Diving with Mermaids in Musandam, August 29-30, 2014

My logged dives #1300-1303

No one, not even me, seemed to notice that I made my 1300th logged dive with Bonnie Swesey, the kind lady who put Bobbi and I up, or put up with Bobbi and I, in her flat for Bobbi's last year teaching at ACS in Abu Dhabi while we both resided in Al Ain and Bobbi commuted occasionally, but not every  day, thanks to Bonnie's hospitality. In return I offered to help Bonnie get back into diving with an intensive refresher course. We didn't do an official course, I just took her diving, and by the end of it we had restored her to compos mentus with her basic diving skills.

Also in our group were my lovely wife Bobbi, our best dive buddy Nicki, and a newcomer to our team, Kelly. We dove for two weekend days, Friday and Saturday Aug 29-30 from Nomad Ocean Adventure in Dibba Oman, always a relaxing place to stay, eat, and check Facebook.

We joined with MSDT Rosien and two of her student divers, so our dive spots were conservative, but still enjoyable. Our first dive was at Ras Morovi where in the cove where we usually begin fishermen had strung a net right up against the reef so that Bonnie and I had to go over it. That was the easiest way without risking damaging it, pull it down to our level and then ease over it.  There is some tension between divers and fishermen. Nets on the reef are not good for it, and what's not good for the reef is not good for the fisheries. Still the fisherman has to feed his family, so despite the fact that fish are caught helplessly there, best not to interfere in the local economy, so we left the net alone. Bobbi and Nicki and Kelly were lagging behind Bonnie and I (we were going at Bonnie's pace to let her get comfortable) and  I'm not sure what they did at the net, but we didn't see them till after we had come to the surface. It was a pretty dive as usual. There is a cave at the start of the dive, an alcove really, that used to have a couple of crayfish in it, but then there was just one, and last few times I checked, none. Eaten I supposed, until on this  dive I found more big ones thriving in the rocks nearby. It's a pretty part of the dive, swirling with fish from the top of the reef down the wall to the blue. The video above begins with that view.

Our next dive was at Lima Rock, the  north side, which was calm relative to the south, which was getting swells. The north was calm enough for Rose's students, but she put us in with the usual warnings about currents at either end of the rock. We didn't see much on the dive (as I commented on our exit, which I put at the end of the video) but we did see the nudibranch there, and as we came to the eastern edge, we had some excitement as the current picked up. There is a point of no return there where you either go back or go with it. I was ahead of the group buddied with Bonnie. The others I thought were following but they went conservative and turned back. It wasn't a strong current, just a mild sweep toward the point, and with just Bonnie in tow it was easy to keep an eye on her. Often we find barracudas there, but not this time, not much to see on this trip. We hugged the reef as we went around the corner to where the wall begins to the west, but Bonnie was low on air and it's a sheer rock wall for 5 minutes, so I guided her through the gap back to the north side where we surfaced and picked up the others, as you see at the end of the video.

Next day the seas had calmed a lot though not enough for us to dive Lima Rock south with beginners, and maybe not that pleasant for experienced divers challenged by rolling seas. Many are susceptible to seasickness, so we dived the more peaceful Lima Headland and Ras Sanut on the way home. We saw rays in both places, cowtail or feathertail (is there a difference? we debated this over lunch on the boat). On Ras Lima Bobbi  called us all over to see a large coronet fish, and I found a large lionfish with whom I practiced buoyancy skills while I hovered next to him getting GoPro closeups. We saw a lot of crawfish as well and I ended the Ras Sanut dive at a shallow ledge where I found some crayfish and then panned to a swim-through where some batfish were sheltering. I swam through and on the other side found another crayfish. It's all on the film.

Not the best diving we've experienced here but good enough for a few video souvenirs. The weather was fine and sea temperatures amenable to shorties, though I was comfortable in 3 mm. It was great to get Bonnie back into diving and to dive with Nicki again and Kelly from ACS. Hope so see more of these people under water in the near future.

Finished PADI Advanced o/w course with Luke Ingles in Musandam with Nomad, Jan 27, 2012 - and Dibba Rock from Freestyle Jan 28

My logged dives #1107-1109

After our diving was aborted by bad weather (or expectation of bad weather) the previous week, Luke and I returned to Nomad with Nicki in tow, Bobbi stayed sick in bed. We did a multilevel dive our first dive.  We planned a 30 meter dive for 15 min, to come up to 20 meters for 10, and then finish out the dive above 16, but in actual fact we did this on our first dive at Ras Morovi:

We entered the water at 12:33

• We dove only to 75 ft (22 m) for 30  minutes to accumulate nitrogen up to PG Q
• We then came up to 50 ft (16m) for 15  minutes to  accumulate nitrogen up to PG V
• And we finished above 40 ft 12 meters for 11 minutes to emerge (after a safety stop at 5 m) in PG X

The dive wasn't phenomenal.  We were last in the water, Ivor shepherding some open water students and photographers so we had no one to guide us to the deep spot at 30 meters where the barracuda hang out.  Luke, Nicki and I plunged as far as we could but reached only 22 meters where I didn't see the tell-tale sea grasses I was supposed to be watching for. So we worked our way back up the channel where Nicki started finding stuff. First she found some neat miniature crabs in some anemonae.  Then she discovered a flounder (sole) in the sand and not long after that a scorpion fish.  We both saw the turtle at the same time.  It was Luke's first time to see a turtle, though I've seen that particular one before, a small one with barnacles on its back.  He's young and likes to move fast in the water.

The second dive was across the bay at Lulu Island. This was one where we start inside Lulu Island and round the point and then head east.  It's a cool navigation exercise since after 10 min we arrive at these looming submerged rocks, swirling with trevali and other interesting fish. We didn't see much on this one, a moray on the way over, another scorpion fish.  We came up the back side and crossing the saddle to the inside of the crescent which these islands form we hit stiff current, very stiff.  I was already coughing since it's winter here, the water is 23 degrees (5 mm wetsuit helps :-) and I'm getting over a cold.  But with the current, exertion, coughing, I was low on air at 40 min.  Luke too, the two of us came up together, though I popped back down to see what Nicki was up to at 5 m, not much from what I could see.

For the record, on this dive

• we descended at 14:45 after 1 hour 12 min surface interval as G divers
• Dived at 16 meters for 42 minutes (47 min NDL)

We were  very glad we didn't dip below 16 meters at any point during the dive because then we would have had only 34 min NDL and such a dive might have posed serious health risks.

It was a cold boat ride back to Nomad but Luke and I were prepared for it with lots of layers of wrap.  It was relaxing.  Back at Nomad's homey hostel, Luke and I went for a run up the road to the Golden Tulip and then returned on the beach, a lovely sunset run dodging waves lapping.  On arrival back at the hostel, someone handed me a welcome beverage and I never showered from the run, just sat until dinner time enjoying the company, enjoying the company after dinner, doing a round on guitar, nodding off at the table, finally going to bed just after midnight, and sleeping till 8:40 a.m.

We had booked in at Freestyle for a boat ride out to Dibba Rock at 9:00 but at our breakfast table at Nomad I checked an email from them that said they were doing an expedition south in their only boat, but we were welcome to come and shore dive, so that's what Luke and I did.  We got there at around 10:30 after espresso and croissants at Nomad, found a gorgeous day with calm clear seas, walked Luke through his last remaining advanced navigation dive on dry land, kitted up and hit the water for the long swim out on a 30 degree heading.  We were doing fine until we neared the island and picked up a noticeable current that started sweeping us west.  I told Luke we should descend and continue underwater, our only hope of not being swept off the site entirely.

We descended and found ourselves trying to tack north by facing east and keeping ourselves crabbing toward the reef to the north. It was hard work trying to insinuate ourselves onto the reef that way and not get hammered off it, as the current was trying to do.  However as I worked my way onto the reef I was rewarded by the sight of half a dozen devil rays swooping overhead.  I looked back toward Luke but there were only bubbles.  Up ahead a turtle veered off the reef, again Luke a bit too far behind.  I clawed my way onto the reef hand over hand grabbing whatever boulders I could find.  Another turtle darted overhead.  I found a sandy patch and waited for Luke. When he arrived I pulled out a slate and wrote on it, "6 devil rays, 2 turtles."

But this was not easy diving, and how were we going to do any navigation work in this current?  I thought the only way was to get into the lee of the island.  That would be to the north. I wrote on the slate and handed it to Luke "must go north."

I moved in that direction heading my body almost east, tracking to the north, just kicking myself into the current and letting the current move me north.  A shark came into view.  I turned to look for Luke, again trailing behind.  I stopped and added to the slate, "1 shark".  When Luke caught up I showed it to him.

Amazingly the shark came back.  I saw it at the edge of vision where the shark moved, difficult to see if you weren't accustomed to their movements.  Luke peered that way.  The shark kept in view, circling us.  Eventually he turned our way and I went his.  He was in plain view now, Luke saw it, his first ever in the wild.

When the shark passed we continued north and soon arrived at the Aquarium in the lee of the current, and here we were able to conduct our navigation exercises.  Luke did fine, but all the exertion had taken us below 100 bar. We still had to get back to shore, many hundred meters the way we had come.  I wrote on the slate "home = 210 degrees".

