May 27-29, 2011 UAE East Coast - Dibba and Khor Fakkan

My logged dives #1045-1048

Godelieve and Rossane wanted to dive with Bobbi and I this weekend. Chris had booked his Nomad hostel out completely to a large French group and there was no room at the inn for us this weekend, nor space on his dive boats going to Musandam, and Godelieve had never been to Khor Fakkan, so Bobbi and I decided to revisit our favorite dive sites there and see how the fishes had survived the triple whammies of Cyclone Gonu, the months-long red tide epidemics, and more recently the spate of hotel and harbor constructions taking place all along the east coast of the UAE.

It's still a beautiful area, relaxing, moves to a rhythm all its own, and all your own if you make it so. Our rhythm is to sleep to a normal hour on Friday, our first weekend day off, which for us means waking up when the sun rises and lying around till the early sunlight tells us it's 5:30 or 6:00, then getting up and checking email, watching the news on TV while packing our dive gear and clothes for the weekend, fetching the car from overnight parking across the road, loading it up and being away by 8:30 for an 11:30 arrival in Dibba. Lulu is our first stop there, the new hypermarket that has become the focal point of Dibba cuisine. There we could get tasty tiny round pizzas for a dollar apiece, spicy chicken and prawn, watermellon and grapes for a pittance, cold fresh juices, and still arrive at the dive center at noon for their 12:30 dive.

Which turned out in typical Freestyle rhythm to be an after 1 pm dive, but ma'alesh, we had little else to do that day than kit up and wait and get on the boats, and then into the water for an hour's cool relaxation, then back on shore, repeat, add water, relax.

We were told we should have been there last weekend. Everyone was telling us vis had been 20 meters, plenty of animals around, ideal conditions. For our first dive we put in on the right side mooring south east of the island and set our course west in slack current to meander among the coral bommies in shallow water near the island. Surge was a problem and vis was disappointing, but we still enjoyed schools of fish, a lone batfish under a rock, shoals of snappers and jacks criss crossing one another as we dropped into the aquarium, big lumbering porcupine fish moving in close out of curiosity, parrotfish, fusiliers, etc.

From the aquarium I headed back west toward the loud clacking which intensified as we moved in over the coral rubble where the beautiful reef used to be with its sharks and devil rays, undoubtedly the best diving I ever did in the UAE, and certainly the most consistently best including there and Musandam. But that was back when Terry was alive. Now it's sad that Terry and the reef as it was are both gone.

But the reef is bouncing back in one place, if you follow it south from near the aquarium and if you can find where it turns east (hard to do in bad vis, just possible on our noon dive today) you come upon a patch of purple raspberry coral that's pretty like it used to be. But at noon today there were no sharks or turtles on it. When I found it I circled it looking for critters, but apart from healthy reef fish, nothing caught our attention. Eventually we reversed and retraced over the barren parts, and then our time was up and we surfaced.

The 3 pm dive, which got going at around 4 (good to see that some traditions are honored ;-), was not as easy as the first. We had planned to go around to the back side of the island on this dive but when we arrived at the south east corner mooring, conditions had changed and there was a stiff current that would prevent us getting to the back side that way. The current was so bad that when Godelieve and Rossane entered the water they got carried astern and would not have been able to reach us at the bow line except that I yelled for a line to be thrown to them, and to his credit Terry's son Andy had one tied to a buoy and tossed it astern and recovered our divers. Bobbi meantime had descended to await us out of the surface current, and shortly we joined her by pulling ourselves down the rope against the current.

We retraced our steps from morning but this time had to fin toward our right in order to avoid being swept off course. We passed the same coral, with some effort to keep our path through it (the batfish was still there :-). Vis had got worse so at the aquarium it wasn't as attractive as earlier but here at least we were in the lee of the island and had some relief from the current, so were were able to find our way to the back side that way. We entered though thermoclines of bracingly cold water. I was wearing just lycra and a rash vest, Bobbi had on her shorty, and we were cold. At depth, just 12-13 meters, we went out a little into the sand but not so far where there would be rays because the current went against us when we left the shelter of the wall of boulders. We found morays in the wall but turned back when the current started to push us back even there.

We were picking our way back over these boulders when I saw a flash of grey and black streak and realized a black tip reef shark was passing. I wheeled after it, and Rossana just 12 years old, was right at my shoulder trying to keep up with it. Recharged now, we resumed our heading back to the aquarium, but Godelieve had put weight in her pocket and it had slipped out. I saw her and Rossana suface, nothing we could do, so Bobbi and I carried on and saw a second shark as we were coming back on the aquarium. Pushing up against our allotted hour we passed over the clacking reef rubble and I saw a third shark right about where it should be. Bobbi missed that one, and our time was now up, but we surfaced thinking that a mundane and almost unpleasant dive had been rendered almost exciting simply with the appearance of our favorite inhabitants of our once favorite reef.

