My logged dives #1503-1506 We were supposed to teach a dive course this weekend but the students didn't manage their elearning in time (they were in the Seychelles, where there is poor connectivity, as I remember well) so Bobbi and I decided to go over to Nomad Musandam and see how Chris has been fixing up his dive center, and reacquaint ourselves with the animals living near there. We didn't see our very best fish friends in 4 dives there this weekend, but the first dive was the best. Here we sped over glassy seas on Friday morning, only 8 of us on the boat, to the destination of our choice, which we selected as Octopus Rock. We were the only boat on the site, and Bobbi and I were first in the water. Current was minimal and as it was just the two of us we headed out the rock ridges to the east hoping to find a seahorse in the whip coral there. We had only been in the water 5 minutes when we came on something unusual, an eagle ray grazing in the sand as we were coming in from above him. So he didn't see us as we passed overhead and I descended with my camera pointing and got a flash of LED, no more, and the second time I did that realized the camera had defaulted to single shot mode and I hadn't had a chance to put it on video. Eagle rays don't cut much slack. He would have made an excellent video as he was stationary a few seconds before realizing we were there, but once he became aware of us he flexed muscle and was off in a bolt. Eagle rays are the cheetahs of the ocean. I managed to get just three stills, the last one a blur.
The rest of the dive was better recorded. We didn't find any seahorses at 30 meters depth and climbed back up between the crests to the near tentacles of Octopus Rock which we circled counter clockwise. Crossing the north flat and coming to the ridges to the west of the rock I went a direction I don't normally go. Normally I go north to the end of the ridge and turn around it to head south up the other side, then find a low point and cross to the east across a deep channel I have to do on compass to get back to Octopus Rock because the rock isn't visible from the far side there. This time I headed south on the inside of the wall, found a pretty, narrow crevice lined with blue and yellow soft coral, crossed to the inside, and emerged from the inside where we normally pop back over the top and then head east to the south end of the rock. Now I know I can make a pretty dive by going back north along the inside of that wall and cross to the east to Octopus Rock at a much narrower point. Octopus Rock was beautiful today ... lion fish, schools of red-tooth blue triggerfish, different kinds of moray eels, tiny nudibranchs, batfish at their blue wrasse cleaning stations, and closer to the rock, as we corkscrewed around it, surfacing at a pace designed to burn off nitrogen and riding with the ebb and flow of current, mesmerizing schools of jacks and snappers in a never-ending flow of fish biomass.
The remaining three dives this weekend were not as good as the one at Octopus Rock, so what videos I took on these dives I combined into one ten minute compilation (below).
From Octopus rock we went that day to Lima Rock South where we struggled against current to round the western point, but made it through the current, and were picked up over there. The next day, Saturday Nov 5 we started at Ras Morovi, where Bobbi and I were asked to escort an un-buddied diver who turned out to be a beginner we needed to care for, so we didn't get to dive the site the way we would have if it was just the two of us. Still, it was the better dive that day, and in the videos we see an underwater arch swarming with blue triggerfish, a crayfish cave encrusted in blue and yellow coral, the missing rock piece which we reached but we turned back due to current, and a scorpion fish in the sand at Ras Morovi. We finished our weekend diving at Lima Rock North and encountered current at the east point that caused Bobbi to turn the dive there. Our videos in two dives on Lima Rock that day and the day before include nudibranchs, crayfish, eels, lion fish, and pretty swim-throughs on the north side.
Last weekend we were planning to go to
Oman to dive the Daymaniyat islands. We were hearing all about the
whale sharks frolicking there. We had made arrangements to dive and
stay there, but then Chris at Nomad told me he was short of staff for
Musandam and needed someone to guide a couple of divers who had
requested a private guide. It was a long weekend and some of our
friends were going as well, but I decided the most correct thing to
do would be to repay kindness by responding positively to the request for help, which also came with
free diving and accommodation, and postpone the Daymaniyats trip for
a week. http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2016/10/guiding-hannah-and-sandy-in-4-musandam_1.html
So last weekend we ended up in Musandam with decent diving, Bobbi and I limited to
18 meters depth, and every day reading Dro Madery’s
descriptions of whaleshark and leopard shark ballets we were
missing by not being further south in Oman. To make matters worse, the count of
whalesharks sited on Friday was 8, on Saturday, only two, and on
Sunday, none - so there were diminishing numbers. Also we met people living in Oman who went there on Monday, which was their National Day holiday, and saw no whalesharks. So
there was no guarantee when our weekend finally came around that we
would see anything of phenomenal interest, and we tried not to get
our hopes up. We decided just to stick to plan and let whatever
happened happen.