We headed back that way but I deviated to follow the reef. The entire dive we were shallower than 10 meters. Overhead a devil ray passed and Luke saw that one.  There were lots of other fish, like giant puffers, but no more really salient creatures.  We reached the end of the reef and headed out over the sand.  When Luke ran low on air we surfaced.  Up top we were caught in the sideways current and had to fin at an angle toward our destination, partly against the current.  But the closer we got to shore the more the current relented.  Our only problem here was the bloom of jelly fish, small ones, most of whom were benign.  Occasionally one would get caught in a mask strap or get trapped in our lips or neck and caused minor annoyance.  But we made it back ok, interesting diving, truly advanced.

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 :-)

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.

Day out at Freestyle Divers, Dibba - Diving with Eric and Delilah, certified Paula

My logged dives #1025-1026

Friday, December 10, 2010

Paula was making great progress in the pool, getting through her exercises with developing skill and confidence, and she wanted to get certified before traveling to Australia in two weeks time.  No one in my family wanted to drive all that way just for the day but I hopped in the car and met Paula and Eric and Delilah, whom I'd certified the weekend before, for two dives off Dibba Rock.

Dibba Rock can be one of the most hopping dive spots in the UAE.  Last week we saw lots of sharks and devil rays there.  This week it was relatively tame from our perspective, though we were told that the same animals were being spotted by other divers.  Visibility was poor, cloudy with even some algae, which is possibly why we were not able to spot the animals that could easily have been nearby, a meter beyond what we could see in the hazy water conditions.

We still enjoyed the diving.  I felt like I was diving with an experienced crew, none of my novices posed the slightest problem that would compromise the dives, which for Paula and I lasted one hour and 50 minutes, respectively.  Our first dive was in the reef on the south side between the island and the shore, just 8 meters or so, and for the second we visited the back side and got down to 50 feet, about 14 meters.

Though we didn't see the really big game on our dives today, we found interesting things to observe in nature.  On our first dive we found a turtle that tolerated our coming quite close.  He was at the southernmost part of the V of the reef.  We went back up the left side to the northwest top of the V and finned east to the rock where the porite coral and schools of reef fish were.  There's always lots to see there, hovering puffers, and jacks swimming by our shoulders away from the reef.  When we returned down the V the turtle was still there.  Paula and I stayed in his vicinity hoping other animals would pay us a visit.  Eric and Delilah had succumbed to end-of-dive need-more-weight by then, and had surfaced and drifted some ways to the east.  They learned fast and would trim for the next one.

For the second dive we started in the same spot, just west of what's left of the raspberry coral.  Paula saw a turtle swim by as we were descending.  We went back down the V again but saw little apart from the attractive schools of snappers and other reef fish as we returned to the top and over to the aquarium.  I led us north for the trip down to the sand at the back of the rock.  I looked over at Paula and saw right next to her a barracuda almost a meter long.  She was looking at me but followed my finger as I pointed.  By then it had moved away to join its mates, not so impressively close.

We went to 14 meters out over the sand but saw little of interest there.  On the way back to the rock, still over the sand, Paula spotted a huge Spanish mackerel swim between us and the boulders, the biggest fish we would see that day.

I led us up into the daylit gap indicating we had rounded the rock and we ended our dive in the shallows there.  A coronet fish swam past, unfamiliar to Paula.  I was hoping to lead us into the shallows south of Dibba Rock where sharks had been spotted earlier that day, but we were fighting the current and we surfaced at 50 min into the dive, making no headway against it.

It was nice diving again with Eric and Delilah, back for more after our intensive weekend previous, and it's always great to certify another open water diver.

Diving Friday Oct 29 at Freestyle, DIbba Rock, and on Saturday Oct 30 in Musandam with Nomad Ocean Adventures

My logged dives #1015-1018

Friday Oct 29, 2010, Dibba Rock with Freestyle Divers

On Friday, a bunch of us met at Freestyle Divers before noon.  We tried a new extension to 611 built to the new airport in Dubai and it saved us 30 min drive time, so we arrived at the new Lulu in Dibba around 10:30 and even with the ladies buying everything  they thought looked tasty (for a half dozen breakfasts and lunches more than we needed, bless ‘em) we arrived at Freestyle an hour before we were due to be diving.  We met Jim and Mira Bakey and their tall son Michael there, Nicki had ridden up with Ian and his daughter Eva, and Joan and Dusty were with Bobbi and I for a group of 10.

Ian was taking my open water course but by now he had located his missing dive card, his daughter had brought it from UK, and he was finally able to show it to me, so he still wanted to complete my o/w course but now that he’d verified his prior training, he is actually good to dive independently.  His daughter Eva had just certified in February with Greg Heinrich’s but had not dived since, so on our way out to the boat from the Freestyle beach,  I took her underwater  and ran her through the skill set of mask clearing, alternate air source breathing, and reg recovery and replacement, and she did fine.  But as we descended on that dive, I kept an eye on her and made sure she was weighted properly. Joan had got a weight off me right at the start, and Mira too had trouble getting down and needed a kilo.  But Eva didn’t need my 3rd weight till the very end, and throughout the dive she kept herself right at my shoulder.

Unfortunately it wasn’t the best day for Dibba Rock.  The front side was quite crowded, there were a couple of Al Boom boats there.  Too many divers keeps the animals away, and the sun overhead reflected off the suspended matter and made the haze more pronounced.  I didn’t realize that the mooring we went down was right on the reef so I swam west a little and found the coral sparse, so then continued west to find the aquarium, nice fishes there, pretty diving and relatively relaxed and clear.  From there I could orient on the reef proper by swimming due east, but we hit some back current and found it rough going when trying to turn east at the tip of the V.  So I led us back the way we had come, just trying to keep the divers together and stay on the coral patch. 

It was when I came out on the mooring we had started on that I realized that mooring was on the reef.  That was good to know because Hasan had come down for the 3 pm dive and was waiting for us on shore when the boat came back.  It was his first dive ever, but he’d done well in the pool and I had encouraged him to make the trip after completing only just one module. We had plenty of time to prepare.  I would be his buddy.

I convinced Nicki to join us on the 3 pm dive by promising her a back-of-the-island dive.  Eva decided not to make the trip so it was just the 3 Bakeys and Joan and Dusty, Bobbi and Nicki, and Ian and Hasan and I.  When the boatman pulled to the backside drop off, I insisted on mooring because Hasan wasn’t ready for a free descent, but the boatman was unable to due to the exposed rocks there.  Nicki wanted to dive there regardless so I asked Bobbi to join her.  The Bakeys decided to go in there as well, and then Ian said he’d like to start there too. Ian was fun diving and not in student mode that day since he still had the last two pool modules to do before he could do the last two dives of his course, so sure, he could join in if he wanted.  Bobbi could at this point have opted to come with Hasan and I since Nicki had plenty of company, but she decided to leave the boring front side of the island to Hasan and I.

So Hasan and I were dropped in on the mooring we had visited at noon, which I now knew to be right on the reef we wanted to be on, and this dive was not boring.  For one thing, the angle of the afternoon sun and slight overcast removed the sunbeams from the water, so we could see better than at noon.  And apart from Iva and a few divers he was training in peak buoyancy (they tend to stay in one spot), we were the only ones there. It was not long before we found a shark, and I swam after it and made sure Hasan saw it well and up close.  We meandered the reef looking for more and ended up in the aquarium where there were schools of fusiliers and snappers and the schools of fish with gaping mouths that all snap shut in unison.  We saw pufferfish there and tangs and parrots and actually I could name almost all the fish in the handbook.  Then we headed west to the reef and saw our second shark there, might have been the same one.  We wheeled over the reef taking it easy now.  Hasan was on his first dive and has a lot to learn about weighting and buoyancy control.  At this point he was awkward in the water, expending a lot of energy in hand motions, and half an hour into the dive he was down to the red, so I suggested we just stay where we were for a bit.  A couple of minutes later a large 2 meter Spanish mackerel passed nearby.  We ascended from there, pretty satisfied with ourselves after that one.

Hasan had to get back to Dubai and work the next morning, so he left after the one dive (one of the best of the weekend for me!)  The rest of us cleaned up our kit and headed over the border to the Mauritian hospitality of Chris and his family at Nomad Ocean Adventure.  Beverages were in evidence when Ian and I headed for the pool to complete module 4 there.  We had to delay drinks gratification until forced to stop and come to dinner, grilled kingfish and pasta with shrimps, plenty of salad, a variety of quiches, et quelquechose rouge.  After a very convivial meal ensemble, people headed for bed early, and Bobbi and I slept more than 8 hours, when I got up at 8 to meet Ian in the pool and complete module 5 there.

Saturday Oct 30, 2010, Musandam with Nomad Ocean Adventures

Unfortunately Ian had an issue at work come up and couldn’t join us for the dive.  There had been a storm in Oman the day before and communications both phone and internet were not working on the Oman side of the border.  Ian was having to cross into the UAE to keep in touch with his office and as we were loading the boat he informed us that he and Eva would have to head out.  This left us down to 11 divers on our boat, as we’d had two added, Richard the French instructor who sometimes uses a rebreather, and his lady friend Allison who doesn’t, so when Richard dives with her he uses conventional equipment. 