Back on shore Andy and his staff were offering beer and making the motions of preparing barbeque, but the Royal Beach Hotel where the shop is prefers to keep prices high (800 for a single bedroom) and endure less than full occupancy rather than offer dive packages that would allow divers to stay on the premises, so it's hard to accept hospitality from the dive shop when we have to not only drive into Dibba, but check into our accommodation there as well. Two bedrooms at Seaside Apts where we stay (not by the sea, they always remind us, when we call there), with kitchen with microwave for heating up the interesting Indian dishes we can buy at Lulu's, is only 330 in May, or 82.50 each for four people. I hope Andy can restore the social scene at Freestyle though. We would like to have stayed with them, but logistically it was too difficult, with Godelieve having to cook special pasta to feed Rosanna, and everyone being tired and not wishing to drive on UAE roads under the influence.

Before we departed we learned that their Musandam trip that day had encountered 2 whalesharks (they're back!) but we had arranged to dive Inchcape 2 and Martini Rock next day with Divers Down. We had selected that over a trip with Brian and Tatsiana at Neptune Divers, who were going to Musandam on Saturday, but we were going to Khor Fakkan.

So no more about that (but checking old dive logs, lots of whaleshark sightings in May and June, this one in 2003: http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/divelogs/dives2003/486-487.htm; and these just last year for example:

• http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2010/05/ho-hum-another-whale-shark-dibba.html)
• http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2010/06/6-whale-sharks-on-al-marsa-liveaboard.html

Anyway, we turned up at Divers Down well before we needed to be there. They were just setting up shop at the Miramar, on the same beach as the Meridien Al Aqah, from where Al Boom sends boats daily to the sites were were planning to dive. Must say Divers Down agreed to my exact requests for dive sites, which was why we chose them, and the boat was ours apart from an open water course being run from it, whose divers were not diving the same dives we were. But we still had to share those sites with the hoards from Al Boom's boats.

The dives were nice, though we were going through motions of previous dives Bobbi and I had done dozens of times before, but like everything else in the UAE, the dives were not like before. The Inchape 2 is the wreck in 22 meters near Martini Rock. It's got a lot of animals on it, writhing with morays, and surely much else, though most of the life on it today was human. We had planned a dive as in the old days. Descend on the wreck and for Rosanna who had no computer, understand from the wheel that she could spend 30 min max at 22 meters, then ten minutes at 16, and then exhaust the tank for as long as it takes at 12 (the dive would be 37 minutes NDL at 22 meters if diving on tables). In the event we had circumnavigated the wreck in the sand, done a tour of the decks, and even investigated the holds with overhead escape access, acquainting ourselves with most of the morays in the process, in the first 20 min of the dive, at which point we headed off on phase 2, a 240 degree compass course in the sand about 5 min to the wall of boulders. The plan here was to find jawfish in the sand just short of those boulders. There were none that we could find. There were more morays in the rocks, but when we turned the corner into the bay to the north of the wall, the rust and blue corals were there, but nothing much to write home about. Nice dive, but not like in the past.

We motored over to Martini where bananas, watermellon, and oranges were laid out for us and we enjoyed a surface interval in warm but overcast May conditions. Our dive on Martini rock was again cold though. Too cold. The purple and white soft corals were there, and very beautiful. Morays were plentiful. But not much else. I scoured the rocks for scorpion fish. They used to be everywhere on this dive. We used to see turtles and honeycomb morays. On this dive today, we encountered mostly Al Boom divers and reef fish. It was pretty but pretty cold too. We're waiting now on the reports from Musandam of whale shark sightings :-(

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.

April 29, Fanaku and Kachalu, Musandam - April 30 Dibba Rock

My logged dives #1038-1040

April 30 we decided to dive at Freestyle Divers.  Terry, the gregarious founder, had just lost his battle to cancer.  "Diver down", read one comment on the Facebook memorial page.  All who knew Terry knew him as a community spirit as well as an entrepreneur.  He used to tell me I was “mad” when I’d turn up at his shop at sunrise and swim alone or with a buddy, if I could recruit one, out to what used to be my favorite reef in all the world.  An early morning swim was invariably rewarded by encounters with turtles and views of sharks cruising over the raspberry colored coral. There were schools of barracuda and sometimes devil rays as well. It took half an hour to swim out, an hour on the reef, and half an hour back.  If I started at 7:00 a.m. I could be back ashore in time to return to Dibba Rock by boat, first dive of the day, at 9 or 9:30.

