Damaniyites Diving with Global Divers, Al Ansaab, Oman, Oct 26 and 27, 2012

My logged dives #1168-1171

My good friend and dive student (and world-class lawyer) Jay Fortin was flying into Muscat with his wife Robin for the weekend and wanted to dive the Damaniyites, so he made a booking with Global Divers, in Al Ansaab, in the Muscat, capital area , Oman, for Oct 26 and 27, 2012. They asked if Bobbi and I would join them and help with a refresher for Robin.  Of course we agreed.

Global Divers <http://www.global-scuba.com/> operates from the Aviation Beach Club in Muscat, where I was a member and kept a sailboat from about 1990 to 1995.  It was a great little beach club, pleasantly rustic, and accessible via a straight road from one side of the main highway between the Airport and the Ghala / Alansaab roundabouts.  We used to drive from Sultan Qaboos University where we lived for ten years and make a u-turn at the Ghala roundabout and then drive back to the turn where the straight sandy road traversed a vast tract of scrub lands where we used to sometimes hold running events.  What a great playground.

It's much different now.  First off, there is no airport roundabout.  There's a flyover now, and past the airport where we started looking out for that straight dirt road, there are massive roadworks where a superhighway soon to connect Muscat to Seeb has churned up our playground and thrown up buttresses for flyovers, and we couldn't even see the coast from there. Even the town of Al-Ansaab had been overhauled with shops and banks, but we found the coast road and drove it past a new Spinney's Al Fair to work our way back up the coast behind the airport.  We passed an elaborate gate and hit the brakes.  We backed up and sure enough, there it was written Aviation Beach Club.  What a makeover.  Just inside the gate we could see signs pointing the way to Global Divers, though there was no signposting from the road.

For those of us coming from UAE, it's an hour further to reach the Seeb area, so I don't know how often we'll use Global Divers in future as opposed to Al Sawadi, especially as we can find comfortable accommodation for 15 riyals a night and intriguing local nightlife in Suweiq, but if you're living in Muscat or landing there, then you save that hour driving outside Muscat to Al Sawadi.

Damaniyites is an island chain that stretches offshore between Suweiq / Barka and Seeb in such a way that there is some point in the chain that it is about equidistant between the two, so that the boat ride to that point is about the same for either area.

Global Divers favors the island with the ranger post, which it can access in no less time than it takes to get there from Al Sawadi, though to dive the Jun island part of the chain, this would be a long trip from Global Divers in Seeb. However, Global has decent access to the Aquarium, which is closer to Seeb than Al Sawadi, and very popular with divers.

We had great vis there and warm temperatures. The thermocline didn't kick in till around 18 meters, three millimeter wetsuits were quite comfortable,  and some divers wore shorties.  On Friday October 26^th  we went to the bay just north of the ranger station and dived Three Sisters to the west and a site they called Noodle to the east.  On that first dive we found large honeycomb rays, at least one turtle, smaller morays, and a sting ray under a rock at the 18 meter point where we decided to stop punching current and turn around, ascend gradually, and fin comfortably with it.  Bobbi and I had been joined at that point by a third diver who ran low on air and ascended just as a mackeral or some large fish cruised by just off the sand. Further on we found a pair of crayfish brazenly exposed on a ledge outside their lair.  If I'd have had a net or a pair of thick gloves I could have easily snagged one of them.  They were both waving their feelers at us, and relying on that moreso than eyesight.  It was only when I stuck a finger in the way of one waving feeler that the animal backed in high alarm back into his hole, and the other followed suit.

On our second dive on Noodle across the bay, we met with a current on descent but once to the seaward side of the island, we had a good long dive.  All our dives were an hour on this trip (because they asked us to come up by then). On this dive I recall more of the same, especially a turtle or two and the large honeycomb morays.  We ended up being swept over an area that was not reef, and came up midway between the island with the ranger post and the next one over to the east.