However the lack of communications led to our herding people onto our boat before they were comfortably ready only to wait there for a captain who didn’t come, no one could call him.  After we had assembled our tanks for the first dive and sat for a quarter hour with no one around to help, I returned to the dive center and got Chris on the case, and eventually Sultan appeared, in his finest white pressed dishdash, since he’d been called away from a Saturday family affair.  Unfortunately Richard and Allison had left by then, not wishing to wait, but on the upside we’d been joined by Jonathan who had arranged to come down from Dubai but was a little late, so we had gone ahead, since he couldn’t reach us by phone, so we had no idea if he had got waylaid or what, but he managed to find us the way we always accomplished these hookups before mobiles became ubiquitous, somehow.

Sultan has captained out boat before, he’s a nice guy, always helps us with our gear and takes us where we want to go, even when we change our minds, so we were all back on even keel as we sped up to Lima Rock in the bright sunlight, the mountains of Musandam rising from the very sea in limestone formations speckled with under water alcoves and strewn with boulder swim-throughs.

By 1 pm we were descending for our first dive on the south side of Lima.  I had gone in and checked so I knew there was a current, one that pulled east toward Iran at that end of the island (take that one you might need a visa) and west toward Lima headland at the other end. We had gone to the north side of the island but found dhows and dozens of divers sheltering in the relative calm there, so we’d moved to the south side where we prefer to dive and decided to start midisland and put ourselves in the west current.

I briefed everyone about rounding the island, though not everyone got that far.  The dive itself wasn’t that interesting, poor vis, a few morays and crayfish, and lots of batfish being cleaned by wrasse, interesting to watch, the batfish seem to really enjoy it.  Nicki said she saw a huge Spanish mackerel resting on the bottom but I was tending to the divers.  Jim and Mira Bakey were first to show me low air and head up so I took charge of their son.  But he was at about 70 bar and everyone else I could still see had over a hundred.  So I led us up to 12 meters.  We caught the current and I led higher.  As we reached the end of the island we popped over some algae encrusted rocks at just 5 meters, and  sent Michael, by then below 50, up to the surface we could see rippling right overhead. Joan and Dusty and my buddy Bobbi followed me back down to 15 meters. And we continued in pleasant temperatures through the schools of fish on the north side of the island until we agreed to come up to safety stop depth, and when my computer reached 60 minutes I pointed this out to Nicki, who showed me 56, because her buddy had had a delay at the surface at the start of the dive, so I signaled Bobbi to join her, and I took Joan and Dusty up, as we were all getting low on air and I had admonished everyone not to dive overtime, or we’d assume they were missing and mount a rescue.

Everyone seemed to enjoy that dive and we were heading to Wonder Wall in the direction of home when I noticed Pearl Island about to go out of sight behind Ras Lima and I thought, and then actually said, why not there? The only time we’d dived it Bobbi and I had been led by Michael Diver (Facebook moniker, different Michael from the one we had with us) and we had met fierce currents.  It had been a difficult dive.  We’d had current at 1:00 but possibly it would have slacked by 3:00, and I thought I could recall the route (though not the direction which I thought was north, but I figured out during the dive that it was actually east).  All the divers still with us seemed up to the challenge.

The boatman pulled us behind the island where the new instructor Philip in another Nomad boat was just then taking down a group of open water students; likely he’d not be going where we were headed. We finished our sandwiches and kitted up and entered the water.  Vis was not great, maybe 7 meters or so.  Fortunately there was hardly any current to impact us as we headed north into the channel and then rounded the island to the east.  I wasn’t sure where I was but it looked familiar.  There were lots of grey morays in the rocks but I was looking for the fishpots that would lead us to the submerged islands to the (I now realized) east. At 16 meters I found them and followed their ropes over the sand.  About 20-30 meters out I saw a submerged outcrop looming to the south, so the heading was a little south of those ropes.

The sunken islands were fun and foreboding, teeming with fish life.  Going from one to another Michael noticed three rays on top of one and tried to get my attention but neither I nor the others saw them (and Dusty surmised they were actually batfish).  We picked up a current coming to the third one but got some relief from it as we rounded on the south and took the channel to the north down to 18 meters.  Here we found the hulking barracuda we had seen the time before.

The barracuda like current so it was a stiff fin into it to head back to the west the way we had come.  We lost Jim and Mira on this maneuver but again we had Michael with us, and Joan and Dusty, and Bobbi and I.  Nicky and Jonathan had not been seen since we headed east toward the sunken islands.  I presumed that any missing buddy pairs were enjoying themselves and caring for one another.

In the last part of the dive we passed one area where barracudas were visible at depth and schools of snappers were pouring off the rocks above. We finished up following a shoulder that rose to 5 meters, a good place for a safety stop.  There was lots of cabbage coral here, a favorite haunt of turtles though we didn’t see any.  It was really a beautiful dive, nice to get to know a new spot.

Lima / Musandam Oman April 16-17 2010 - My logged dives #963-966

This is just a quick recap of events last weekend. I booked in 8 divers for Discover Nomad, all keen to go in search of whale sharks. Bobbi and I saw one last time we were at Lima Rock March 19, and they'd been sighted off Lima the previous weekend. So the divers on the trip were keen to go. But the weekend before we were due to head out, two dropped out called away to South Africa, one got sick and couldn't dive, and Glenn and Gwen and Gulya descended on Abu Dhabi, Glenn recovering from knee surgery and couldn't dive, so Bobbi bailed too.

Jay Fortin, Bill Nash, and Greg Golden left Abu Dhabi Friday morning about the same time I did and we all rolled up at Discover Nomad, Dibba, Oman by ten in the Morning. The four of us were on a boat with two French guys using re-breathers, and two personable ladies Zana from Brazil and Laura from Lima (Peru, not the Rock). Zana, a rescue diver, turned out to be an artist with a blog: http://calligraphybyzana.blogspot.com/.

I was the "guide" for the boat so I got to tell the boatman where to take us, subject to negotiation with all on board, of course :-). First destinations both days were Lima Rock and the elusive whale sharks. To make a long story short, they eluded us all weekend. The baby was spotted off Dibba Rock on Friday, and when I stopped by Scuba Dubai on my way home Saturday, I spoke with someone who had seen one off Martini Rock, south of Khor Fakkan. None sighted off Lima by any of the divers there this weekend.

There were plenty around attracted to the prospect. I had never seen Lima Rock so crowded. On the first day there was a dhow moored off the south side chartered by the Al Ain Dive Club. I knew this because my friend Ali Bushnaq was on board. They put their divers in the water and strew over a dozen snorkelers in the water just as we were going down, and there were other dive boats at the spot as well. It seemed there was little chance of finding big game with so many people around, but we weren't entirely blameless for being there ourselves.

One nice thing was the current was slack. I went in with mask, fins, and snorkel and tested the water before every dive. So we got to pick our spot and meander over the reef at will. We found a couple of large honeycomb morays and I found a small sting ray under a rock, on both our first and second dives that day. But apart from that we didn't see much of great interest. Lots of morays, trigger fish, batfish at the cleaning stations getting their extreme makeovers courtesy of the tiny blue wrasses. Nice diving, cool temperatures, sunny but not too hot out, seas mild apart from a bit of a blow causing whitecaps on our way home the first day, dissipated by day 2.

The French divers, nice guys, had an unusual dive profile with their re-breathers. They started diving at 12:33 and were not due back for two hours, so after our dive, we had lunch on the boat while waiting for them. When they resurfaced, we headed over to Octopus Rock. We had two novice divers on board, Bill who was doing his 5th dive after completing his o/w course with me, and Laura, who had done about 25. So Octopus Rock was a bit of a gamble due to currents there. But I tested the water and found it fairly benign. There was another Nomad boat there and I noticed when their divers went down they were moved downcurrent, so with 4 in the water and Jay discovering a leaky o-ring as he was about to roll backwards, I told him to go in anyway, needed to get down while all were grouped near the rock. It worked well, we descended, Jay's air held out fine, and though we hit hard current each time we rounded the rock spiraling upwards, we had a fairly pleasant and successful dive.

Next day Jay developed ear problems and couldn't go so it was just Greg and Bill and Laura and Zana on our boat. By then we were a compatible dive team. Again Lima Rock was packed with divers from at least half dozen boats, and a bit crowded below, plus the current was back moving in from the east, so I had us dropped at that end of the rock and we swept along the entire south side. Greg had weighting problems and couldn't come down right away. Bill, impeccibly trained, joined him at the surface, so Laura and Zana and I were forced to dive without them (or resurface, and be carried to the middle of the rock). Greg and Bill continued their dive independently and did very well, ending up not far bahind the ladies and I. We didn't see much to blog home about, though Zana found us an electric ray.

The boats on the south side of Lima were picking up their divers and all moving to the north side, so I decided to heck with whale sharks, not likely to see them in the crowd, so with permission from our team I asked the boatman to take us to Ras Morovi. There, Bonita was diving with her group on the north side of the eastmost island, and Al Boom was diving there as well. I was thinking to have our boatman take us into the cove I like but another dive boat snuck in while I was pondering so there were divers there as well. We opted to have lunch and think about it. Meanwhile the divers had moved off. I wasn't familiar with that particular spot but it seemed to be popular with those who should know, my group were game, so we dropped in there.

Nice dive, one of the best of he weekend. We dropped to 25 meters in the sand. Vis there was a clear 20 meters. Again we didn't see much apart from beautiful flow of reef fish moving up and down the wall, but the dive was very pleasant, sweet, as one of the ladies put it afterwards. When we rounded the island (compass showed going north) we entered a murky patch on that side, so just as well we didn't dive the cove. Here we encountered some current so I reversed back to the south and returned us to the clear water on the east wall, and we ended our dive there.