These were the days when we could dive Dibba on Friday and sit on the lanai with Terry and his merry band of employees and camp followers who would clean their gear and troop down to the off-license, another much patronized concession, like Freestyle, on the premises of the Royal Beach Hotel. Bobbi and I had a rule.  Only one can of product from that shop while our gear was drying, THEN put the gear away safely in the car, THEN enjoy the cool breezes and warm company and more such cans on the lanai.  Sometimes Terry would start the barbecue.  Sometimes he’d produce a huge fish and cook it and offer it around. He often made known there was more in the fridge for anyone not wanting to walk right then over to the off-license shop.  

Then came the cyclone Gonu, picking up huge chunks of the reef, crushing it to rubble, and dropping much of that on the beach outside Terry’s shop.  The reef didn’t give up, tried to bounce back, but then came the red tide, months of it, robbing the coral of light, leaving the rocks where the raspberry polyps had been the color of the brown algae that decimated it, and leaving skeletons where morays once poked out of the rocks.  The jaw fish moved away.  Rays became scarce, sharks not as prevalent as before.

When we dived it today it was not remarkable.  I found a big bull ray in the aquarium at the start of the dive, an unusual place for a ray to be.  I had Nicki’s camera and took its picture.

Nicki send me the pic of Raymond, please :-)

Thank you :-)

But the rest of the dive was not so interesting.  Like Love in the Time of Colera, the trees have all been cut along the riverbank, the water itself is drying up, and the epidemic has reached the riverfront town.  The two lovers are clinging to one another in their wrinkled old age.  Everything is changing and we are clinging to vestiges of what once was.  Terry is gone now, global warming is heating up the planet and with it the oceans past the 30 degrees over which coral starts to die, and that encourages the blossoming of algae that delivers the coup de grace. Untrammeled development is silting up the diving scene all around the Emirates, except for Musandam, which remains pristine, secure in its rugged isolation.

It was with hopes of seeing some of that that we left for Dibba as soon as we could get off work on Thursday, Nicki and Bobbi and I.  We pulled up at Nomad Ocean Adventure in time to pop a cool one before dinner, a savory beef casserole.  We fell in bed and slept till the a/c went off at 7:45 next morning, power off to all of Nomad, not sure about the rest of the town.  In an hour it was restored and Bobbi and I went back to bed.  The dive we had thought would be at 8 a.m. had been rescheduled for 10:30.

Chris is also experiencing changes but is still maintaining a reasonable routine.  His center wasn’t crowded, plenty of beds were unslept in, and maybe the manageable numbers, people mellowed by the ambience of his place, helped him get us all under way and take a lucky dozen past our usual dive sites at Lima Rock and Ras Morovi, past Octopus Rock, even past Khor Hablain and Mother of Mouse, Ras Sarkan on the left, and White Rock where we’d come last time we’d taken a liveaboard dhow this far up Musandam, and even past Musandam Island to the two islands off the tip in the straights of Hormuz, Fanaku and the tiny Kachalu.

Chris doesn’t know these sites that well.  Usually he’s been back at the office when others have taken his customers this far north.  But now he has fewer hands on deck and has an opportunity to come dive the area himself, which he definitely enjoys. Like me he’s not sure what the currents are doing, so as we approached Fanaku, and I had already put on my wetsuit, he asked me to jump in and test the water.  I did as requested and right below me saw a pair of devil rays cruising.  We had just seen dolphin as we passed Musandam Island.  This seemed to be a great place!

Unfortunately the diving itself was not that nice today.   We dived Fanaku at first and Kachalu second.   The visibility was poor in both places.  In both spots we went down to 35 meters looking for some clarity.  Someone said they found it at 40 but we didn’t push ourselves.  Rather on both dives we angled up keeping out of deco and at least finding the vis improved with more daylight.

On Fanaku the area was covered by a rust colored organism that gave the rocks an orange hue, mixed with another that presented red splotches in between.  There were big fish on both dives but nothing exciting like sharks or rays.  On Fanaku we found several rather large nudibranchs, interesting.

Kachalu is a small island in the straits known for its washing machine currents.  We had done Fanaku on the slack and again on Kachelu I was asked to test the current.  I was not swept past the island so we decided to give it a shot.  As at Fanaku we tested the waters down to 36 meters but decided to have a long dive rather than exhaust air and deco on this one part of the dive.  As we ascended and rounded the rock we found ourselves beat back by an oncoming current so I reversed our direction, and we swam to the other end of the island till we felt the current hitting us again from that direction, and so we wandered back the way we’d come, and in the end pulled ourselves into the wash and hung on, then let go, and allowed ourselves to be swept off the island on ascent.