The weather, fine the weekend before
all over Oman and UAE, seemed to be deteriorating. On Tuesday it
poured down rain in Al Ain, flooding parking lots. It was still
cloudy on Wednesday and on our way into Oman and down past Sohar on
the way to Muscat, our windshield wipers were warding off
occasional rain squalls. We almost didn't stop off at our favorite Kashmiri roadside restaurant along the way for our favoritely delicious chicken karai and dhal, since it was raining as we approached, but the rain let up just as we arrived at the spot so we stopped after all and ate outside, moving under the awning to avoid the slight sprinkle.
We were heading for Seeb,about a 4 hour drive from our house in Al Ain (plus time for border crossing). It was no longer raining when we reached there and
pulled into the Eastin Residences,
which turned out to be a reasonably nice hotel for half the price of
where we’d be staying the next night at Civil Aviation Club on the beach at Seeb behind the airport. The CAC had the advantage though of being where the dive center was, making driving unnecessary après-plongée with 1-riyal beers ($3) and meals al fresco at the beachfront clubhouse (no more rain that weekend :-).
Our late arrival meant we didn’t get as much sleep at the Eastin as we needed after a hard week
at work, but we slept well. We had to get up at 6:30 though to leave
by 7, only to discover that it was only half an hour to civil
aviation beach, so we were there half an hour early for the 8 a.m.
meetup with Global Scuba.
It didn’t take them long to get the
handful of divers who turned up for diving onto a boat and on our way to the
islands, just half an hour away. We hoped we’d see whale sharks at the
surface en route, but we saw none on the way out, that first day, which wasn’t a
good sign. As I said, we were bracing ourselves for disappointment.
And when we pulled up at the Aquarium, a shallow reef head starting
at 5 meters and going down to 30 or deeper off colorful walls, there
were several other boats there already. But then our mood soared when
we saw a whaleshark surface right near our boat, its fins breaking
the surface near some snorkelers. We started to get excited about
maybe seeing one while diving after all.
We entered the water and found it as
clear as a swimming pool. We descended right on top of a turtle.
Just beyond that, I found a pair of honeycomb morays, I lifted the camera off them to see divers ahead finning fast and pointing up and out to blue water, and there was our first
whale shark. We followed it for a bit and then I panned down to a pair of scorpion fish, and close by a pair of nudibranchs. From there I filmed a placid ball of yellow fish, above which a pair of whalesharks appeared. Everything was coming up pairs on this dive. I videoed the two whalesharks for nearly three minutes before turning back to the reef where Andrew from Poland was photographing a turtle, and dive guide Arif wanted to know how much air we all had.
Next up, more scorpion fish and a rarely encountered banded moray eel. Then we lingered over a wriggling ball of whiskered fish, passed through cuttlefish territory, found another turtle, another fishball, another turtle, a pair of bannerfish, and beyond the fishball another whaleshark. The whaleshark stayed with us for at least 5 minutes (got that much video at any rate).
It was getting time to end the dive, so we made our way up the reef toward the 5 meter shallows, and got close up with a flounder (a.k.a. moses sole). Nearer the top there was another honeycomb moray poking out of a cabbage coral, and more cuttlefish. On our safety stop, 3 minutes at 5 meters on the top of the reef, we found one last turtle, and nearby one last honeycomb moray in a small bommie, with batfish attracted to the same bommie because blue wrasse had set up a cleaning station there. I was about to go up the mooring line but decided to accompany the turtle instead on its way to catch a breath of air. At the surface I looked down to check on my real buddy, and found Bobbi coming to join me not far below.