Next day, the 27^th  we continued our exploration of that area by diving the back of the island to the east of 3 sisters, so we'd dived the whole face comprising two islands by the time we were through.  We again had nice vis. We found an easy ledge for Robin to descend on, but Jay and Robin got ahead of us and kept going when we clacked to call attention to a large honeycomb moray and we saw no more of them till back on the boat. So we joined where Global instructor Ali was leading some other divers at 18 meters in the sand and we positioned ourselves midway between them and the boulders on the wall. We figured if they saw anything  in the sand they'd call us over.  From our vantage on the wall I saw a turtle fin vertically up the wall and called Ali's attention to it. At one point a ray swam past Ali and we tried to give chase. I noticed another hiding in a crevice and again I called attn to it. Later we came on a number of honeycomb morays including one just lying on the bottom.  Again we had a nice long dive and we thought an interesting one, until we got back on the boat and found everyone including Jay raving about the leopard sharks.  Since Jay had gone ahead of us and saw it after that, I don't know how we missed it, but we've seen so many of them, we were not all that crushed.

Our second dive was planned for the Aquarium, arguably the best site in that area.  At times there we have seen sea horses, free swimming morays, scorpion fish, and rays.  Our anticipation was excited by reports from the boat that had done its first dive there that they had seen leopard sharks too.  However, for our afternoon dive, the wind was picking up as was the current, and conditions were less favorable than they had been in the morning.  Still we moved through clouds of snappers and saw a sting ray at 20 meters in the sand.  Bobbi found a scorpion fish and we came on a number of honeycomb morays, including one whose head was poked outside some sponge coral, being cleaned by blue wrasse, looking satisfied indeed.  At the end of the dive we came on a school of darting squid, all in all not bad for a day out.

Due to the changing sea conditions, the boat ride back was fairly miserable, spine-jarring bouncy and wet.  Everything got soaked, and it reminded me of the best sailing days off Aviation Beach back in the '90's.

Meanwhile, we bid adieu to Jay and Robin, until next time ...

Virtual diving this weekend: Oman

I'm taking a break from diving to enjoy a brief visit from my granddaughter this weekend, except that I've been diving into Facebook and came on this ...

In case you can't read it, my comment says: "I lived and dived in Oman ten years 1985-1995 and I live in UAE now partly so as to live just over the Oman border. I've encountered all the animals shown in this video numerous times."

Here's the video that shows the animals we've encountered in Oman and in the UAE in the many years we've dived in both places:

To embed the video, Blogger asks you to input its title and it will search YouTube for it.  The search on the title of this video "Oman Diving, Scuba Diving - Ministry of Oman Tourism" got half a dozen hits.  One was on a film uploaded by the Oman Tourism authority on Dec 27, 2011 with this commentary:

"Many thanks to Khaled Sultani for sharing this video with us. The video is, to a certain extent, the 'best of' Dimaniyat Islands. It's an accumulation of around 4 awesome weekends of diving in this location in Oman, over the past few years. Sadly the visibility isn't always great but it's tough to beat when it comes to richness in Marine life."

Sadly, it's true what they say about the visibility. We had the honor and pleasure of diving with Khaled and his team of video photographers in the Damaniyites last September, on a weekend when the visibility was on 'sadly' status.  Still we got in some great diving.  My blog posting for that weekend features a YouTube embed that Khalid took on one of our dives.  Check it out:
http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2011/09/bobbi-and-vance-fun-diving-at.html

Diving in Damaniyite Islands with ExtraDivers at Al Sawadi Beach Resort, Oct 8, 2011

My logged dives #1082-1083

Tourist visas in UAE are granted for one month at a time (with a ten-day grace period) and while we are between jobs as it were, Bobbi and I have to exit the country and re-enter every calendar month.  We are in the habit of making this our excuse to regularly dive the Damaniyite Islands in Oman. Someone has to do it!

We decided  to spend most of Friday in the UAE.  Bobbi and I needed to sleep just a little later than usual due to the hectic lives we’ve led since having to vacate our home the past 13 years in All Prints.  In the morning we unpacked a few boxes in our new but temporary 1-br apt in Khaliyfa A, the new township near Abu Dhabi airport while watching BBC news and draining a pot of coffee, and then we loaded the 4 dive bags we keep in our apt, each containing a full kit of Scuba gear, and drove into town to where I’ve been teaching part time and both of us got on the Internet from there. Then Dusty called from the Thai embassy where he and his lady friend Michele were enjoying a Thai food festival, and some of our old Thai friends and their spouses were there, and it was on our way to the highway to Oman, so we dropped by there on our way out of town to have a delicious meal of homemade Thai.