Bobbi and Nicki want me to mention the starfish and the angel fish and the beautiful colors (hundreds of tufts of yellow soft coral on Kachalu).  Nicki says she could see Iran.  I’m not sure if she meant underwater or above.  Also, I had to go back to her pictures to figure out that this was the starfish she wanted me to mention.

That night, dinner at Nomad was shrimp in glass noodle salad, and shrimp and rice, delicious. We relaxed afterwards and consumed our contraband, and next morning crossed the border back into UAE without any smuggled goods. We drove on down the coast as far as Freestyle and remembered Terry.

Bobbi and I just fun diving at Dibba Rock, April 16, 2011

My logged dive #1037

I had a presentation in Ras Al Khaimah on Saturday morning.  The weather had been kind of windy and unsettled lately, and the car had been covered with dusty rain splatters the past several days despite my having it washed each day. We were thinking to go diving on Friday and then overnight in RAK for the conference, but thinking the weather might improve if we delayed, Bobbi and I ended getting up at 5 a.m. Saturday and driving up to RAK that morning to do the presentation, and dropping down to Dibba when the conference ended at noon to make the 3 pm dive with Freestyle on Dibba Rock.

It was just Bobbi and I on the dive, literally.  We had stopped by Lulu hypermarket to pick up a couple of their tasty mini-pizzas (less than $1 each piled generously with cheese and tandoori chicken chunks) and fresh fruit juice, and we were consuming those on the lanai at Freestyle and watching two crowded dive boats motor across the water full of divers just completed their noon dive, but some were in training, so when 3 pm came and they still weren’t ready for their second dive, Colin put Bobbi and I on a dive boat all by ourselves for the short excursion out to DIbba Rock.  So for most of our dive, we had the site pretty much to ourselves.

The most interesting thing about this dive is usually sharks crossing right across your bow as low down on the reef as you are.  We didn’t see any of those on this dive, but we came on several turtles, and at the southern tip of the V shaped reef, we encountered schools of devil rays, 4, 5, and 10 at a time, cruising just ahead of us in the water.  There were barracuda there as well, and large jacks, and we even found a couple of moray eels, which we rarely see in the coral on the shallow south or ‘near’ side of the island.  Also the purple raspberry coral that used to be there in abundance is coming back toward the east end of the L.  I think it makes more sense to call it an L shaped reef to show the compass headings.  When you look at it from shore, north is a little to the left, so from there it appears as a V.

Anyway it was a really nice dive.  We surfaced after 55 minutes (we were asked to keep it to 50) with 100 bar in our tanks.  I was tempted to ask if we could just go back to shore on a south heading on the bottom, we had the air for it, but I figured the boatman would, or should, not agree to that, so I didn’t suggest it.

Bobbi and I just FUN divinig in Musandam April 2, 2011, my logged dives #1035-1036

 

http://en.news.maktoob.com/Pages/Media/GalleryPopUp.aspx?GalleryID=262289&ImageID

For anyone who thinks that sharks are anywhere near the most dangerous thing about diving, check out the scene on the road, we figure about 10 minutes after we passed the very spot in dense fog trying to make our 10 a.m. meet-up time 3 hours away in Dibba, Oman. Fog is not at all unusual on the coastal road between Abu Dhabi and Dubai in the early morning, drivers here blast through it at 140 km per  hour, and this kind of dozens-of-cars pileup has happened twice in the last couple of years on the same highway.

But we made it to the coast safely where we got in the boat with Nomad Ocean Adventure and ran up Musandam where we dove Ras Morovi and Pearl Island.  We had two very nice dives, no students (bless em :-).  On the first one we got to go all the way around Ras Morovi down to 30 meters at the far end.  Lots of Moray eels, a huge crayfish well exposed between two rocks, and in the cave I always check in, behind the veil of fish fry that are also always there, a ray hiding with his tail sticking out so I would know he was there.

The second dive on Pearl Island was another pleasurable one.  I like this site.  I always do it the Michael Diver way, north around the point and then east across the sand to pick up the far island. It was full of big fish all aswirl.  We were first in off the boat both times and seemingly had the ocean to ourselves except where we encountered others toward the end of each dive coming the other way.