This was a phenomenal dive. It lasted for an hour on our computers, and the video footage of interesting things to see went on for half that long. The fact that diving of this calibre is so close to home for us is one big reason we have remained in this region for almost 30 years now.
This dive was so great that we decided to do the next
one on the Aquarium as well. This time we headed to the south parts of the Aquarium looking for leopard sharks and rays, but saw neither. It was still a good dive. We descended on batfish hanging around the anchor line, found scorpion fish and nudibranchs, lingered over a rock with both scorpions and nudibranchs, came upon a turtle placidly grazing despite photographers, found a lionfish cradled in cabbage coral, explored a fishball, encountered more honeycomb morays and scorpion fish, clouds of fish, and so on.
Saturday, October 8, back to the Aquarium for a whaleshark, then elsewhere for leopard shark
The second day, we returned again to the aquarium. On the way we came across the pod of whalesharks recorded earlier in this post.
Once on the site, descending as before on the 5 meter reef top, we soon came upon one of the turtles grazing there. Just after that we found a sand patch with a couple of large nudibranchs, plus a crocodile fish I wouldn't have spotted except that someone must have disturbed him, since it reflexively moved across the sand and stopped in view of my camera. Passing along a wall, I spotted a pair of scorpion fish that can be hard to see except that these moved further down the wall. Next we saw another big nudibranch on our way to cuttlefish territory. Here my GoPro caught a turtle ascending but changing his mind and leading us on a trip over its cabbage coral patch instead. Maybe he just wanted to show us a honeycomb moray at the edge of the cabbage patch. We soon found more cuttlefish, another moray peeping out of the cabbage, a filefish scurrying across our view, a couple of honeycombs sheltering in small bommies, some darting squids, a cowrie shell with a starfish moving slowly nearby, and a couple of batfish.
Ten minutes into this video I shot a remarkable segment of over 5 minutes of continuous filming. For the first 3 minutes, I start with another pair of cuttlefish. I pan from them to catch a free swimming honeycomb moray writhing gracefully on its search for a hiding place. My camera turns back to the cuttlefish. It seems we've stumbled on their mating grounds, as we see several presenting with their tentacles raised, turning white with excitement. I dwell on one pair who have locked tentacles and are turning into cuddlefish. Next in the same long segment, we see our dive leader Arif give the shark sign, and point just beyond a fishball, which we swim quickly past to spend a splendid two and a half minutes following a cooperative whaleshark. We end the dive with batfish at the safety stop, and a free swimming honeycomb moray sprinting across the top of the reef.
On the last dive of the trip we changed locations to the island just east of three sisters, one whose name Arif said translated to 'big fish'. It started as a fairly normal dive but soon a whaleshark appeared. We found a ray and ended the dive in a resting leopard shark with a honeycomb ray poking out of a nearby rock.
The location of this dive site was I believe the far eastern island on the map below though it could be the one just east of Three Sisters. The far east site is called Hayut, which means 'whale' in Arabic, i.e. a big fish, but this is not what Arif called the site. The map also shows the location of the Aquarium, which is a reef, not an island. I got this map here: http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/arabian-sea/oman-diving.html
Our plans changed with the wind this weekend. I had been planning to conduct a dive course for a mother / son pair but found out the weekend beforehand that their eLearning was out of date, so that got postponed. Meanwhile I had offered to help Chris out at Nomad if he needed me this weekend, but when the course got postponed, Bobbi and I started making plans to go to Oman and dive Daymaniyats. Our holiday had not yet been officially confirmed by my employers for Sunday but it seemed it would be a three-day weekend, a good time to go to Oman and deal with delays at the border coming back across, not having to work on Sunday.
By Sunday the week before I hadn't heard back from Chris so I confirmed the Daymaniyats trip, and then finally heard from Nomad staff that they were counting on me to guide some customers who had requested that service. Chris, the owner of Nomad, has been so good to us, I felt I should honor my offer to help, never mind the timing on the uptake, especially as Chris would have had only one day to find someone else and get that person a permit to cross the border, and Chris smoothed the decision with free diving, room, and board, so I postponed our Oman plans to the following weekend.