We had pre-arranged to pick up Dusty there, the 3^rd of the 4 dive bags were for him (and the other was our spare gear). We were on the road by 3:30 and to make a long drive and border crossing short, we arrived at the Suwaiq motel at the edge of the mountains right off  the Batinah coast about 4 and a half hours later.

The Suwaiq motel used to be a dubious place to stay.  When we slept there once before we didn’t know it had two night clubs, one for Indian and the other for Arabic clients. If you arrive at night they will both be pumping loud music at once, and the only way we could tolerate the rooms into the wee hours was that in addition to the a/c, we also had a fan we could run all night by the head of the bed.   It was tawdry accommodations and the only advantages were it was much cheaper than other hotels, and the loud bars sold beer for just a riyal for a tall can, less than $3.  Another advantage is it’s only about 40 min from Al Sawadi Beach resort, which charges more than 4 times the price of the Suwaiq motel. That includes dinner, but you can get a great meal of dhal, freshly bbq chicken tikka, biriani, masala, purata, and fresh mango juice for just the price of a beer at the Suwaiq Hotel.

Imagine our surprise when we checked in at the Suwaiq hotel, had a look at our room, and found it had been remodeled.  It was tastefully decorated with comfortable new double beds.  The baths had been remodeled. The old mouldy rugs were gone and in their place shiny tiles.  Best of all, the lanais had been enclosed into small TV rooms, with new flat screen TVs with cable vision, and this extra room between the bedroom and the music had been especially designed there to create a buffer between sleep and the music.  And it worked, when we turned on the a/c we could sleep soundly, couldn’t hear the music.  Best of all, there was a new bar there with tasteful decoration and no music.  Smoking had been banned from the public rooms for a long time, but here was a place to enjoy a nightcap without even the annoyance of loud music.  If you’re reading this don’t tell anyone else about this place.  We don’t want it filling up, which at only 200 dirhams a room, it should do.  We’ll definitely stay there again next time we dive the Damaniyites.

Speaking of which we had two dives on Saturday morning.  One was Tina’s Run (not quite its name) on the north side of police island, starting from the east and moving west and the other was the mousetrap, the wall running underwater from Sirah Island to Big Jun.  T-Run was especially good.  I was pushing the edge of the reef, looking over the side down onto the sand, and into caves, looking there for leopard sharks and rays.  These were all at the top of the reef.  Fortunately Bobbi and Dusty found them and got me back up there. The ray was a black bull ray in a cave.  The leopard shark was a small one at rest in a patch of cabbage coral.  He posed there for the dozen divers that came to visit and never moved.  Leopard sharks have not rounded but sculpted bodies, moulded for grace, in my opinion among the most beautiful gentle creatures in the ocean, and when not bothered, among the most imperturbable.

We didn’t see a leopard shark on the second dive. On both of them, some divers saw turtles, there were big sting rays, honeycomb morays and all kinds of other eels, lion fish … Dusty swam into a cave with huge bat fish, creating an interesting tableau.  There were endearingly ugly cuttlefish, wary of intruders, going iridescent and rippling off if we got too close. I shined a light into one hole and found a large purple crab staring back at me. Vis was great, water temperatures were warm above the thermocline at 15 meters, 26 down there.  Not a bad way to turn around a visa if you are in that position in the UAE.

Bobbi and Vance fun diving at Damaniyite Islands, Oman, Sept 2-3, 2011

My logged dives #1073-1076

Bobbi and I had a week off for Eid Al Fitr so we crossed the border into Oman to dive at one our favorite spots in this part of the world, the Damaniyite Islands, just off Al Sawadi, about an hour's drive north of Muscat.  The islands are a protected marine reserve 40 minutes by boat off the coast, known for great visibility and rich marine life.  We used to see leopard sharks here on almost every dive.  Now it's rare to see a leopard shark, and fishermen are encroaching on the reserve despite the police post on one of the islands, visited by police for only a part of each day.  The worst problem on our most recent visit though was the visibility.  A green algae had bloomed in depths down to 17-18 meters, stopped by the thermocline there which plunged us into temperatures in the low 20s when we went that deep.  Vis was at least good at the bottom, though the light was clouded by the algae.  We had not anticipated the cold.  Bobbi had left her 5 mm wetsuit at home.  She at least had a shorty she could wear over her 3 mm.  I had a half mm lycra and a half mm rash vest over which I could put on a 3 mm overall, and over that a 3 mm longsleeve top, so I had 7 mm on my core, but still got chilled in the limbs and head, so second dives each day were hypothermic for both of us. 