It was a great weekend, compatible people, and nice to be diving with divers Greg, Bill, and Jay, all of whom I'd trained as advance and / or open water divers.

February 19-20 2010 - Diving Dibba Rock and Musandam with Freestyle and Discover Nomad

We started our weekend of diving at Dibba Rock, with Freestyle Divers, Friday February 19, 2010. Our Divers were Bobbi and I, Oliver and Susi (getting certified that weekend), Keith and January (just starting her o/w dive course), and Daniel Sobrado, whom I had certified last trip to Dibba, on January 23 (http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-22-23-2010-diving-dibba-rock-my.html)

Bobbi and I participated in the Terry Fox run in Abu Dhabi on Friday morning while January and Keith were running the half marathon in RAK, so we met in Dibba for just one dive at 3:00 p.m.


January's first o/w dive and Susi's second, and my logged dive number 942

This turned out to be a nice dive, but it began oddly with our wearing 5 mm wetsuits against the cold, most for the first time, so buoyancy became an issue on the dive. Everyone checked their weight first and ascertained they could descend, but in reality, when we began our dive, people were bobbing back to the surface. I had a mix of people, including January on her first dive and Susi on her second for the course, though she had dived with me several times by then, all but one, fun dives. Bobbi was trying out her new 5 mm wetsuit for the first time so even she was slightly underweighted. And me too, I was using for the first time a 3 mm overall / longsleeve jacket combination to give me 6 mm on my body core, so though I carried 3 kilos extra for students, by the time I'd given two away I was blowing hard to stay down. Oliver and Daniel were thankfully overweighted, so we all managed to do the dive, barely.

Vis was not great, there was a bit of brown algae around. There was a slight current moving us east over the reef so I had to keep calling January back where Susi was gamely doing her o/w #2 skill set, tossing regs away, partially flooding her mask, simulating alternate air source breathing. Eventually we were ready to move out and I let us drift over the reef, hoping the certified divers among us would keep to some kind of formation. Some dvers were high in the water, some were moving ahead of me, so when the reef ran out they didn't realize it and so some were out of sight as they drifted too far into the haze overhead, and I could just see their bubbles. All became gradually aware that they needed to turn and fin into the current. January stayed right at my shoulder and we came on a turtle which everyone eventually passed over. By now people were settling better into the dive and keeping their buoyancy closer down on the reef and it got interesting as now the current was nudging us north and we could just hold position and depth and let ourselves be moved along the reef, teeming with fish.

There was nothing to see out of the ordinary until I noticed a flash of grey, a bulky blacktip shark moving at the edge of our peripheral vision. I turned and swam toward it and caught up with it just as it veered toward me. It came in close, presenting a clear view of its snout, until it realized that I was in its path, and then it turned away and headed off over the reef. Most divers in our group saw it and exclaimed as we boarded the boat how close it was, "It went right under Daniel," and yada yada. We ended our dive at about 50 minutes, me holding a rock between my knees to stay down, some divers bobbing to the surface, all lighter with loss of air, needing more weight to compensate for the extra padding against the cold.

We enjoyed the sundown on the Freestyle veranda until our gear was dry enough to pack away, Then we drove across the border and arrived at Discover Nomad where Chris had rooms for all of us, and his new manager Bonnie was fixing dinner. Chris's mom and dad were away so it wasn't the exquisite Mauritian cuisine we had come to expect, but Bonnie did a fine job of feeding the dozen or so divers settling in at the Nomad hostel for the night.

February 20, 2010 - Susi's 3rd and 4th O/W dives for CERTIFICATION and January's second (plus a fun dive)My logged dives numbers 943-944


Next morning we were up and away in one of Chris's speedboats, putting out to sea at 10 a.m. An hour after that we had arrived at Ras Morovi where I got Waleed, the boat captain, to drop anchor after some minor mis-communicaton in Arabic. With the anchor line in place Susi and I slipped into the water and she did her controlled emergency swimming ascent while Bobbi helped January and Keith kit up, buddy check, and enter the water. With that delay Susi managed to rescue me with cramp removal and tired diver tow back to the boat.

By now everyone was in the water and we all descended, January and Keith and Susi on the anchor line, Ken (Finnish doctor who'd rolled up at Nomad the day before; whom we'd dived with on a Yellow Dhow liveaboard, http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2009/09/sept-4-and-5-2009-logged-dives-913-919.html) and Bobbi already down, and Daniel and Oliver hanging out somewhere in the gloom. My focus was on the two students in training, and I had Susi orally inflate her BCD and remove and replace her mask while January was settling in and establishing neutral buoyancy. By the time I had run January through her module 2 skill set, the other divers were milling all over the place. I had buddied Susi and January so they were with me and they were my prime (and only, really) responsibility, but I had buddied the three guys so the one who would be low on air first could ascend with the second lowest, and the third could continue diving with us (so everyone would have a buddy), so I wanted to keep them in our group. Bobbi wanted to stay with us as well but she and Ken were experienced and not a huge concern.

At the start of the dive it was a little difficult to keep the three guys together and keep track of where they were. They were at different depths, one in front and overhead, two a little out of sight but bubbles just visible following along. But soon they all settled in and we started to see animals on the rocks, and it became a really good dive after that. We started seeing morays. Then there was a cave full of beguiling batfish which we swam amongst. A lone barracuda briefly entertained Susi and January and I, and I swam up close to it. Susi led us on a compass heading west to our maximum depth of almost 16 meters and did a straight shot back to the rock she'd started from. There were lovely teddy bear purple and orange corals here. I ventured over a shoulder at around 9 or ten meters and came on a huge bull ray covered in sand. He saw me, shook the sand free, and escaped quickly in a cloud of dust. I'm not sure if anyone else saw him, though Ken and Bobbi came on a pair of bull rays lying one atop the other. Bobbi saw them clearly and tried to get Ken's attention, and he looked just as they were flying away (she reported later ;-).

Meanwhile, 35 minutes into the dive, Oliver indicated 50 bar so I led everyone to shallower depths and checked everyone's air. Only Oliver was low, so at 38 minutes I indicated to Oliver that he should surface alone, since we were at only 5 meters and the boat was nearby, but as we were shallow, and wearing those 5 mm suits, almost everyone else found themselves rising to the surface, and next thing I knew I was staring up at legs kicking from the surface overhead. Susi and January had both surfaced inadvertently so I joined them. Bobbi and Ken were fine wherever they were, and Daniel and Keith didn't appear, so I assumed they were fine. Susi was low on air and decided to join Oliver on the boat. January and I both had 100 bar left, and she was game, so we descended to resume our diving.

We were now in the cabbage coral patch where we found a couple of turtles. Further up ahead we came on Bobbi and Ken. Ken was photographing gobies as they emerged from their holes and as that takes patience January and I moved on. The area was full of fish life, though there was nothing exciting left to see in our dive. It was just pleasant and getting a little cold, so at 57 minutes I signaled a 3 min safety stop, and after an hour underwater, we surfaced. Everyone was by now back on the boat, talking about what a delightful dive it was. January was kind enough to assist me to the boat via a tired diver tow.

Waleed motored us over to the Ras Lima headland where we stopped out of the wind for lunch. Clouds were by now brewing overhead, robbing us of sun, and seas were becoming choppy though where we were, it was calm. Susi and I did her last remaining surface skills while we vented nitrogen, and when we got back on the boat I sat with the ladies to determine that we could do a next dive at 14 to 16 meters for 45 minutes (safely and with plenty of margin for error). Keith had developed ear problems and decided to simply snorkel, so it was easy to pair divers now, Daniel and Oliver, Bobbi and Ken, and Susi and January with me. We backward rolled over the side and descended using visual reference of the sloping wall and all made it to the bottom in good order, just 7 or 8 meters.

This was a fun dive for January since she hadn't completed the last two modules of the course, so it was just Susi to remove and replace her mask and then hover. There were a lot of tunicate coelenterates in the water and vis was not the greatest, divers seemed to be doing their own thing, hard to keep them all together, Susi and January and I drifted off, no one followed, we went out to some rocks in the sand and kept going to 14 meters, looking in vain for rays. We headed back into the rocks and found some boulders that invited exploration. We meandered in and out and up and down. The rocks were teeming with fusiliers over the rust colored coral carpet, and bigger jacks in the alleyways. We headed to a maximum depth of just over 14 meters, and on the way back from that foray, encountered a huge honeycomb moray that fascinated the ladies, who were seeing one for the first time (Bobbi and Ken saw one, maybe the same one, with a cleaner wrasse that entered the moray's mouth and cleaned way back in the throat - gulp! I saw a wrasse around the mouth of this one, might have been the same one).

Eventually we reached our agreed end of dive time of 45 min and I suggested a safety stop. We hung out at 5 meters enjoying our last 3 minutes and at the surface Susi declared that this was her best dive ever. For me it was just another day in paradise, though it was a comfortable, enjoyable dive, and the ladies had handled themselves like champions. And congratulations to Susi on completing her course.