Chris was having staff changes and there were only two dive pros to manage two boats going to Musandam Friday and Saturday that weekend. The customer who had requested a private guide was doing an advanced course, but I was to look after his wife Hannah, and their friend Sandy, for the days he would be on the course, Friday and Saturday. So while the Nomad staff managed the other divers, I got to conduct some very nice dives, as you can see in the videos that follow ...
In the first video from Friday September 30, Vance and Bobbi are guiding Hannah and Sandy over colorful coral reefs teeming with jacks, fusiliers, and triggerfish, hiding morays and crayfish, home to turtles, picturesque bannerfish, and a motionless scorpionfish. A rainbow broomtail wrasse is seen with an anxious jack trying to blend in with big brother for protection.
Next day, we're on Octopus Rock in the first segments, with morays and crayfish around the rock, jacks and fusiliers on the rock itself, and a batfish obviously enjoying being administered to by wrasse. Then at Ras Sanut Bobbi finds a big crayfish with a story. It's crawling on the roof of its lair and has dislodged the top of an oyster shell. A fish is quick to exploit the exposed oyster and the crayfish is in an unfamiliar attitude, backing away with difficulty from the intruding divers. Soon after we come across a rare mottled eel. We've seen them in this area before. And on the same rock just behind we notice a cuttlefish, well camouflaged there against the brittle stars. At one point in my video, he seems to disappear. Finally I spot a feathertailed ray out on the sand. This is right off the field of raspberry coral where we've seen these rays before, so dive off that coral and there's a good chance you'll see one.
Meanwhile, Dro Madery was taunting us with posts about Daymaniyats diving
Our plans changed with the wind this weekend. I had been planning to conduct a dive course for a mother / son pair but found out the weekend beforehand that their eLearning was out of date, so that got postponed. Meanwhile I had offered to help Chris out at Nomad if he needed me this weekend, but when the course got postponed, Bobbi and I started making plans to go to Oman and dive Daymaniyats. Our holiday had not yet been officially confirmed by my employers for Sunday but it seemed it would be a three-day weekend, a good time to go to Oman and deal with delays at the border coming back across, not having to work on Sunday.
By Sunday the week before I hadn't heard back from Chris so I confirmed the Daymaniyats trip, and then finally heard from Nomad staff that they were counting on me to guide some customers who had requested that service. Chris, the owner of Nomad, has been so good to us, I felt I should honor my offer to help, never mind the timing on the uptake, especially as Chris would have had only one day to find someone else and get that person a permit to cross the border, and Chris smoothed the decision with free diving, room, and board, so I postponed our Oman plans to the following weekend.
Chris was having staff changes and there were only two dive pros to manage two boats going to Musandam Friday and Saturday that weekend. The customer who had requested a private guide was doing an advanced course, but I was to look after his wife Hannah, and their friend Sandy, for the days he would be on the course, Friday and Saturday. So while the Nomad staff managed the other divers, I got to conduct some very nice dives, as you can see in the videos that follow ...
In the first video from Friday September 30, Vance and Bobbi are guiding Hannah and Sandy over colorful coral reefs teeming with jacks, fusiliers, and triggerfish, hiding morays and crayfish, home to turtles, picturesque bannerfish, and a motionless scorpionfish. A rainbow broomtail wrasse is seen with an anxious jack trying to blend in with big brother for protection.
Next day, we're on Octopus Rock in the first segments, with morays and crayfish around the rock, jacks and fusiliers on the rock itself, and a batfish obviously enjoying being administered to by wrasse. Then at Ras Sanut Bobbi finds a big crayfish with a story. It's crawling on the roof of its lair and has dislodged the top of an oyster shell. A fish is quick to exploit the exposed oyster and the crayfish is in an unfamiliar attitude, backing away with difficulty from the intruding divers. Soon after we come across a rare mottled eel. We've seen them in this area before. And on the same rock just behind we notice a cuttlefish, well camouflaged there against the brittle stars. At one point in my video, he seems to disappear. Finally I spot a feathertailed ray out on the sand. This is right off the field of raspberry coral where we've seen these rays before, so dive off that coral and there's a good chance you'll see one.