We got up before 6 a.m. to leave Abu Dhabi before 8 in order to arrive as requested by 2 pm on Friday, only to be told that we didn't really need to be there until 2:30, but they always told people coming from UAE to arrive a half hour before they wanted them there.  In fact, that was to meet a boat departing at 3:00, so we could have slept an hour longer that morning.  

While waiting we encountered good friends Robin and Ann, whom we knew from BSAC days in Abu Dhabi. They had dived there several days already but were giving Friday a miss due to the cold and disappointing vis.  They painted us a pretty poor picture of what to expect, but we soldiered on.  Robin and Ann were still around on Saturday but didn't dive that day either.

I can't say I blamed them.  We were thinking to give Saturday a miss as well, but we were there, and you never know what you'll see.  Actually our first dive was the best of the 4 we did, because the family spending the week there at Al Sawadi and getting their kids certified wanted to go to the Aquarium. This was a long trip for an afternoon dive.  It meant that we weren't diving until after 4:00, so our second dive didn't start until almost 6, and was essentially a night dive.  To Extra Divers's credit, they did have torches for everyone, fully charged, and I had brought my two from home.

The Aquarium is a submerged reef lying just outside the protected area so it's getting covered in nets and fish pots, and whereas it still has a lot of honeycomb moray eels and smaller fish, we didn't see any turtles, and the bigger fish are sure to be caught or driven away between the divers and fishermen.  Still there were interesting things to see there. Bobbi found a large seahorse as big as her forearm.  We saw some large cuttlefish as well, in groups of two and finally four just at the top of the reef.  We saw a lot of honeycomb morays, one free swimming, and a large pair wavering like flags, right at the end of the dive.  We found plenty of green and grey morays as well. We found hard-to-spot flounder and scorpion fish, hard to see camouflaged in cabbage coral. It was a great dive despite the poor vis, and Bobbi and I came up only when our time expired at 1 hour, everyone else already on the boat.

Our night dive was at Little Jun, far right corner, south I think, east (far wall) back toward Big Jun, direction of Sira.  We felt freezing cold on this dive, but didn't see much ourselves.  Bobbi found a pair of hermit crabs in fluted cone shells, with small shrimp living on the shell. Said the dive guide reported a massive sting ray that went right over his head, corroborated by Marian and her daughter who were with him at the time, but none of the rest of us saw it. Bobbi and I were chilled and came up after 45 minutes.

Saturday, we dived with a group of video photographers, one of them named Khalid Al Sultani and his wife, Sara from Germany, who were lingering over small animals in the dive and got some stupendous video, check it out

an Ode to the little things from Khaled Sultani on Vimeo.

Our first dive was at Police Island, same corner as Little Jun day before.  Bobbi and I dropped through the algae murk and onto a big honeycomb at 21 meters.

Our favorite fish on this dive was one we've seen before in Thailand, which the dive guide said at the time was "look like shark, not shark".  I thought it was a cobia, such as this one, http://www.flickr.com/photos/sprain/403529059/. It was 1.5 to 2 meters, circled us high up on the reef, around 7 meters depth, but had a small mouth like a nurse shark (not a jutting jaw as in this picture), and a dorsal fin a little far back from that of a shark (not fanned as in this picture, that I noticed), and also it was not skittish as sharks tend to be.  I'll try harder to track this one down.  Also, the lady who was diving with Bobbi and I and our guide Roshan while her husband watched the 2 year old back on shore at the resort, found a lobster (crayfish).  They went up early while Bobbi and I finished out the hour underwater.

Our last dive was at three sisters on Police Island, encroaching on another site there. The first thing we saw was a torpedo ray being videoed by Khalid, one of the video divers. Roshan was snapping pictures of nudibranchs which was essentially how we spotted them.  As on the other dives there were numerous lion fish, morays, often two together, trigger fish everywhere, napoleon wrasse, and lots of scorpion fish.  Poking my light into caves we found a big puffer fish in one, and a huge grouper hiding in another.  We saw flounders on all the dives, on this one three together in the sand.  The guide was teasing some clownfish and oddly, one of them bit his finger (amusing, surprised Roshan). There were nice swim-throughs on this last dive, but we were COLD on this one, and glad when our hour was up.