Very relaxing and enjoyable for just Bobbi and I for a change :-)

Certified two new o/w divers Jon Nichols and Mark Kennitz in Musandam January 13-15, at Nomad Ocean Adventure

My logged dives #1031-1034

Mark and Jon and me in the middle, at Ras Morovi

I certified two divers this weekend, Jon Nichols and Mark Kennitz.  Mark is Keith’s brother. He and January did both their o/w and advanced courses with me, and Jon works with Keith, so Keith and January are happy campers sending some good people my way and giving Bobbi and I more excuses to go diving. Ex students Rebecca Woll and Ian Nisse joined as well, and Ian brought Nicki along in the car with him. Nicki roped in our acquaintance Erhardt into the trip, and Erhardt buddied with a guy named Sergei who was visiting from Ukraine, the only one on the boat not in our group. To make it more like old friends, Brian Ruigrok was our dive leader for the trip.  We’ve dived with him a lot at Freestyle Divers, and then he married Tatiana, whom we met at 7 Seas and then she started working at the Beach Hotel where I used to train divers, and my! how the connections develop in small town UAE.

Our boat Friday was packed out with the 11 above plus Jon’s wife Maree, who is interested herself in learning to dive, her mom Carol visiting from New Zealand, and their two kids, all tagging along as snorkelers.

Jon and Mark had to come up Thursday night to get started on their academics and pool work, but they misjudged the time and arrived at dinner time, too late (and too cold!) by then to get in the pool, so I gave Jon a couple of quizzes. Mark had done PADI elearning and needed only to take a quiz to ascertain that he was the person who had taken the quizzes online. Then I had them collect their gear to get it ready for pool work, and we agreed to get started at 6 a.m. the next morning. 

It’s winter in the UAE.  The air is cold at night, in the morning, and even chilled all through the day.  I was wearing a jacket at our briefing over coffee, and the sun was just beginning to light up the overcasts skies. The pool was a frigid 12 degrees, according to its thermometer, and we were planning 3 pool modules to prepare for the first two dives of the course.

We were saved by the consignment of 5mm wetsuits recently received at Nomad.  I was surprised at how bearable that 12 degree water was, and after diving two days in the pool and ocean with the 5 mm suit, I decided I was in love with what kept me warm and protected, my 5 mm wetsuit.  I’ve got to get my very own.

Anyway, Jon and Mark turned out to be quick studies, and like Delilah and Erik who had to begin their course at 6 a.m. Friday on a cold morning a month back because they had made a wrong turn and missed their Thursday night pool sessions, they progressed through the steps on schedule, starting with 6 a.m. briefing, and 7 a.m. in the pool for module 1.  They took a little over an hour for Module 1, but module 2 went quickly and by 9 we were drinking coffee our wives brought us in preparation for module 3.  One more splash in the icewater and we were done by ten. The other divers in our group had arrived by then, and we were at the harbor by 11:00 ready to enjoy our day of diving.

We had received permission to go all the way to Ras Sarkan, a place we rarely visit, but that overcast sky grew dark and foreboding, and the sea doused our enthusiasm with frequent drenching, and after an hour, still short of Lima, and finding slow and uncomfortable going, we decided to divert to Ras Sanut and begin at the Wonder Wall, where we had intended to do our second dive that day (on request from Sergei, as relayed to us by Michael Diver).

We had motored through algae on the way to the headland, but when we reached the ras itself we found we could see the bottom through clear water, a good sign.  I took Jon and Mark on their first dive ever and we began through a picturesque cloud of fusilier fish hovering on the coral bed and down to the sand where we looked for rays, and hoped for eels in the boulders specked with purple coral.  But we saw none.  Buoyancy problems normally encountered by novice divers were aggravated by bubble expansion in the brand new 5 mm wetsuits, and my divers were up and down as they gamely worked out how to achieve buoyancy control through trial and error.  Still the dive lasted 45 minutes and ranged down to 14 meters.  It was a pretty dive, and ‘awsome’ to my students, but kind of ordinary to me and to all the others we talked with back on the boat. Out of the water it was cold and blustery in the rocking boat, not a great day out for Jon’s family, except that the kids at least braved the water to try their hand at snorkeling.

We ate our chicken wraps and decided to retreat back to port and dive what I call Fishhead along the way. Brian calls the site “the Caves”.  Locals bring paying customers here in their boats and take them into one of the alcoves there.  Brian gave a briefing for the site where he suggested that divers enter that alcove and find a hole 8 meters deep.  I like to dive it from the bottom.  I have the boatman drop us by a rock and then I go along the bottom to a dark entrance at 14 meters which you can penetrate from there to the surface.  I’m pretty sure it’s the same hole, though I have never popped to the surface to see what it was like up top.  Because of that exit I feel it’s safe for beginners who are at ease in the environment, but inside is what appears to be a labyrinth of swim throughs.  On this day, vis was marginal, and my light was getting reflected back at me as I searched for that continuation beyond the entry alcove, so I didn’t find it, but it was just as well, since I was the only one with a torch.