My logged dives 1487-1494 Friday, September 9, 2016, time for another holiday break from UAE, this time for Haj season, a good reason to have a week off. We woke up around 6, an hour lie-in for us as opposed to the normal work-week waking hours, and packed our bags. At 9 a.m. we called for a taxi and a couple of hours later, we were at Dubai terminal 2, not our favorite but improved since our flights to Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Soon after that we were on a Fly Dubai plane to Dar es Salaam, an hour wait there to take on more passengers, and by early evening, we had arrived at Zanzibar Airport. Somewhat uncharacteristically for us we had booked only our first two nights on the island, in Stonetown, at the Beyt Al Salaam Hotel off Shanghani square there. The cab ride was a straightforward $15 for the 30 min. transfer, the hotel room was cramped but comfortable enough, and the restaurant, the only obvious place to eat on our quiet garden square, served lobster and prawns with avacado for a very reasonable price. We tried out the beers, Kilimanjaro and Tusker at 4.5%, Safari our flavorite at 5.5%, $3 each half liter bottle (later we'd find them in bottle shops for half that). Stonetown turned out to be a charming corner of Zanzibar Town, the main city on the island of Unguju, in the archipelago known as Zanzibar, which includes Pemba Island to the north of Unguju. It was fun walking around there, visiting the bazaars, and seeing the sites, avoiding touts who were not that troublesome as long as they were shown some respect. There were pleasant restaurants on piers with panoramas of lateen rigged boats at anchorage and rooftop bars and restaurants to have snacks and refreshment, and we had dinner that night at a restaurant with local musicians playing.
Meanwhile we worked out that the best place to go for diving would be from Nungwi beach at the north tip of Unguju. We got in touch with dive shops and two of the dive centers that got back to us were East Africa Divers, who had a trip going Monday to Levan Bank, a place they went only when they had enough divers who were experienced, and Divine Diving, whose manager Raphael offered me an instructor courtesy discount on diving for Bobbi and I plus free equipment for simply booking in advance. That was the no-brainer center for us to use as base to dive the same sites as everyone else, but I booked East Africa our first day there for the chance to visit Levan Bank on Monday, and we pitched up at Divine Diving on Tuesday, Wed, and Thu.
We also booked a room at Smiles Beach Hotel, a bit expensive but many of the hotels on Expedia and Booking.com were filling due to Eid, and it the word on Trip Advisor was that it was at the "quiet end" of Nungwi. It was not a bad choice apart from the restaurant that churned out egg-based breakfast fare too greasy for our tastes. We booked it for three nights but ended up staying five. We were thoroughly enjoying ourselves diving by day, eating lobster for dinner every night (about $15 grilled on the beach to half that at the 'bakery' doubling as a restaurant in the dusty town back of the dive centers on the beach). Our meals were accompanied by decent South African and Spanish red wine purchased from the bottle shops for $10 a bottle and taken to our table which was most often on the beach. Between the diving and the dining, we hated to leave there.
LEVAN BANK
But this is a blog about diving, so let's talk about that. Our first experience with diving in Zanzibar was with East Africa Divers, a German run shop managed competently by Michael and Deline. They used inflatable zodiacs which were the norm for much of the diving in Mozambique and South Africa. All the dive shops there used steel cylinders which had to be taken into account for weighting. We had brought 3 mm wetsuits which we knew to take 6 kg with aluminum tanks, but with the steel I got that down to 2 kg on my belt. Deciding to decline the offer of 5 mm wetsuits and getting our weighting calibrated is a ritual when going diving in a new location, but we got through that and onto the zodiac for the 20 min ride to Levan Bank. We were briefed for a 35 meter dive but ten minutes into it we were still searching for the reef which eventually appeared as a dark cloud in water that was about 15-20 meters visibility. Bobbi and I had leveled off at 20+ meters by then and when we descended on the reef it was about to 28 meters. We had current and surge ascending gradually up the banks and there wasn't much to see there, just nudibranchs and such.
HONGA Our second dive that day was on Honga reef just west of Nungwi. This was a macro dive where we saw flatworms, nudibranchs, and slugs, on a reef with schools of fish. Bobbi saw her first crocodile fish here. There is also a large scorpion fish in the video that is blending perfectly with a rock, and another small one that jumps away when I try to move some coral that's blocking my camera view.