We got back to port right at 3pm, hauled our gear up the road (no car waiting), didn't wash it, and headed back to the Millenium hotel, where we showered and just barely made our late checkout time of 4:00 pm.

The Millenium Hotel was very nice, just half an hour's drive north from Al Sawadi on the Sohar road. We used to like Al Sawadi Beach Hotel a lot, spent many nights there with our young children in Oman, and had some great feasts back in the all-you-can-eat lobster days, gone now. The Al Sawadi as it gets older diminishes in value as it also gets more expensive, now 95 Omani riyals a night for two, half board (US$250). Last time Jay treated us to accommodation there, so nice of him. This time we checked around online and found the Millenium for 65 Omani riyals ($170) for the two of us with dinner and breakfast buffets much better than at AlSawadi, great rooms with seaview upgrade free, quite luxurious, similar to Meridien Aqaa but smaller scale. We had a view of the boat harbor out the window. The bar and restaurant were pleasant with outdoor decks, but furniture spartan, and drinks expensive. We splurged 14 Oman riyals ($40) for a bottle of Argento house wine. They had our room number but we didn't sign the chit before leaving the restaurant so they sent 'room service' up with the bill and doorbelled us out of bed at 10:45 that night to come to the door and sign the check, jeez. 

If you stay at the Millenium be aware there are no top sheets on the beds or inside the closet (where they provide a spare blanket), and the duvet is too hot for summer, but the AC is too cold without it. Next time we'll request a sheet before sleeping (and ask there be no room service we haven't requested ourselves).

Travel logistics: The borders were quiet on Friday morning when we made the trip. We left the house at 7:45 and were over the border just after 10:00. it took us half an hour to drive from the Oman border down wadi Jizzi to the Sohar Road, a trip that used to take 45 min on a winding road. At the Buraimi turnoff it takes almost half an hour to reach the triumphal portal on the far side of Sohar and another hour from there to reach Al Sawadi Beach turnoff.

Just beyond the Sohar gate there's a bull fighting grounds just off the road on the beach side that was active at 5:30 on Saturday evening as we were coming back, but I think it might have still been Eid celebration in Oman, probably not a regular occurrence, but something to watch for if in the area on Fridays.  Bullfights tend to happen every other week on a Friday.

Heading south from Sohar you eventually come to the Suwaiq roundabout. There is a turning to the right signposted for Rustaq there. It's a back road to Rustaq, not the best way to get there, but a little way up that turning, past where the boulevard ends and where the road curves, the part that goes straight takes you to the Suwaiq motel, a colorful place to stay but potentially noisy.  If planning to sleep there, take a fan for white noise to drown out the incessant bass beat (the AC on its own doesn't quite get it), and if diving next day, give yourself an hour for the trip to Al Sawadi Beach Resort.

The next roundabout toward Muscat is Wudum al Sahel, with a gazebo arch in the roundabout. A sign here tells you to go straight for the Millenium Hotel, 16 km. But it's only 10 km or so to the next roundabout where the sign says to turn left for the Millenium Hotel (and it's 5 or 6 km from there). This roundabout is also the northern entrance to the proper loop road that takes you if you turn right there to Rustaq and then eventually brings you back to the highway at Barka past Wadi Bani Khurus, Wadi Bani Awf, Wadi Mistal (Ghubra Bowl and Wakan) and Nakhal, all fascinating places to visit. This roundabout has two boats in it.

If you're staying at the Millenium allow at least half an hour to reach Al Sawadi Beach from the hotel.

Now comes the tricky part getting to the Al Sawadi Beach Resort from the direction of Sohar. The next proper roundabout in the direction of Muscat from the north is Musaneh. There are no signs here but the turning to Al Sawadi beach that used to be halfway down the highway to Barka is no more, and so if you continue south on the main highway you'll pass the spot where the formidable steel guardrail now blocks what used to be your turn, and you must continue another 10 km before you can U-turn at the roundabout at Barka and drive 10 km back on yourself to the turn for Al Sawadi which you still might miss, since it's no longer signposted. If forced to do that look for a Shell station on your right (heading north) and an Arab World Restaurant just after that, and take the next turn which should put you on a street lined with hedgerows that takes you between the Makkah Hypermarket on your right and a Turkish restaurant on your left. That's the road to Al Sawadi.