Again there was not much to see in the way of unusual animals on this dive, but my divers liked the cave dive, and the boulder swim throughs in that area form an appealing topography. Dive time was 42 minutes and maximum depth about 14 plus meters (16 on the tables ;-).

We got back to port by 5 pm with daylight to spare to get me started on a jog to the Golden Tulip and back, a modest 7 or 8 km.  Back at Nomad I found our group enjoying happy hours with a variety of beverages all brought over the border from home.  Dinner was served at nine, and somewhere in there, Jon finished his Module 5 knowledge review and took the module 5 test.  In anticipation of a 7 a.m. start to more pool work in the morning, Bobbi and I went to bed early, but we were awakened at 3:30 by revelers returning from a birthday party around the pool out back.  From the looks of what they left on the table for us to find in the cold light of dawn, it was quite a party, with at least a dozen empty bottles, and as many glasses left half full, revealing that the party-goers had mostly had  quite enough when they finally decided to call it a night.

Jon and Mark and I hammered home the last two modules in the bracing waters of the icy pool, rendered pleasantly tolerable by those 5 mm neoprene suits. We wrapped up well before ten and made our plan for doing two dives and all the flexible skills in the surface interval between them.  At 10:30 we were told we could head for the harbor, and we were heading again for Lima by 11, over seas that had calmed considerable but were not quite flat.  Rebecca and Erhardt were no longer with us, and Jon’s family had returned home, understandably.  The birthday girl and her friends had joined us, as well as a polite young Emirati named Rashad. We also had another Mark aboard, a BSAC diver who eschewed the wraps for lunch for a thermos of soup, and kidney pie with English mustard on top.  In his cool box he had packed a single Castle for the trip back.  All were pleasant company.


The diving again Saturday was not special.  We at least made it to Lima Rock where we dived the “back” or north side, because it was sheltered from the seas, which had whitecaps on the southern side, and as it developed, divers were getting spat out into the current visibly churning off the east of the island, the one that offers free passage eventually to Iran.  No problem, nothing to bump into out there except schools of huge barracuda, and maybe the bottom, at about 50 meters.

We went in as a group of six: Bobbi and I buddied and monitored my two students, and January and Keith joined us on this one. We put in at the west end of the island and I had my divers go to a sheltered spot between two rocks and wait for the others.  As everyone was entering the ocean, the boat drifted a bit to the east, but we had that fixed location to swim to so we were able to meet up before descent. But on descent we found we had a stiff current eastward.  I got my students into the sand for their exercises and we tried a compass heading north, just ten fin kicks.  Coming back it was more like 20 into the current so I moved us off the sand and up and close to the reef.  We had to be careful that no beginning divers let themselves rise mid-water where the current would take them.  This required fine tuning buoyancy control on their part, but we all managed it well and stayed together throughout the dive.  My students went low on air first so we went into the shallows where we found a batfish letting itself be cleaned by wrasse, and trigger fish hiding in the rocks with their blue tails sticking out.

The others followed us to the surface where we saw other divers about to be carried away in the rapids toward which we were slowly drifting.  It’s no big deal if that happens at the surface, the boat can easily retrieve divers.  In any event we had drifted past the end of the island and into the current by the time we had all been recovered to the boat.  There were two other groups of divers caught in the stream carrying them far away from land.  We recovered them too, no problem, just not much to see out there. Our dive was around 40 minutes at 16 meters maximum depth.

We went to Ras Morovi for shelter and lunch.  This is a good place for beginners especially in the marginal sea conditions we were experiencing.  My students had the whole gamut of surface skills to complete but due to weather we put in on the north side of the ras for lunch but moved to the south side for diving and exercises.  Brian took his group in for their dive as I was setting up a CESA line for mine.  In the course of the next 45 minutes I had the guys run through all the flexible skills.  At one point I found us caught in a current and I had us move to the shelter of the bay on snorkel.  We finished off there with an alternate air source ascent, by which time Keith had joined us for the actual dive (all the others in our group were giving it a miss due to grievances ranging from the cold to the excesses of the night before).

We snorkeled again to the point where the reef begins.  I was glad to have a group of young guys who could keep up with me, through all that moving around on the surface, but these guys were excellent buddies and we all settled down on the sand where I suggested an underwater compass heading to look for rays.  On return from that we all removed our face masks and twirled them around our fingers before continuing on the dive.  Students are surprised at how you can keep your eyes open in the water and see out them, a little blurry, but there is no sting in that saline solution. 