January 22-23, 2010 - Diving Dibba Rock - My logged dives #938-941

January 22, 2010: My logged dives # 938-939

Dibba Rock, Freestyle Divers
Susi McGrath's first o/w dive; Daniel Sobrado's first and second
Fun divers Bobbi, Greg, and Oliver

Diving was good off Dibba Rock this weekend despite vis being pretty bad and the water temperature about 24 degrees centigrade, cold enough for a 5mm wetsuit, Neither Bobbi nor I had 5mm wetsuits and though I wore 0.5mm lycra and t-shirt, plus a thin chicken vest, for maybe 4mm on my torso, it was chilly.  Air temp was pleasant, so the outside temp at least allowed us to warm up between dives. Bobbi got herself sorted but only on our way back to Abu Dhabi from Dibba, when we stopped at Scuba Dubai and Bobbi found 5mm wetsuits on sale and bought one.  I want one too but the men's weren't on special.

I had two students.  Daniel Sobrado was sprinting through the course and finished this weekend.  Susi McGrath was more tentative, but had done fine in her first open water pool training the night before we set out for Dibba.  She had brought her partner, Oliver du Toit, who had joined us in the pool for a refresher. Greg Golden joined our dive team as well (I had trained him in Advanced PADI o/w recently).  With Bobbi driving, we left Abu Dhabi at 7:30 and took the new Yas Island highway to save time over the old road to Dubai.  We met Oliver and Susi at the ADNOC Oasis in Taweela, Susi joined our car, and she and Danel did module 4 academics on tables and module 5 final exam in our car on our way to Dibba.  We arrived at Freestyle an hour early for a noon dive as a group of six.

It was a warm calm day out with placid seas, but the drop in water temp had brought on the algae, and as we descended first time, the water was brown with suspended matter, disorienting for my first-time divers.  However, reflexive claustrophobias were bravely overcome, and we landed in a shallow 6 meters of water on a new mooring that's just west of the raspberry coral.  Once we'd achieved neutral buoyancy we moved onto the coral patch, very disappointed in the vis, impossible to see beyond a few meters where fish flitted in bright flashes, was it a fin? no, just a larger fish than normal, beguiling.

But there were barracuda about and we could get quite close to those, dozens in a school.  We came on some turtles, several, observing us tamely for the most part as we observed back.  We spotted some cuttlefish.  Bobbi and Greg moved off from us and saw batfish.  Susi seemed to like the big puffer fishes.  The new divers were trying on weight though. I was plopping bricks in their bcds and still they were having trouble staying down.  The excess vertical movement took a toll on their air consumption and our dive ended after 38 minutes, maximum depth 8 meters.

Sill, all had gone well for an initial dive.  In the surface interval I took Daniel in the shallow water off the beach to complete the module 3 confined water skills we had not had time to finish last time in the pool.  So he was ready for his 2nd o/w dive at 3:00 but Susi, who hadn't started module 3, would do hers as a practice dive.

For the second dive, we started at the mooring nearer to the rock and I took Daniel down for a quick controlled emergency swimming ascent.  Bobbi managed to get the other divers in the water as we surfaced.  On our second descent, Daniel ran through his Dive #2 skill set while everyone was adjusting their buoyancy. We then moved toward the rock and came onto the aquarium with the red corals, and lots of large fish milling about, including some good sized barracuda.  We headed from there over the raspberry coral and saw the usual suspects on the second dive.  All divers were starting to get comfortable by now, and the dive time was longer, 42 minutes, at 8 meters max.

January 23, 2010: My logged dives # 940-941

Dibba Rock, Freestyle Divers
Fun divers Bobbi, Greg, Oliver, and Susi (in training) - CERTIFIED Daniel Sobrado

Daniel and I had gone in the pool after diving the day before and finished off modules 4 and 5, so he was ready to complete his 3rd and 4th o/w dives on Saturday. Susi decided she'd like to take it easy the following day, and she seemed much more relaxed in the water without the stress of having to perform skills.  The wind had come up and seas were slightly choppy, but vis had cleared a bit below, and we could now see 3-5 meters.  We dropped in the far west  buoy and i told everyone we'd head east to the coral.  I was expecting a 20 meter swim but in fact we were there in a couple of fin kicks.

We saw a pair of turtles straight away and after that schools of barracuda.  I'm always on the lookout for sharks when I see barracuda.  Waiting for the others to catch up I saw one fade into the gloom and I finned to catch up but couldn't see him clearly more than a few moments at a time, and couldn't leave my new divers behind.  But I used the standard hand signal to report the sighting and this heightened everyone's expectations.  We continued off the reef past the anchor that's been embedded in it forever to explore the boulders marking the aquarium.  It was clearer here, but I wheeled us around and led us back over the coral.  Here I saw a pair of sharks skim across my bow and I went after them and watched them wheel in a circle right around me.  Bobbi was alongside, pointing, but I'm not sure who else in my group saw them.  But no matter, we got a third chance, a lone one this time, coming in close and showing off to everyone.  Susi was pointing, quite chuffed.  We finished off with more barracudas and sightings of schools of yellow fish hovering over the coral.  Everyone was doing better on air, 46 minutes at 8 meters.

For our last dive we decided to do the back side of the rock.  We were again dropped just off the raspberry coral so we got to swim ten minutes among the turtles and barracuda on the raspberry patch, and back through the big fish in the acquarium. There were a couple of Really Big Barracuda there, and on our way over the raspberry patch we saw a huge 2-meter Spanish mackerel that some other divers in the area who saw it mistook for a shark.

I swam slowly to pace myself with the beginners and it was 15 min into the dive before we started heading down toward the sand at 10 meters at the back of the island. Unfortunately this part of the reef hasn't recovered as before from the cyclone and red tide.  It's rare to see eels here anymore, and the pipefish in the sand are gone. On Daniel's compass heading into the sand we saw no rays, nor did we see any when I led us out to 15 meters on a second foray.  But on our return leg Bobbi pointed excitedly.  She had seen a jawfish.  We had all come on top of it and scared it back in its hole, but I had all the divers back off from it.  They didn't know what I was pointing at but they understood to wait, and soon the little jawfish head appeared wanting to know the nature of what was stalking it.  There used to be a lot of them here, but it's good to see that they are bouncing back, if tentatively.

By now my new divers were pointing at their pressure guages suggesting that it was time to end the dive, so I lead them back to the wall and up to shallow water.  We hadn't made it around the rock but our boat was waiting for us where we surfaced.  Despite the depth, air consumption was still improving, 49 min this time, at 15 meters maximum depth.

December 1, 2009 – Vance, Bobbi, and Glenn off Flic en Flac, Mauritius, my dives #937-938

After driving down from Trou aux Biches and Grand Baie, we ended up in Flic en Flac, a town off the west coast with tacky beach scene appeal. All the coastal areas had public beaches with dirt roads and parking lots and ubiquitous Italian ice cream trucks playing snippets of familiar tunes over and over again that must have driven the drivers bonkers. My memories of Mauritius are permeated by the jingling tunes from these trucks, plus the sounds of birds sweetly singing. The beaches had sparse lawn patches above the sand and a variety of trees, including baobabs and cedar pines.

We parked at one of the beaches and went on foot in search of accommodation. One hotel apartment complex recommended in LPG was full but the landlady suggested we try in the recently built villas in the grid of streets just back of her hotel. We found plenty of choices there but declined the first ones because there were still clients in some of them or the owners had brought their kids down for the day to let them splash in the pool and the villa was over-run by kids who had to be removed so it could be cleaned. Eventually we got a villa just a block off the beach and liked it so much we stayed three days.

The villa cost 2500 rupees a night, about $75, and had 4 bedrooms on two upstairs floors. It was quiet and spacious, fully equipped kitchen, two baths, and had a nice pool outside. Other guests seemed to spend all of their time eating and drinking at tables on the lanais off their apartments. Where Glenn slept the first night the sun woke him up at 5 a.m. so he simply moved upstairs and had the whole floor to himself, with a big double bed in the bed room facing west over the courtyard. So he had one floor with two bedrooms and Bobbi and I had the other, nice.

We used this abode as a base for hiking one day in the Black River park, and the next day we dived two dives with the nearby Ti-Cabo divers. The instructor there, Fadi, had lived in Oman and took a liking to us, and showed us the best diving possible there. Our morning dive was at Serpent Reef. Unfortunately vis was not great, and the underwater scenery was essentially boulders, but the life in the rocks made for interesting diving. There were leaf fish for example, sea snakes, many kinds of eels, several really large scorpion fish, a small torpedo ray, sea slugs, and other things we would not have spotted had we gone there unguided, but Fadi seemed to know where each animal lived. The second dive at Aquarium was more of the same, and the two dives we did there we simply let our eyes follow where Fadi pointed.

Impressions of Mauritius

We were not so enthused to want to spend a second day diving there, so we moved over to the east coast, Trou d’Eau Douce, and then down to Mahebourg for our flight home. Overall we were quite pleased with our Mauritius holiday. It was easy to go without bookings, except we had arranged for a car and a first night in Mahebourg (to facilitate hook up with Glenn, but we could have done without that and just selected what appealed to us when we arrived in town). Accommodation was plentiful in all price ranges and excellent value, food was delicious with creole accent, beer was cheap, the islanders were relaxed and unhurried, it seemed to be a safe place, small enough to get around the island on a single tank of gas ($40, but we only needed the one fill). The weather was great, mostly sunny, sometimes windy, and the misty rains that came occasionally were short and welcome. The scenery was strikingly reminiscent of Hawaii, we enjoyed all the diving we did, and we’d like to go again to Rodrigues next time, and after that to Reunion.