But to avoid going 20 km out of your way, when you reach the Musaneh Roundabout heading toward Muscat, turn left and then immediately right to get on the slip road going against traffic heading north on the Sohar road. Go slow enough to slow down for unpainted and unmarked speed bumps. You cross a couple of places where there is a turning off the highway and you have to cross those roads, but eventually you'll notice the Makkah Hypermarket ahead of you and you turn left there to get on the road with hedgerows and the Turkish Restaurant on your left.

If you miss that turn you'll come to the Arab World Restaurant and the Shell station just a block later. If you notice them in time, turn left at the street just before the Arab World Restaurant and where it dead-ends turn left again to take you back to the road with hedgerows. I did this myself a couple of times or I wouldn't mention it.

Hope this information is useful to someone (if it is, click on an ad, thanks :-)

May 20-21, 2011 - The Damaniyite Islands from Al Sawadi Beach Resort

My logged dives #1041-1044

Extra Divers has taken over the concession at Al Sawadi Beach Resort.  We had encountered them last year at the Oman Dive Center and they enrolled us in the ‘club’ and gave us a card with a number that when we present it at any Extra Divers shop worldwide, we get a 10% discount off our diving. So we had the card to reduce our dive costs, plus they have made it convenient for divers from the UAE to come up mid-day and dive with them in the afternoon.

Jay and Matt Fortin were flying in from Doha and agreed to meet us there Friday afternoon.  They landed in Dubai and drove down to Al Ain to spend the night on Jebel Hafeet instead of having to drive the distance Thursday night. And Bobbi and I were able to leave our house at 7:00 a.m. on Friday morning, and at 9:30 a.m. we had hardly any holdup at the Omani border.

We could have reached the resort at a little after noon but there was construction at the turning for the beach resort from the Sohar to Muscat road so we had to drive down it an extra 17 km all the way to Barka, u-turn in the roundabout, and drive the 17 km back, 34 km out of our way due to the blocked turn across the main highway.  Next time we turn at Musanneh and take the slip road to where we need to turn left.  If you try it and get to the Shell station and Arab World Restaurant you’ve gone a few hundred meters too far.

Still we got there at 1:00 for what we’d been told would be a 2:30 dive. There was plenty of time to check into our room and go for a swim.  We were at the dive center well before 2:30 but at that time they were still having customers fill in their forms.  So it was after 3:00 before they got us all on the boat and about 3:30 before they put out to sea, kind of late in the day for a two-dive afternoon off islands that take over half an hour to reach.

Sira Island (what we used to call Jed, or Fed in some of my old dive logs)

The first dive started out tropical, remarkably clear vis, and fish and coral everywhere, like in Egypt Red Sea or the Philippines or Mozambique, very beautiful.  Various kinds of corals were easily visible in 20 meter clarity, housing some large honeycomb moray eels. Turtles were swimming there, and other kinds of morays.

But when we pushed into a current at the end of the wall and reversed direction up the opposite side we hit an environment that resembled the north side of Lima Rock, bland coloring and boulder terrain with lots of fish but not that much to write home about for much of the dive.  We pursued this at about 16 meters until we found some pots with holes in them sunk there possibly to create an extension of the reef, or as someone’s fisheries experiment.  Jay and Matt were signaling low on air at this point and headed up the reef, but Bobbi and I stayed in the sand because two of these pots had honeycomb morays poking out of them, craning their necks and moving their mouths the way the big morays do. But just beyond that I noticed a brown ray partially covered in sand.  We swam up to it and it started pivoting and flapping its wings slowly and soon it had liftoff and was moving ahead of us, sand trailing off its back as it went.  It didn’t seem alarmed, just mildly annoyed, as it zig zagged gracefully ahead of us and wheeled as if inviting us to come across for a better look.  It played like that for a minute or two, until its excess speed got the better of us and we lost the chase.

We kept on from there, getting down to 25 degrees cold in the thermoclines so I was was glad I’d put on lycra under my 3 mm, until our hour was up, and we took four minutes to reach the surface up through water exceeding 30 degrees, in terrain reminiscent of the back side of Dibba. On surfacing we found we had gone halfway from Sira along the wall in the channel to Jun island, which we could have reached in another half an hour.

