to be relatively mild in the end.<br />
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I was diving with Nicki Blower, Kelly Harris, Ihab and Karim from Egypt, and my favorite dive buddy Bobbi Stevens<br />
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In these videos, GoPro videography is by me, Vance Stevens<br />
PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor #64181<br />
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For best results, view these videos using highest HD setting on YouTube<br />
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<br />Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-73253791807365708832017-04-09T11:25:00.004-07:002017-04-09T11:27:27.728-07:00Certifying Harleen Kaur and Patricia Azevedo Bagas as PADI O/W Divers, Musandam, Oman<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">My logged dives #1528-1531</b><br />
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These videos were taken Apr 7-8, 2017 in the course of certifying diving Harleen Kaur and Patricia Azevedo Bagas as PADI Open Water SCUBA Divers - Nomad Ocean Adventure, Musandam, Oman<br />
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The videos show schooling jacks and a turtle at Ras Morovi and a scorpion fish on Lima Headland on April 7. Patricia joined us on Saturday, April 8 and we saw a grey moray eel at Lu'lu Island and a sting ray on Lima Rock (North).<br />
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The Lima Rock dive ended in considerable current that swept us past the rock and into deep green water, where we encountered the school of huge barracudas that hangs out there, visible only to passers-by too busy battling down currents to engage their GoPros.<br />
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Congratulations to the newly certified divers Harleen Kaur and Patricia Azevedo Bagas<br />
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GoPro videography by Vance Stevens<br />
PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor #64181<br />
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For more scuba diving videos<br />
like this one, see<br />
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http://VancesDivebLogs.blogspot.com<br />
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For best results, view these videos using highest HD setting on YouTubeVance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-4596742190324758822016-12-30T04:34:00.000-08:002016-12-30T08:21:03.226-08:00A quick dive off Dibba Rock with sidemounted Kyle Schoonraad<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">My logged dive #1527</b><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">On our return from the Philippines, Malaysia, and Doha<b>, </b>Bobbi and I brought our 8-year old granddaughter Gwenny home with us from Doha on our last plane ride and enjoyed her company in Al Ain for a few days. We had the crazy idea she might like to learn how to snorkel so we booked a room at Sandy Beach Motel on the east coast UAE, which has an island you can walk to at low tide and where you can snorkel and see sharks if you are lucky. Gwenny seemed keen to learn (we didn't mention the sharks), and Bobbi went out and bought her a small mask and snorkel. We managed to get a room before the new year's weekend rush for a reasonable weekday price. The hotel is built in such a way that you can't get on the beach where you can walk to the island unless you stay at the hotel, so we were all looking forward to the getaway.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">As it turned out,<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"> </span>Gwenny is still a little small for the equipment we got her and she wasn't able to get her head in the water and mouth around the snorkel. Plus the water temperature had just dropped to 23 degrees, and it was too chilly in the water for sustained practice, so we gave up on that idea for a couple of years. We'll send the snorkel and fins home with her when she goes in hopes that she'll get some practice in swimming pools in Doha, and when she's ready we can show her some real fish, and even teach her diving when she wants to learn.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Meanwhile as long as I was in the neighborhood, I got in touch with Nomad, Fujairah and arranged to come down Thursday and dive Dibba Rock. They had some technical divers coming in the morning so they scheduled me for an afternoon dive, but later that morning they got back to me and said the technical divers weren't coming because of the fog on the road around Dubai, and the boat was waiting there just for me.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">I was the only diver booked in that day. Bobbi would be hanging out on the beach with Gwenny, so I didn't even have a buddy. So Kyle Schoonraad (he and his lady Jessica are the pros there) offered to accompany me on the dive.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">It was a real treat having Kyle to show me the rock from his experienced perspective. He did it about the way I would have, starting at the Aquarium, which was teeming with jacks and snappers, and moving deeper to the sand at 10-12 meters, where there were more jacks and a big school of barracuda. On the way there, at 55 seconds into the video <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">I </span>was taking, we passed over a torpedo ray which both of us missed. It was interesting coming on that in the video, like huh? rewind ... yep that was a torpedo ray right there, and we both headed right over it.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Within minutes of passing the <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">barracudas</span> Kyle excitedly pointed up and started finning madly for the surface. He looked back at me and made pointy horn signs <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">either side of </span>his head, obviously meaning devil rays. He indicated there were <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">9 or</span> a dozen of them. I couldn't see them, vis was too poor. <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">Happens; s</span>o many times I have seen sharks around there, pointed ahead, and people just behind me couldn't see them, because the sharks vanished quickly, vis was poor, and the divers were just that critical two meters further back.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">We continued along the back of the rock to the gap where Kyle <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">quer<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">ied me </span></span>t<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">hrough his bubbles</span> which way we should go. I wanted to see his choice, so I <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">bubbled him back</span> to go ahead. He led up the gap, where there was fortunately no current, so we could follow the top crest into a nice long wedge and come out on the drop off to the sand where the rays were.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">You can see the rest in the video. We found two rays and got decent video. About that time Kyle went into another state where he was raving about devil rays and pointing up ahead, so this time I took video the way he was pointing so I could show him later there was nothing there, all in his head :-)</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Back on the surface, the boatman told us the rays had been jumping out of the water while he was waiting for us, so I guess he was imagining them as well. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Anyway, great dive, and great diving with Kyle as his only diver on that day.</span>Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7593158381473637794.post-1462156298432875722016-12-29T23:01:00.002-08:002016-12-30T04:11:49.414-08:00Diving off Port Barton, Palawan, Philippines<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">My logged dives #1524-1526</b><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">We had heard Internet would be dodgy in El Nido, so we were glad to see that there was free wifi almost everywhere. However we soon found out that wifi rarely worked. The problem was with the Internet provider for the whole area. So once you are in El Nido, if you've been playing things by ear to get that far, it's hard to plan a way out unless your time is flexible.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">The way I would like to have gone would have been to get the boat from El Nido to the island of Coron further north. There was a fast boat leaving at 6 a.m. most days and another slower boat that departed occasionally, but not every day. These boats tended to be booked out for next day travel, so you had to plan a day or two in advance to make the trip. Then once in Coron you would have to back-track the journey or get the boat onwards to Manila. That was an overnight boat which sailed perhaps three times a week. I would like to have done that if I had a week to spare. But given tight timings and inability to get on Internet and book our flights from Manila to Kuala Lumpur (so we'd have to do that in Manila).</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">There are airports in El Nido and Coron, though it was doubtful we'd have been able to get on a flight at that time of year, Christmas holidays bringing so many people to Palaway. It seemed best to plan a Coron trip for a later time when we could book round trip air travel to and from Manila and make a dive plan, perhaps a liveaboard, to see the wrecks there, do it properly, not with just two days to spend in Coron.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white;">So as an alternative, we heard that some travelers were going to Port Barton, on the way back to Puerto Princesa more or less, and in a rare moment of connectivity I came on a Wikitravel article </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">that led us to come here: </span></span><a href="http://wikitravel.org/en/Port_Barton" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">http://wikitravel.org/en/Port_Barton</a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">The article mentions "</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525;">'Aquaholics' run by Keith Dudley and located in the middle of the beach next to Summer Homes. This diving center has a highly recommended diving instructor named Martyn who has been diving for more than 33 years and is also a level one qualified SSI Free Diving Instructor and swimming teacher +639199916282(Smart). Martyn can teach you to dive and take you through speciality courses such as Wreck and Deep diving. ...</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525;"> For fun diving and diving courses Port Barton is superb, with great coral and marine life, not to mention some wrecks, within easy striking distance."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525;">We've learned to be wary of glowing recommendations from people just learning to dive, not the most discriminating of customers. But it was time to go somewhere, and the weather had turned in El Nido. It rained all night the day before we left, and it rained all through the van ride from El Nido toward </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525;">Puerto </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525;">Princesa. It was still raining when we left the main road at Rojas and took the road to Port Barton, which is under construction. The parts that had not been developed were in quagmire in the rain, with the van slipping toward the edge, and raising some doubts about getting out of there on the uphill leg.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525;">Accommodation in El Nido is laid back but simple and hard to find when we arrived. The van ran as far as the beach and dropped us at the beach-front Jambalaya restaurant where we de-camped Bobbi who waited with the bags while I went out scouting for accommodation (they were having happy hour so we enjoyed that and ate there when I returned later with a room key). I walked up the beach as far as the dive center where I found Keith, an old retiree who said he had learned to dive when he was 50 and had found himself a niche in paradise where he could live easy and support his retirement. He had spaces for us next day (only had another couple of divers, one of them on a beginner's course) and he outlined a program of diving starting with the shallow wreck and then working our way back to a couple of reefs on the trip home. It didn't sound all that exciting and it wasn't really; Keith disclosed later that diving was declining there due to overfishing and the local habit of channeling waste disposal to the bay.</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: inherit;">.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525;">As for diving at Port Barton, we embarked on a banca outrigger boat for the day trip starting with the </span></span><span style="color: #252525;">Albaguen Wreck, 26 meters, which you can read about here:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">Aquaholics Dive Center description of diving off Port Barton</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.divepalawan.net/port-barton/">http://www.divepalawan.net/port-barton/</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">As wrecks go, it as a mediocre one, and we saw with fish, glass shrimp in the hold, a scorpion fish hidden in plain sight on top, a common slug, and blue flatworms in the sand.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">I didn't get the names of the reefs we dived next but they were similar. </span>Dive 2 was on a reef on our way home, where we saw slugs, a turtle with a remora, a humphead wrasse, batfish, nudibranchs, clownfish, a camouflaged crocodile fish, and more flatworms.<br />
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Dive 3 was on a reef near grass flats where Martyn said they sometimes see manatees, or dugongs. Here we saw more slugs, clownfish, nudibranchs, lion fish, more flatworms, another camouflaged crocodile fish, schools of razorfish, and a fish with alien eyes peeping our of a hole in a rock.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525;">We had planned to spend two diving days there but in the end did only one. Accommodation in El Nido our first night was rudimentary. Electricity went off at midnight, except at the discos, which had generators, so the bass-beat started at midnight and thumped down the quiet beach into the wee hours. Roaming dogs barked and chickens crowed until the motorcycles took over at dawn. Our second night I managed to get us a pleasant room at Summer Homes (24 hour electricity) in a beach view room. It was quieter there (less street noise reaching our room) and the restaurant had excellent Thai food. I booked and a van from there to Puerto Princesa the following day, where we decided to take a travel break in rooms with more standard amenities and indulge in rectifying our pent-up Intenet latency</span><br />
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<span style="color: #252525;"><br /></span>Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0