Like a certain Captain Flinders who sailed his British ship to Mauritius at a time, unbeknownst to him, England and France had gone to war, so he was detained on arrival and spent six years in a French gaol, we were captivated by the charm of the island (though put off where traffic was too much for its narrow roads, which compromised the ambience of many small villages). Driving there was like playing a computer game, anything could be walking, pedaling, stopping, or crossing in the narrow roads, where lanes often dropped without shoulder into the sea, and cars coming at you were swerving into your lane to avoid their own obstacles, plus driving on the left, all combine to keep drivers on their toes there. But I was talking about diving, how did driving come up?

November 28-29, 2009 – Vance, Bobbi, and Glenn off Trou aux Biches, Mauritius, my dives #934-936

We weren’t sure what to expect about diving in Mauritius. We had the impression from reading up that the best diving would be off the islands in the far north and we could have gone there if we had left Mahebourg early after sleeping over there our first night on the island, where our son Glenn flew in from Qatar and joined us at Le Bambou Guest House. It’s a small island, and if you rent a car you can reach almost anywhere in an hour, unless you get behind a cane truck, in which case allow an hour and a half (you’ll likely encounter several cane trucks, so better allow two hours).

But we lingered the following morning in Mahebourg and had crossed the island on the trunk road to Port Louis but had only reached Grand Baie by 11:00 next day. That was a tourist town in the north with lots of dive centers. Our Lonely Planet said the dive centers had moved a few kilometers away to Trou aux Biches at the northwest corner of the island so we gravitated there. Somehow we ended at Pro Dive where the aging owner Kevin, with luxury boat and frizzy blond hairdo, convinced us there hadn’t been sharks on the north islands since the last tsunami and the best diving was right there off Trou aux Biches. To top it off he got us a remarkable deal at the Casuarina resort where he was based. He quoted us a price so low we had to argue it with the manager, since Kevin had mentioned a very special group rate, but eventually the hotel honored the quoted price, which included breakfast and dinner plus free use of kayaks, paddleboats, windsurfers, and laser sailboats at times we weren’t diving. So we got to stay a couple of days at a luxury resort at a price so low I had to promise the manager I would not divulge it, and because we were guests at the resort we got discounted diving as well, $400 for the nine dives Bobbi, Glenn, and I ended up doing, fully equipped (with new 5 mm wetsuits, much appreciated, since the water temperature was 24 degrees at depth).

The diving was decent. We really liked the viz off Trou aux Biches. Our first dive was a little odd simply because we had been briefed for a wreck dive between 21 and 25 meters but ended up with a divemaster and a beginner and told to follow them, so we dived a shallow reef called Japanese Gardens, in the vicinity of the wreck that everyone else was diving. It wasn’t a bad site. We saw a cowtail ray in the sand and garden eels, and lots of the usual reef fishes. The beginner had trouble descending (ear problems) and the divemaster, Vivian, was testing a mask with a camera mounted on it, and both of these caused some delays as we meandered on the same part of the reef waiting for the student to join us, and for Vivian to take test photos.

Twenty minutes into the dive we had only reached 11 or 12 meters, far short of the 25 meter depth we were expecting, so we were a little confused. No telling what was happening exactly, but I had mentioned the day before when we were discussing possible dive sites that I was not impressed by wrecks per se, and I guess they wanted to check us out and needed someone who wasn’t that keen on wrecks to dive with the beginner. In any event, because of the odd outcome of our morning dive, for the afternoon, they reversed their groupings and took Bobbi and Glenn and I to the wreck while the others did their second dive of the day on the shallower Japanese Gardens where we had dived in the morning.

The wreck 'Japanese Trawler' was a nice one. Due to the great vis the wreck loomed at us as we approached, about 8 meters tall at the bow. At the stern we found another cow-tail ray, and in one of the funnels there was a green moray we were all encouraged to pet. The cargo holds were open, I dropped in to one (being sure to keep overhead clear so as not to technically penetrate) and the engine room was similarly exposed. Again it was full of fish and made a very pleasant dive. Glenn was somehow unable to switch his underwater camera from video to still photo mode and so videoed the entire dive, which we he's finally put up at YouTube.



The following day was a Sunday but because there were others who wanted to dive Kevin opened his shop for a morning trip to Coral Gardens, a site with gorgon fan corals off Club Med. The dive here was interesting at first, there was a big green momma moray we could stroke, being careful not to disturb her baby in the process, just as toothy as her momma. There were lots of scorpion fish and other small things hidden in the boulders, but eventually it became cold and redundant, and I was glad to surface and be on our way.

October 30-31, 2009 - Vance, Bobbi, and Nicki at Ras Morovi, Lima Rock, and next day Dibba, my logged dives #930-933

Diving Oct 30, 2009, Discover Nomad

Christophe set the depart time a bit early at the last minute so we had to wake up at 5 in Abu Dhabi and be out the door with our tanks weighting down a shopping cart at 6, and we managed to get Nicki from curbside (kerbside to her) at 6:10. Plus I had to stop off at my office to get a memory stick I'd left there so that when we arrived at discover nomad about 20 after ten I had got most of my grade reports done. Chris was still kitting up his divers at the dive hostel so our late arrival wasn't hanging up the show. Still Belinda, diving with us in our group, pointed out to us that she had got up at 5 in Dubai and had been waiting for us for some time. She had kids to organize as well, but 2 hours less driving. Anyway, somehow it all seemed perfectly timed (apart from the early wakeups) and we were on the speedboat and on our way toward Lima Rock at 11, feeling great, weather not too hot, and mountains rising up from the blue sea as we motored past the familiar fijords.

There were just 7 divers on our boat plus the local driver and Christophe: Bobbi and I, Belinda, a Canadian named Ryan, and a couple of French guys, Christophe's open water students, who took a lot of photos and conversed among themselves and with Christophe in French, and who seemed like decent blokes but didn't cross over their language barrier. I spoke to them in French a couple of times but anyone whose native language is French quickly detects that mine isn't ;-)

Anyway we were there to dive. Christophe took us first past Lima Rock to to Octopus Rock, what we used to call the Stack, but the vis looked bad there so Chris recommended we move a little few hundred meters south to Ras Morovi. The ras (headland) is a dragon's back of a mountain ridge that dips under water and comes up in a dragon's head across a narrow channel so it forms a narrow peninsula with an island at its point. There are many dives possible here, starting inside the channel or depending on current, at the ocean side of the island, but today we took a third way, one I hadn't done since diving here with Godelieve and her kids, and that is starting inside the first bay back from the dragon's back and following the wall around in a big U to end up in the channel.

My logged dive #930 - Only today we made a circle at the bottom end of the U. Starting on a south heading at the left point of the U inside the bay we went increasingly deep to about 25 meters or so keeping an eye out for seahorses in the green whip coral or seagrass or whatever that stuff is. It looks like a forest of green underwater swarming with fishes as far as the eye can see which on this day was about 7 to 10 meters I guess, not bad vis, not great. We found no seahorses nor anything much of interest really apart from some hovering lion fish, fierce-looking morays, and scrappy crawfish looking delicious in their lairs.

As we rounded the underwater mountain at the bottom of the U, I carried on along the wall and unbeknownst to me at the time completed a circle without checking my compass, thinking I was heading north the whole time. No wonder that part of the dive seemed repetitive (except that to compensate for depth, everyone was diving higher now ;-) But I realized it when I was heading north again back at the bottom of the U, 50 min into the dive, and Bobbi and I with about 80 bar still to go. I recognized it because there was an alternate route to the north which I hadn't taken my last time here, but which I took now. This one progressed up the channel and led us into a area of cabbage coral interspersed with pretty blue tufts of soft coral, and this area was full of turtles. We found a half dozen of those before we had to surface, Ryan hovering just overhead, air holding out well in a 65 minute dive.

All back aboard the boat and we motored over to Ras Lima, the east-west wall extending well off the small village on the beach, and scarfed down a few of Sylvienne's (Chris's mom's) sandwich wraps, interesting combinations of chicken and wieners, eliciting even more 'sausage' jokes from Nicki. Chris was planning to have us dive that wall but I made some murmurings of preferring to dive Lima Rock, a popular choice, and Chris said sure, why not.

My logged dive #931 - Chris put us in at the eastern point on the north side of the island and the plan was to dive the north side heading west. By the time all the divers were in the water, we were getting swept at an accelerating pace to the east, caught in a current we couldn't fight. Chris saw what was happening and hand signalled me to round the rock at its eastern point and dive the south side, so I had everyone descend, and from then on it was a drift dive. We went down to what I thought was the gap leading to the other side, but it kept descending and we were at 35 meters before I decided to level off, Bobbi clinging to me less in anxiety than for safety. We were getting swept in a direction I thought was west trying to stay on the wall, and coming alongside some very large meter-long barracuda, wow. Here I realized we were heading east, we'd somehow disoriented 180 degrees. By now we were midwater, no point in diving here, so I signaled up. Everyone stayed together. We came up to 5 meters and I signaled a safety stop. Everyone hung together, but in exactly three minutes I signaled up because I wanted to get picked up and taken back to the rock. At the surface I saw we'd been swept well off the wall, halfway to Iran :-) Ryan and Bobbi and I met at the surface where the boatman eventually saw us and came out to pick us up. Nicki and Belinda remained down till we revved our engines to call them up. They’d had had some sort of miscommunication, each thinking the other needed to remain under, but as a reward they had ended up in the middle of a circling funnel of barracuda.