Walid Jun (Jun is the big island nearest Sawadi Beach resort, Walid Jun is the son of Jun to the south)

Because of our late start that afternoon, this dive started half an hour before sunset and ended in dusk. Jay and I had both brought small torches and we needed them on this dive.  I switched mine on to look under rock ledges at first but eventually just left it on, like on a night dive. We illuminated a few morays, and Jay’s beam located a small black ray under a rock, possibly a juvenile bull ray.  My beam picked out a a turtle cruising the reef just beyond that. Fahad found a crayfish in a hole, and called me over for my torch to illuminate it brightly for all to see. At another point my beam crossed a scorpion fish.

We had been briefed that at the end of the dive if we encountered a current, just ride it, so we did, Bobbi and I drifting neutrally buoyant over a patch of cabbage coral, crisscrossing it with torch beams.  We were almost an hour into diving when we surfaced, last divers to come up.  The boat was just ahead of us, visible against a horizon tinged with orange. I shined my light on our heads for pickup and we clamored up the ladder at the back and rode home to a buffet dinner and well-deserved liquid refreshment, and well deserved rest afterwards.

Next morning we had meant to get up early and use the wifi in the lobby but we slumbered in bed past 8 and barely had time for breakfast before we had to get back on the boat and go diving again.

The aquarium (a shallow reef off the island south of the ranger station)

This started as an odd dive due to the inadvertently deceptive briefing.  Fahad was a great leader in the water but his briefings were comical.  He would hold the charts right side up but someone would notice in mid briefing that north was not actually at his back but at ours, but once we figured that out, we could do the geometry and understand what lay beneath us more or less.  For the aquarium dive, it wasn’t Fahad per se, but the chart.  He showed us the island behind him and the wall just behind us to the west.  We were in the northwest corner so the idea was to follow the wall south and when we reached 100 bar reverse to the north, ascend to the plateau, and return to the boat, which would remain at anchor (anchored right on the reef we saw, they need a mooring at that beautiful spot). It seemed to be a typical out and back plan.

The first part of the dive went seemingly to plan.  We entered the water in 7 meters clear as a swimming pool, made our way to the wall, and dropped down to the sand bottom at 20 meters or so, more cloudy and colder down there.  There was a slight current against us, which made perfect sense to head south and turn mid-dive to return on the northerly current. We found several morays at depth including some large honeycomb ones, our favorites, and near where we stopped to look at a smaller speckled yellow-mouth moray lying exposed on the sea bed, a large bull ray came swimming toward us.  We hovered while it came right up to us.  Not in a hurry, it wheeled about and sauntered back the way it had come, but not so fast that we couldn’t keep up with it for a ways, but it had more stamina in the water than we had air for it, so we stopped and let it mosey on ahead and out of sight.

It was about this time that I noticed we were heading north, creating for me a disorientation dilemma.  It’s so easy to get confused underwater. I purposefully recalled we had definitely started on a southerly heading, direction of Muscat, definitely to the south.  Was there something wrong with my compass?  I manipulated its direction; the needle stayed pointing the way we were going.  We must have rounded a point then, in which case we’d be heading up the back side of the island.  That would be wrong, so I signaled my divers (Bobbi, Jay, and his son Matt) to double back on ourselves.  I figured we’d see where we went wrong and we could carry on going south at that point.  It felt odd though to be going south, intuitively back toward the boat, but according to the compass, away from it.

I led us higher up the reef, still going south but with the reef on our right not on our left, as it should be, but with shallower depth came greater clarity.  We were in no time back at the nets we'd seen at the beginning of the dive that unfortunately have fouled parts of the reef in splotches the size of basketball courts.  Here we saw other divers, and Fahad leading his group shallow.  The reason was obvious.  There were beautiful soft purple and yellow corals here, and dozens of large honeycomb morays, some poking out of rocks, some swimming freely.  There were other morays as well, green and white, and even a couple of black banded ones trying to hide with their heads in the rocks, not out like the other morays, and not commonly seen.

We soon got oriented here.  We were not on a north-south wall as implied in the briefing diagram.  We were on a cone with encircling sand at 20 meters.  Had we known that we could have simply carried on at ever shallower depths and circled the boat in corkscrew fashion.  Confusion allayed we enjoyed the rest of the dive, swimming amid the morays and hovering with a beguiling school of batfish.