We had no complaints about East Africa Diving, apart from paying $280 rack rate for the two of us for the 4 dives (two dives each). We would be diving at Divine for substantially less than that and they were going to Big Wall on Tuesday, which was off Mnemba Island around the tip to the east of Unguju. They did their diving from dhows which were more spacious than the zodiacs, but much slower and made for full days out. Since they were full days they provided fruit and donuts after the first dive and chapatis with 'saladi' and cheese for lunch on the boat ride back. Divine diving had a nice social feel to it starting with more time spent with your dive buddies on the long boat rides, to the shots they provided when the boat returned, to the parties they hosted after hours, so we sometimes went back there in the evenings. We enjoyed diving with them.
MNEMBA - BIG WALL
Our first dive with them on Mnemba was on Big Wall. We found good visibility, not a lot of excitement, but there was a distant shark nonchalant at below 30 meters and a crocodile fish on the reef; plus interesting puffs of sand clouds in surge in shallows. On our second dive elsewhere around Mnemba, we saw a pair of leaf fish (see if you can spot them in the video), slugs, flatworms, nudibranchs, scorpion fish, a nice clam, and the usual reef fish, a pretty dive with small curiosities.
TUMBATU ISLAND
The following day Devine took us to Tumbatu Island where we did two dives, again combined into one video. This was an interesting day out as usual but for an unusual reason. Tumbatu has dive sites suitable to beginning divers and unlike the two days before, when we had been in small groups of advanced divers going to more challenging sites, our boat was crowded. Bobbi and I are elderly and when boat loads divide into groups, we often get grouped with the weaker divers. We were put with two young ladies who were beginning divers and a couple who were large but it turned out were from Texas (like us) and were alright divers. But I was sitting next to a young lady who did not know the parts of her equipment and when I asked her, nicely, if she was certified, she said she was but she had only done the 4 dives for the course. I didn't like what I saw so I asked if Bobbi and I could join the other group of seven. That would make a group of 9 and reduce the other group to 4, which might be a good thing for the dive guide, to be able to manage a small group that included two such inexperienced divers, but I was asked to sit back down. So I sat back down next to the lady next to me, whose name was Raquel. She was from Spain and was clearly anxious about the upcoming dive, so I told her not to worry, Bobbi and I would take care of her. When we descended we found she had little control over buoyancy, and was inflating her BCD to rise and deflating to descend. When she would ascend too rapidly she would try to kick head down and I would have to go get her. At one point she disappeared. I looked up and saw her at the surface so I went to get her there, dive computer beeping away, while I watched that it didn't show oversaturation. While there I explained that she had to use her lungs for buoyancy and to descend always do it fins down, deflater overhead. She got the message, came back down properly, I set her buoyancy for her, and she was better the rest of the dive. She expressed great appreciation during the surface interval so I explained that for the next dive we would start with a fin pivot, establish neutral buoyancy, and then not use the inflate mechanism at all after that. We descended fine and at the bottom I monitored her while she got her buoyancy right. Then I signaled her to keep her hands off her inflator and use just her lungs from then on. She not only understood but did as instructed, and she was a great buddy for the rest of the dive. She thanked us profusely and I found it highly gratifying to be able to assist in a way that I had been trained to do.
MNEMBA again
And the last day we went back to Mnemba for two distinctly different dives. Essentially we put in on a reef and followed it along for a dive where we went deep looking for sharks (to about 25 meters, but the sharks would have been deeper than 35). We didn't see sharks but we saw an amazing octopus on this one and lots of other things. It requires its own video.
We enjoyed a surface interval on the boat and then set out without moving the boat at a right angle to the reef along the sand with coral bommies which had a completely different ecosystem starting with garden eels and scorpion fish, macro attractions, and ending in a remarkable frogfish. See if you can spot it at the end of this video.
Big surprise at work Wednesday Aug 31. Two significant events, the new brigadier commander of our college undertook an inspection, and it was the last day of the month, also known as salary day in UAE. The result, everyone was granted the next day off Thursday, happy surprise long weekend, and thanks commander.