That out of the way we continued on along the reef.  It’s a pretty spot.  Vis wasn’t great but not terrible either, so the colored corals were evident.  We didn’t see unusual animals apart from a couple of morays, different varieties.  Air was getting low when we rounded the corner and passed over the cabbage coral where turtles like to hang out, and dropped to the cave and ledge where I sometimes find rays, but no turtles or rays today.

Back on the boat after the dive Jon and Mark had to strip to their bathing suits and head out into the cold open water on their 200 meter swims tests and ten minute survival floats.  I think it was the worst part of the course for them, but they gamely succeeded.

Fun diving though and congratulations to the two newly certified divers!

Seasons Greetings 2010 with Diving in Musandam

My logged dives #1027-1030

This looks to be my Merry Happy Card this year.  This is what I was doing on Christmas day, and today, the day after, my birthday, I'm heading into work.

Bobbi would have joined us but she is in Houston with her mom.  Dusty went to see his grandmother, and they'll both be back in Abu Dhabi in early January.  Glenn and his wife and daughter Gulya and Gwen were with us a week ago, and we all celebrated our family gathering together then.  So this Christmas I was home alone and spent the day diving with friends.

Friday, December 24, 2010
 The night before the chef at Nomad Ocean Adventure had prepared the most succulent turkey I have ever tasted.  Normally we bake ours and it comes out dry.  This one was cooked like a chicken, and the result was mouth watering.  But the real treat was that we had the dive center all to ourselves.  We were the only ones to feast there, sleep there, and we commandeered the boat for the following day and dived where we felt like it.

We had planned a group of 5 for Friday, but Hasan didn't make the trip across, and Ian's daughter Eva rolled up sick with a fever and a cough and didn't start her advanced course as planned, so it was just us in our group, Ian, Nicki, and I (pictured).  On Friday we were joined by Delia and Ahmed who were being escorted by the dive pro Hussain.  We started with the obvious dive for that region, Lima Rock.  It was unusual for me to diving strictly for pleasure and with people who were serious enough about their diving to be able to go where I did.  So after picking a spot mid-island to avoid the current we headed down the wall and out over the sand to some further coral strewn rocks I rarely visit 30 meters down.  We spent about 15 minutes there before heading back to the wall and then heading up it looking for animals in the rocks.  We found a honeycomb moray, several gray and green morays, and a torpedo ray.  It was a very relaxed dive. Ian left us at 43 minutes but Nicki and I stayed down more than an hour before ending on a zen note.

There was green algae in the water around Ras Morovi so for the next dive Hussain decided to try and escape it by moving further north to Octopus Rock.  This dive is known for its current and today was one of the most extreme ones I have experienced there.  We went down on the southwest corner.  On a mild day we can usually proceed southeast to look for seahorses in the green whip corals and wheel around to the various submerged outcrops at 20-28 meters, but today that would have exposed us to a freight train current, so we hugged the rock and finned into it.  It was challenging for my buddies but when we came over a ledge about 20 meters distant we found some shelter and rested to catch our breath.  The current made the vis really good and also attracted animals.  We found a school of barracuda just off that point, and a big king fish was cruising back and forth (not sure, long, silver, solitary, single fins top and bottom, Ian thought at first it was a shark).  Being very careful not to get swept away I led us into the current and finned to the east of the island where we had some outcroppings.  I started moving east west there, always returning to the rock to keep oriented, and also to see that Hussain had taken his group into the lee on the south side and was conducting his whole dive there.  There are huge batfish on this rock, always a pleasure to see, getting cleaned by wrasse at the numerous stations there.  But we were low on air at just 38 minutes and ascended up the lee side of the rock to 5 meters, eventually to pop to the surface.  Hussain was soon to follow.

Saturday, December 25, 2010
Next day, Eva came on the boat but was still not well enough to dive.  Hussain had developed a tooth problem and decided to oversee from the boat.  So it was just us, an opportunity to push further north than our usual spots, so we set out for Mother of Mouse.  However, in a phone call to the coast guard we were denied permission to go further than Octopus Rock, so I said fine, why not go there.  I was expecting milder currents from the day before, and it had been a great dive. But skies above were overcast and as we approached Lima sea conditions were becoming rough.  As we motored toward Octopus they became ominous and brooding, we decided to head for the shelter of Ras Morovi instead.