Toward the end of our allotted hour we joined up again with Jay and Matt, conserving their air nicely, but by now diving in their own team-pair.  Bobbi and I meandered until our time was up but the anchor line and the boat’s shadow served to always orient us, which allowed me to bring us up slowly right under the boat.

When I noticed that many of the divers were jumping in the water to cool off and duck dive around us, I figured there was no rush for us to get back on the boat, so I suggested to Bobbi via our standard hand signal that we hang out another three minutes under the boat in a 5 meter safety stop.  The batfish joined and amused us, while we relaxed neutrally buoyant and eventually exited the water after 70 minutes diving on our computers.

Police Run (a wall dive from the east side of the island with the ranger station and round the corner to the bay where the station is)

It was warm back on the boat in our wetsuits so when I put some baby shampoo in my mask I decided to just go in the water to rinse it out, and then I might as well just put it on and check out what was there through my mask and snorkel.  Others had done the same, and soon everyone was watching a cuttlefish in the clear water there.

Fahed was trying to organize us back on board and we were soon back in the water where we found the cuttlefish more in his element.  Again vis was clear and the corals were healthy and varied, and it was easy to see out over the sand at 16 meters where we hoped the leopard shark would be.  Bobbi and I used to almost always see one or two in the course of two days of diving at Al Sawadi beach. I thought back to the time I got my picture made with one once, back when leopard sharks were plentiful here.

Picture credit: Hilal Matta
http://www.vancestevens.com/divelogs/dives2002/465-466.htm 

I had made that trip alone. For some reason Bobbi didn’t join me in a long National Day weekend, which I had started out by driving on my own to Al Ain after work and running the Al Ain HHH in their annual ‘Nash Hash’ event.  I slept that night in my car at the site of the on-on in one of the wadis in Oman but short of the official border post.  I awakened early to drive through that post at dawn and on down to Al Sawadi Beach Resort to try and get on a dive on spec.  I arrived by 9 but they were fully booked -- but by chance one of the divers had a stomach issue and dropped out, so I got to take his place and go on the trip.  It was on one of those dives that my dive buddy took this pic and kindly emailed it to me afterwards. 

After diving that day I went into Muscat to see friends but ended up camping near Nakhal, sleeping again in my car.  I drove that morning into Wadi Bani Khurous as far as the town of Hijar at 900 meters and walked from there up the mountain to Aqabat Talhat at 2300, which I revisited recently with some friends from our local running group (on Earth Day, when we made a cleanup of the area, which had been crashed by a large group of hikers who left their Pocari Sweat cans and Tanoof water bottles lying all over the place, http://justcurious.posterous.com/earth-day-april-22-2011).  I then walked back down again, same day, and drove home to Abu Dhabi that night.  Those were the days.

Back to this dive where Bobbi and I were keeping a lookout for leopard sharks, we hadn’t seen much of great interest apart from more morays, when we arrived at a cave Fahad had told us to watch for so we could swim through it.  I was first on the scene and entered the cave poking my light into the soft corals looking in places where rays might like to hide. I had come through the cave and was doing the same on the other side when Bobbi pulled my fin to show me the eagle ray. Bobbi said later it had come right at her, but saw her, and bolted.  She had grabbed my fin meantime or I wouldn’t have seen it since I was focused on my torch beam.  When those things move, they move fast. I saw it escape overhead and up the reef, bulky white underside plain in the clear vis.  I rose up the reef with computer beeping a bit, a little too fast from a nitrogen point of view, to see where the ray had gone, and caught glimpses of it as it made its way quickly along the wall, now obscured in the distant suspended matter.

We continued the dive now apart from the main group, and when Jay and Matt turned up the reef Bobbi and I carried on together.  We were keeping in the sand in a last hope of finding a leopard shark, but eventually we decided we had better to surface.  The boat was still picking up divers from further back on the reef when we noticed below us a very large ray.  So we didn’t see our leopard shark but we descended for one last time on the ray and left our Damaniyite diving on that note.

It was a brown cow tail ray, similar to the one the day before, and like that one, it simply moved seaward, but not so fast that we couldn’t keep up for a minute or two.