Bobbi and I were already planning to drive up to Dibba after work on Thursday and stay at Alia Suites on the coast, the better to be at the border at 8 a.m. to cross into Dibba Musandam and dive with Nomad Ocean Adventure there. But we decided to bring our departure forward a few hours and get in a late afternoon dive Thursday with Nomad Fujairah before checking in at Alia Suites.
It was a great day for a dive. The heat knife is coming off the edge of summer, weather is pleasant, water temperatures still warm, 27 degrees at the worst (centigrade) often warmer. We were the only customers that afternoon, so Kyle and Jess just arranged the boat and Bobbi and I were the only ones on Dibba Rock that afternoon. Diving was very relaxed and lasted over an hour at shallow depths.
Kelly Harris drove up from Abu Dhabi and met us at the border at 8 a.m. Friday morning and we crossed over to dive at Nomad Ocean Adventure Musandam that day. Brendan was our boat guide and he left it to me to choose the sites. There were a group of Japanese doing a deep dive specialty. They were looking for 40 meters so we did our first dive on Lima Rock. There was no current to speak of and we had no trouble getting out to the point and crawling all over it. No current meant that no big creatures were lurking there, but it was still a nice dive, water fairly clear and nice and warm.
The sea was slightly rough with swells rolling from the east. They had forced our diving on the north side of Lima Rock, and they precluded our diving Octopus Rock, which we were thinking to do. They made the north side of Ras Morovi rough as well so we went to the south side to the cove that is protected from the direction of the waves. Here we had a lovely dive. There were crayfish at home in the ledge at 9 meters, and I found us a nice leopard ray in the saddle. From there I turned south to find the hidden reef, which we rounded and returned up the top to avoid deco. It was covered with black coral and teeming with fish. On our way to the grotto we encountered a turtle, and other game you can see in the video.
Kelly and Bobbi and I crossed the border that evening for a second night at Alia Suites, all set to dive next morning at Nomad Fujairah. Kelly had never been on the Inchcape before so we all went there. She and Bobbi and I were the only divers on the boat, apart from Kyle Schoonraad, who came along to point out the seahorse he had seen the day before. We also were first on the wreck so had it to ourselves the first few minutes, though we were joined by a dozen divers and surfaced to find boats daisy chained back from the mooring line. It was a lovely dive, good vis, not cold, with free swimming honeycomb morays nestled in with the teddy soft coral, picturesque lion fish, a pair of puffers, a scorpion fish, and of course the sea horse which we saw just after descent, pointed out by Kyle practicing trim with his perfectly balanced twin sidemounts. The video is here https://youtu.be/P9FuxTa_Hs0
Karen Drest had found out about our trip via our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/groups/froglegs/ and drove down from Al Ain to join us on our second dive of the day on Dibba Rock. Vis was good. We found some flounders and lots of morays. We cut up the gap to the west of the rock and worked up current across the shallows coming out right on the old mooring line and from there easily found the sand flats where there were several active rays, which we captured at the end of our video.
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My logged dives 1478-1481 Friday August 12, 2016 Octopus Rock We had great visibility while conducting a PADI Advanced Open Water course with Nomad Ocean Adventure for Greg Raglow, accompanied by Greg's friend Mike Kelley and by my favorite dive buddy Bobbi Stevens.