But there was a place just north of where I usually dive that Hussain said was nice so we decided to try that. That's where Nicki produced the surprises she had been concealing in the bag she had brought on her sleigh, so we had our fancy dress dive :-)

It was a picturesque spot with the reef ending in sand at 17 meters.  We continued down to almost 30 just to see if there were any rays but found none. So we headed back up the reef and meandered, finding at one point a rare kind of eel that Nicki likes to photograph.  There were many eels and the usual fishes but nothing I recall saliently on that dive.  It was just another pleasant underwater experience in an environment that is unfortunately vanishing worldwide and that too few people get to see and appreciate.  We prolonged our experience to over an hour again.

We motored into the middle of a deep bay south of Ras Morovi where the water was calm and had our sandwiches.  We had decided to do our second dive on Pearl Island just to the south across the bay but we ended up doing it there instead.  Nicki's dive computer decided to go for a dive without its owner and she watched it disappear with shall we say, misgivings (understatement).  However she was determined to retrieve and punish the recalcitrant computer so we decided to suit up and search for it.  We had to act quickly.  We were not at anchor.  Hussain noticed the direction of drift and I took a bearing on it, 120 degrees.  We had no idea how deep the water was there.  The three of us plunged over the side, Ian perhaps unwisely since he would be heading down without reference to an indeterminate depth.  In any event, his ears prevented him from completing the journey so it was just Nicki and I to keep together and pass through meter after meter with no idea where it would end until we finally saw the silt bottom at 30 meters.

I had brought a weight from the boat intending to tie off my marker buoy on it but I knew if I tied it off there at 30 meters it would be hard to come back for later, so I dropped the weight in the sand and did squares around it.  We stirred a sand cloud in the silt and Nicki and I lost contact but rejoined and I decided we should head on that 120 degree course.  I counted out about 20 kick cycles in that direction, but still no computer and the time at 30 meters was ticking down.  I thought Nicki and I should spread out and try the reciprocal heading so I indicated she should move in the opposite direction from me and she headed that way but at the edge of vis kept going.  I moved after her and in so doing lost the line I could follow back to the weight.  She had disappeared and I didn't want to go too far or risk complete disorientation, so after a minute I decided to return on my reciprocal 300, look in the sand on the way back, and surface there.  I was just starting on this maneuver when Nicki reappeared.  She had decided to go at the right angle 30 degrees from where we were 20 kicks and had just returned on 210 to where she had left me.  And amazingly she was holding her computer.

The only disappointment was that in getting off the original line we lost the weight I had placed in the sand below the boat.  Returning to the surface with both weight AND computer, we would have been hailed as heroes.  At least Nicki retrieved her computer and I guess it could be said that despite loss of our original reference point, we were either incredibly competent or incredibly lucky divers, or both.

We started off the bottom at 10 minutes, came up entirely on instruments on my computer, because Nicki's was still narced from the 31 minutes it had spent at 20 meters, and did a safety stop at 5 meters 12 min into the dive, surfacing with 15 min on my computer.  Since we had conducted a serious dive I decided to stay out of the water at least another hour, so it was 2 pm before just Nicki and I descended on Pearl Island.  Ian had nackered his ears on the previous attempt and decided to sit the last one out. Vis at this spot was awful actually.  We hoped the algae would not be deep but it dogged us the entire dive and spoiled my ability to spot the usual references.  This was to round the point and keep to the sand at 16 meters, then follow the fishing pots out taking a bearing just left of them to the first of the submerged islands.  Problem was I couldn't remember if that bearing was north or east.  In previous visits it was obviously one or the other because the fish pots were lined up just to the right of where we needed to go.  This time we were in green haze as I followed one pot, came on another, kept heading that way (east) but found no more pots and no island in the amount of time I though it should have taken.  The dark shadows ahead seemed to be just open water.  I found a line that connected pots and followed that back in an attempt to retrace to our starting point.  In my second attempt we fared no better really.  The only boon was that we came on a large cow tail ray in the sand and watched him move to escape us.  I was chasing shadows now.  At one point we came across a large barracuda, only one, but usually they hung out around the islands.  When I saw a school of fish I headed that way, thinking they might be hanging off the coral.  This turned out to be a good guess and 20 min into the dive we bumped almost blindly into a submerged reef.  By now I was pretty much out of breath so I tried to lead at a depth where we could see the bottom but still stay high on the reef.  This was between 2 and 3 atmospheres and my air was going embarrassingly fast.  We were fighting current too but we managed to criss cross the rocks and find lots more eels end enjoy the last of the dive.  Somehow we stretched it into 45 minutes though I had to drop down to 7 meters at the end of it because Nicki had found two of her rare morays in the same hole (turns out they weren't all that rare) and was busy photographing them, oblivious to my vanishing air supply (and to her deco time, since she had no functional computer). No matter, we were near the surface, and reached it safely, and there was still enough air left in my tank to dry my dust cap.