We all had over 100 bar, but we’d had enough excitement for one dive, so we got the boatman to take us to the middle of the north wall, the sheltered side, where some live-aboard dhows were anchored. Here we finished off our air in the shallows, basically trying to avoid any further trouble. It was nice diving. Bobbi and I separated from the group and found half a dozen blue spotted rays under as many different rocks. We saw at least that many morays, including one large honeycomb, and some nice tableaux of lion fish. It was a relaxing end to an unusual dive.

We spent the night at Discover Nomad chez Christophe, but because beverage supply there cannot be counted on we slipped over the border to the hole in the wall at Royal Beach and dropped in on Terry and the other Freestyle divers to enjoy a cool one before driving back to Oman. Terry was overseeing the barbeque of a huge yellowfin tuna and he offered us a taste. We only tasted because we were heading back to Christophe’s for un repas a la Mauritius coutesy of Sylvienne’s kitchen, which deserved more than one etoille Michelin. There we were soon tucking into exquisite quiche, tender steak, succulent kabobs, and deliciously grilled shrimp, plus a fresh green salad, great complements to our two bottles of red wine, which we shared of course.

Somehow we got sleepy and found ourselves waking up a few hours later to another great day on the UAE seacoast. We moved off to return to Freestyle at 9 where we found we could get on a dive to the Inchcape.

My logged dive #932 - Nicki wasn’t in the mood but Bobbi and I joined a boatload and we were soon heading down the mooring line in a stiff current to the wreck at 30 meters. We had wisely worn lycra underneath our 3 mm wetsuits because it was cold down there, perhaps 24 degrees. Due to the depth it’s only a 20 min dive anyway, but the temperature was a shock after the warm summer. The wreck was beautiful as usual, swarming with schools of snappers and bigger fish. There were no rays there at the time but the two honeycombs to replace the ones who succumbed to the red tide were in their predictable places, easily spotted by all the divers. For Bobbi and I who have been here many times, it’s a treat to be diving it just the two of us, without having to monitor students, so we let ourselves slip into a minute of deco and we were last up the rope. We made an unhurried descent, our deco cleared at 9 meters, and we spent 3 full minutes at 5 meters even though we had been just below the other divers waiting for them to complete their safety stops. The current had disappeared at the bottom, but now we were being pulled to the side like pennants. We could see the other divers at the ladder climbing up onto the boat and when the last bum disappeared from the water we let go the mooring line and caught the ladder as we were swept beneath it.

My logged dive #933 - We did one more dive, at noon on Dibba Rock. Nicki had finally got her hair just right so she joined us. The sea and sky were bright and the water looked clear and promising, but it was a promise not kept. The viz was silty. We were dropped on the mooring at the north corner of the rock. We made our way back through the aquarium and onto the reef. I hadn't brought a compass because mine was on a console whose pressure guage had malfunctioned, but I could tell we had hit it right when I heard the clacking and saw a school of young barracuda overhead. Then a large black tipped shark appeared swimming nonchalantly across our bow. Bobbi and I watched it go by, but Nicki was lagging a bit and missed it. Too bad as it was our only shark sighting that dive. Due to the milky conditions I missed a turn in the reef and had trouble getting out to the end of it. I had to retrace my steps on the reef and didn’t know where I was exactly until we came on an anchor that’s been in the reef for some time. Orienting on that I managed to find the right way, and brought us onto a number of turtles in the process. There were frequent sightings of barracuda overhead, shoals of snapper, puffer fish meandering across our paths, and some cuttlefish occasionally, but all in all it was a slightly disappointing dive (what am I saying?! I must be getting jaded ;-)

Sept 4 and 5 2009, logged dives 913-919 from Al Marsa LIVEABOARD dhow in Musandam

Photo credit: John Brodie

Sept 4, 2009 began the night before on the 3rd. We fought Ramadhan pre-iftar traffic getting out of Abu Dbabi just in time to make it to Dibba harbor after dark and slightly after 8. There, several hands helped us get our dive gear from the car to the Al Marsa dhow we would be living aboard the next few days http://www.musandamdiving.com/. We set sail not long after that and were soon enjoying a buffet dinner al fresco on the upper deck. Being Ramadhan we were not sure what beverages they would be serving aboard the dhow but we had brought a coolbox replete with our own. The 3.5 hour drive through Suweihan, plus the day’s work before that had exhausted us, so we were in bed early in our cabin, Bobbi and I squeezed onto a single bunk, lulled to sleep by the roll of the boat and the steady drone and vibration of the engines as we completed the 5 hour journey north. At 3 a.m. I awoke to notice that the roll and drone had stopped, but the hum of the a/c remained, and I easily feel back asleep.

We were up at 6:30 for coffee :-(instant) with the other dozen divers aboard, and at 7:00 we assembled for our briefing. We had sailed overnight to Sheesah Bay. A check on my gps showed we were just around the corner from White Rocks, out of sight past the headland we were about to dive. See: http://www.musandamdiving.com/eastern-musandam/map.htm

This became our routine for Friday and Saturday, coffee at 6:30, briefing at 7:00, diving via short speedboat ride to the nearby first dive site, return to the dhow for breakfast on the top deck, relax until time for a noon dive, followed by lunch, more leisure and a 3:00 p.m. dive. On the Friday we also had a rest for an hour before the night dive, pre-dinner drinks, and dinner.

If you have to have a routine this will do! We paid for it of course, about $1000 for the two of us, Bobbi and I, two nights, 7 dives, 6 meals on a luxurious (remodeled in fiberglass but otherwise had the shape of an) Arabian dhow. Musandam is an incredibly scenic place with fijords lined with rock walls where you can see the exposed strata sheered into cliffs and turned at right angles on itself in upheavals over the millennia. The water there can be clear blue or, when the plague of red tide is present, murky and brown till the depth at which the tide stops.

The dives themselves were competently managed with regard to the dive leader Jay keeping people together and knowing the sites well enough to lead on them. He was also very good at spotting the small animals in sand and sea grasses, the scorpion fish and seahorses. But dive companies and dive leaders who work at them come and go frequently in the UAE, and Jay and his assistant, Phillipe (free lancing, working occasionally with Al Marsa and Divers Down) had perhaps not been in the area long enough to know that many sites, or they were being conservative with currents and avoided the more difficult sites. For example, at Sheesah Bay, they led two dives on the north and south headlands but didn’t take us on White Rocks offshore, though that rock stood mid-ocean just a few hundred meters off the headland and would likely attract interesting animals (and currents, but liveaboards tend to be patronized by experienced divers - see my logs from the only time I'd dived it before: http://www.vancestevens.com/divelogs/343to344.html).

They bypassed some other good dive sites, like Mother of Mouse for example (Jay told me later it had been trashed by smugglers, who were using it as a base). The smugglers had weapons and sometimes harassed the dive boats, so Al Marsa went no further than Sheesah, and that’s a real shame, because the further north you go toward the Straits of Hormuz, the wilder the diving gets.

So we did two dives on headlands at Sheesah Bay and then headed for Ras Sirkan, but when we encountered red tide there, we continued south to Octopus Rock, which can easily be reached by speed boat on a day trip from Dibba. This is to say that whereas the liveaboard experience was thoroughly enjoyable, the ability to get into the north of Musandam to some very different and infrequently dived sites was capitalized on less than we'd hoped, so the diving was about the same as would have been possible on a speedboat day-trip from Dibba.

But still the diving was quite nice. And we did lots of it, 4 dives the first day including a night dive, and three dives the next. We were of course in great anticipation of our first dive of the series, up at 6:30 for coffee, finding ourselves at anchor in Sheesah Bay, and speedboat ready to take us around the southern point to Ras Khaysa, what a way to spend the morning!

Sept 4, Dive 913 - Ras Khaysa

The dive wasn’t all that interesting though, vis ok but not excellent, and not a lot there apart from some large honeycomb morays and the usual reef fishes. We hit a current that swept us pell mell across the rock face (perhaps one reason Jay wanted to avoid White Rocks later that day). One diver got forced by it into a corner with sharp rocks that bloodied his legs. The part of the dive where we were being barreled along was fun for Bobbi and I but things went by faster than we could absorb our surroundings. The turmoil of the current was perhaps why most divers ran out of air early and had to surface before the 50 min. dive time limit, and Nicki came up with cramping stomache, but Bobbi and I and a Malaysian lady who later told us to be sure and go to Perhentian Island and stay at Flora Bay, stayed down with Jay the full 50 minutes.