Greg had earlier done his deep and night dives for his course, see http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.ae/2016/06/devilish-diving-in-musandam-greg-raglow.html. For his peak performance buoyancy dive we returned to Octopus Rock, which can have difficult currents but on this day they were fairly mild. With Chris out of commission due to an infection on his arm, I was in charge of the advanced boat, with three groups of three divers. I checked the current with mask, fins, and snorkel and judged it doable before pitching us all in the water, with my group of Bobbi, Greg, and I last in. By then the other two groups had left the current shadow and were drifting at the surface halfway and almost beyond the rock being carried in a mild but significant surface current. Benefiting from observing their plight, my group focused on doing better and we descended on the south point where there is often relief from current. As we were organizing ourselves on the bottom, getting buoyancy just right, the other two groups managed to join us. Current at depth was much less significant than at the surface, and I was able to lead us to the north along the ridge to the west of the rock. Here we saw masses of trigger fish and green and large honeycomb morays. Coming up the far side of the ridge and popping over the saddle to line up on the sprint to the east across the sand channel to regain the rock, we saw a turtle hiding from us. I waited till the others had caught up before edging closer, at which point the turtle rose from its hiding place and became very photogenic as s/he passed us overhead. Lima Rock
Our second dive would be an Underwater Naturalist one, and what better place to see the wonders of nature than at Lima Rock. After lunch we motored over and found the south side rough with chop, so we headed to the north side. We put in at about the middle of the rock and moseyed along till we reached the point covered in ghost fish nets. These are convenient when there is current but there was no current on this day and we pretty much had the run of the rock. Unfortunately when there is no current there are not that many fish either, relatively speaking, when we are hanging on to the nets like pennants, surrounded by barracuda, and hoping for a whale shark to come along. Still the wildlife was interesting. We had seen lion fish, rainbow wrasse, and a slipper lobster, some eels, a large puffer, and angel fish and jacks at the point. Rounding to the south side we found the current coming up that side so we turned around and headed back the way we came, all and all a safe, well executed, and pleasant dive. Saturday August 13, 2016 Ras Morovi
We set out on Saturday to complete the PADI Advanced Open Water course with an Underwater Navigation dive with Greg, joined this time by Bobbi as usual, and Greg's friend Mike Kelley. After Greg had succeeded in completing his square, we continued on along the reef and came upon the aftermath of dubious fishing practices where fish had been stunned with explosives or electricity or poison. I posted what we saw on Facebook:
Lu'lu Island On this day, the dozen or so divers at Nomad had taken a single boat out for the day, and we could have taken it anywhere for the second dive. Brandon, the newest staff member at Nomad Fujairah, had been sent up to Musandam to guide boats that weekend and wanted to learn about new dive sites, so I agreed to show him Lu'lu, just south from Ras Morovi. Lu'lu can be a so-so dive when the water is green, cold and currenty, but today vis was excellent, current only mildly to the north, and the fish were colorfully abundant.
It's a site that can be dived in various ways. The boat shelters in the shallow bay just west and behind the main island and from there you can start north and follow the rock around to the east and then do one of two things. You can keep the rock on your right and follow it east and curve back south, east, and north in a crescent along the inside of a dragon's back of islands, or you can simply head east across the sand and pick up the northern-most of that dragon's back, round that underwater, and start heading back south on the outside of the crescent. Brandon wanted to try the latter, the more challenging route, so we headed due east over sand at 14-16 meters to pick up the pleasant surprise, after 7-10 minutes, of encountering the submerged reef just as you've given up hope of doing anything more than a sand dive. That route has the added pleasure of finding clown fish stuck in pairs on lonely anemone outcrops in the sand, so bored that they rush up to see what is passing overhead and spewing bubbles, darting curiously to discern what's behind anything glass, such as a face mask or camera housing. On our trip we also came across a large cow-tail ray that decided to depart despite my hanging well back from it to let the others catch up, so not everyone in our group saw it. We continued our dive against the current around the back of the dragon's back, coming across a turtle so still I thought it might be dead. To escape the current I crossed to the inside of the crescent and followed it up the rubble, reef to the left, until we were again heading north, and came out on the fish traps where we had started our dive. From there I led back into the bay where the boat was, where we lingered over a scorpion fish in the sand. Another nice way to dive this site might be the way we did it, but maybe head slightly south-east to try and hit the northmost island more to the south than where we hit it heading due east. This would allow us to dive from there to the north point, and then round that island and come back up the south. If the current was strong we could cross to the inside of the crescent but at a point which I can recognize from blue water where rock had previously been, cross over to outside of the crescent, and keep reef to the right to reach shallow coral gardens, the perfect place to end the dive, or simply carry on until you turn north and arrive back in the channel where we started. Or if the current so dictated you could also head reef on left to see what's on the outside of the dragon's back. I've seen eagle rays on that side on a couple of occasions. Congratulations to Greg on his accomplishment, and looking forward to many more dives together in future.