Sept 4, Dive 914 - Ras Ahrous

Back on board breakfast was served under the sun shade on the top deck, second dive scheduled for 11:00. That’s when I noticed from my GPS that White Rock was just around the corner, a km away, and I mentioned it to Jay, but he had already prepared a diagram for Ras Ahrous, the north headland of the bay, and besides he thought the currents would be strong at White Rock. So our second dive of the day was pretty much the same as the first. We saw an electric ray in the sand, and a couple of turtles. The reefs were pretty with soft blue corals and teeming with fishes, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Sept 4, Dive 915 - Octopus Rock

Lunch was served on the top deck while the boat steamed south to Ras Sarkan, midway between Shisha and Lima Rock. When we arrived at Ras Sirkan just in time for a 3 pm dive, it turned out to be covered with red tide, putting our leaders in a quandary, since that late in the day, options were limited. I suggested a site nearby I had dived with BSAC called Brenda’s Nipple (sorry, don’t know the story, but see the night dive at http://www.vancestevens.com/divelogs/369-371.htm ;-),

There was red tide present there as well and by now we were heading for Octopus Rock. We arrived there before 4, found red tide there too, but with the sun nearing the ridge line of the mountains to the west, there was no choice but to dive it anyway. There was current here as well, Jay put us in the water in its lee and told us to hug the rock to “hide from the current.” All divers followed instructions and descended together and fortunately visibility turned out to be fairly clear just a few meters down.

Octopus Rock is usually a good dive (BSAC Divers used to call it ‘the Stack’). There are some resident sea horses, our goal for this dive, and Jay took us right to them, showing us two at 25 meters. We then negotiated the caverns playing carefully with the currents which are notorious around Octopus Rock. We had many photographers in our group, and divers with cameras were lagging behind Jay’s lead. Bobbi and I hesitated at one gulley and then another waiting for them to catch up, and the second time was awkward since there was stiff current there. Jay motioned us to head upcurrent to the left so we went on and left the group behind. Sometimes pulling ourselves along on the bottom, we found schools of fishes, blue triggers, big batfish, jacks, snappers, all milling about thick everywhere we looked as we finned hard into current and then headed parallel to it hoping to round the rock and be carried down the other side. It was here that in a place swarming with fish midwater we saw among them a free-swimming electric ray, looking a little out of place among the fishes, but no bigger or smaller than the others, and he was unconcerned when we chose him to follow.

We then rotated more with the current being careful not to be swept off the rock, which I turned toward to round it counter clockwise. We weren’t actually on Octopus Rock however, so as we came up the wall 50 minutes into our dive we ran out of rock at the top. It was at the right depth for a safety stop, so we clung there 3 minutes for our safety stop. I got out my submersible marker buoy but needed an extra hand, one to hold the bottom open, one to interject air by purge from my alternate air source (never again with the main one!) and a third hand to release the reel once the buoy became inflated enough to head smartly to the top. I needed a fourth hand to hold on to the rock in the meantime but Bobbi was helping with that by holding me in place. When our three minutes was up we had to let go and get carried with the current to ascend mid-water. At the surface we saw other divers nearby getting picked up in the speedboat, and Jay was already aboard with those who had run out of air first. They came over as soon as they could, all divers recovered.

Sept 4, Dive 916 - Ras Limah

Our three dives so far that day had all been to 27, 25 meters, but we had our night dive still to go, and back once more on the dhow had to wait an hour for the briefing. It was dusk when we all re-boarded the speedboat to be carried just a hundred meters away on Ras Limah to the drop in point for our night dive, the idea being to end up somewhere near the dhow. We descended in twilight and descended on top of a large honeycomb moray eel, then were soon scouring the bottom for whatever else might be living there. We saw a few more morays and again an electric ray, some parrot fish sleeping concealed in the rocks, but nothing really amazing (some people would find ANY of this amazing, I realize). There is one thing I always like to do on night dives -- Bobbi and I moved off from the others, and then we cut our lights and waved our arms and kicked our fins in the dark water, just to light up our limbs with sparkler phosphorescence.

To commemorate a great day. Bobbi and I showered and fixed ‘moonlighters’. We had missed our traditional ‘sundowners’ in order to be compos mentis for the night dive, but gin and whatever hit the spot with the full mid-Ramadhan moon rising over the cliff we were moored next to, the full moon just visible to us from the railing on which we leaned while sipping. Our dinner buffet was just a few steps away on the top deck. We had wine with that, and went early to bed. Others were feeling as comfortably tired as we were. This was not a late night party boat.

Sept 5, Dive 917 - Lima Rock South Side

The day dawned as the one previous, but the excitement today was in anticipation of seeing whale sharks. We had seen them on our past several dives on Lima Rock:
http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2009/08/more-whale-sharks-at-lima-rock-in.html

But we would be disappointed on this day. We blamed Nicki, who had chosen Bobbi and I as her preferred dive buddy for the day, and Nicki blamed Phillipe (got to blame SOMEone! :-)). Seriously, there simply weren’t any whale sharks around, because if they are there, being curious creatures, they come to the divers, and they often arrive at the start of the dive.

We were a bit deep for them, 25 meters or so, for much of the dive. I got to 30 at some point, thinking I had plenty of air, but breathed much of that when we mounted the wall and had to fight current to cut through to the north side of the rock. There were eagle rays there, some mid water, and two down in the sand at 20 meters. I went down to 15 meters to have a closer look despite being right at 50 bar at that point (and this is how I knew they were eagle rays, Jay insisted they were devil rays, I’m pretty sure I was right about these though, I clearly saw their pointed heads and the mottled coloring on their backs – something about the coloring of their heads can appear to be the silver processes of devil rays from a distance, as I had thought at first myself). After watching the rays swim around just off the sand bottom, I angled up and stayed high the rest of the dive, which we ended with a 3 meter safety stop starting 50 minutes into the dive, my needle hovering just off the red at 500 psi.

Bobbi wanted me to mention an interesting crustacean that Nicki found for us on this dive, a lobster out on walkabouts with no claws, a flat carapace at its head. It looked delicious but we all left it alone.

We returned to the dhow for breakfast, and the next dive was brought forward to 10 a.m. since most of us needed to get back to Abu Dhabi that evening (didn’t want to think of it!). At the briefing of our second dive, Jay brought out a diagram of Ras Limah, where we had done our night dive the evening before, but that wasn’t a popular choice, and I suggested Ras Morovi just to the north. On a clear day you can see it from Lima, but it was a destination that some weeks previously the boatman had refused to go to when we had been at Lima with Discover Nomad (too far, not included in the price, he had said, leaving us only Lima dive spots as options: http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2009/08/more-whale-sharks-at-lima-rock-in.html).

Today it was no problem, Jay agreed, and we headed there, ten minutes in the speedboat. Ras Morovi has an island to the east off the point with a channel between it and the mainland. Last time I dived there I went to the bay just inside the south headland and we worked our way out around the rocks to the west of the channel and found wonderful teddy bear coral and lots of fish on it. We had turned back from the channel due to currents and returned to the bay. http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2009/05/nomad-diving-in-musandam-may-16-2009.html


Sept 5, Dive 918 - Ras Morovi

Today Jay took us to the north side of the island and we started our dive in the channel heading south, diving its east side. The surface current was sweeping north but Jay expected it would diminish at depth and it did. It turned out to be our best dive of the weekend. There were schools of barracuda in the channel (see John's photo at the top of this post). We came on lion fish and scorpion fish and many morays, honeycomb, green, and grey. At one point Jay rounded a rock and startled 4 eagle rays who zoomed from their resting place in the reef out to sea. Jay had barely time to bang on his tank to attract my attention when zap, zap, zap, a delay, and then zap, one more, the big rays passed right in front of us and were gone in a matter of seconds. I was at Jay’s shoulder and Bobbi was right behind me, and of all the divers with us I think we were the only ones who saw them. Nicki, behind Bobbi and fulfilling photographer duties for us, didn’t see them and the rest of the group were behind her, too far back to see.

But Nicki’s powers of observation of smaller things enabled her to find a seahorse in the green whip coral just a little further ahead. Jay had gone left but I had continued straight to peer over a rock wall that plunged ten meters to the sand, hoping to see something big and interesting over the side, and so only those who followed us saw Nicki’s seahorse. No telling what we missed by not following Jay, he was also good at spotting things, but angling up the wall to begin our safety top at 5 meters we found morays and crayfish lobsters there. Nicki photographed one green moray in a broken bit of coral forming a shell, and she asked later if I’d seen the shrimp on it. I hadn’t so I hope she sends us a photo, and we thought this was a pretty good dive.

Picture credit: Nicki Blower

Sept 5, Dive 919- Lima Rock North Side

There was time for lunch, and an hour’s rest before our last dive at 2 pm. This time we would be diving the north side of Lima Rock. I always find this side a bit of a letdown. It’s shallower that the south side, where the boulders are more dramatic. I rarely see much of interest here, though I’ve seen rays this side and once or twice a whale shark (but half a dozen sightings on the south side). There’s always a chance of seeing a whale shark anywhere on Lima, but today it was not going to happen, and we had to be content our last dive with crayfish, lion fish, scorpion fish, and the usual schools of tropical reef fish. Except at the first of the dive Jay managed to find three or four seahorses. He knew where to look (in the sparce green whip corals in the sand at the north west corner at the start of our dive east). Apart from the two we’d seen on Octopus Rock the day before, I’d never before seen more than one on any single dive.

If you like diving and good company this is possibly the most enjoyable weekend available in the UAE. I suppose if I were leading the dives, I’d try and be more adventurous, like Mike Ralph used to be when he was leading dives in the area, but then again how Mike favored divers was not always in the best interests of his employers, except where they benefited from repeat satisfied customers (f there were spare tanks, he let us use them, no charge; he did the dives he himself liked to do, risky sometimes but everyone survived!).

Speaking of repeat, Bobbi and I will surely repeat this trip again, one of these days, when we feel we’ve earned a good pampering, in celebration of something, or when Nicki goads us into it again.