Let sleeping sharks lie

While based on the island of Gulhi, I did three dives with the Ayala Bubbles Dive Centre.

It was a spotless outfit with nice new equipment.  Being situated across the alley from my accommodation, it was a very easy experience.

They didn’t require any checks of my dive card or previous dives.  They only wanted the signed releases to cover themselves.

My three dives were as follows:

Wed 05 April 2023: Dhigu Thila

The first notable sighting on this dive was the head of a moray poking out of the coral.

The highlight were four big eagle rays, including one resting in the sand, with a dusting of sand over its back.  They were quite large and at first I thought they were mantas but realised they weren’t when the didn’t have the characteristic manta mouths.

There were six white tip reef sharks at various points of the dive, along with a good variety of reef fish.

I noticed that the divemaster had a 500ml empty (or partly empty) water bottle which he kept squishing to make a noise during the dives (today and other days).  I’m guessing it attracts the fish but I forgot to ask.

Thu 06 April 2023: Maafushi Corner

We had a pre-dive briefing in the office for this dive.  We were told that it can be considered a challenging dive.  It is dependent on the current but if approached the right way, it is easy.  It can be a drift dive but it didn’t turn out that way for us.

After being overweighted with 6kg yesterday (as a precaution being my first dive with them), I was given 4kg today.  It turned out to be inadequate and the divemaster had to strap an extra 1kg to my tank while we were underwater.

As I was doing my own checks before the dive, the divemaster said “It’s all OK”.  Hhhmmmm.

The highlight of this dive were the four tawny nurse sharks we saw sleeping on the seabed underneath an overhang.  There was initially one, followed by another, followed by two together.

In each case, we stayed for a few minutes lying on our fronts to admire them while they slept.  It does seem quite creepy to be watching “someone” sleeping.  The second shark did wake up to see us and swam into a hole in the overhang.  The overhang itself was gorgeous with blue and yellow coral.

The sharks appeared to be around 3m but they probably weren’t, as that’s about the maximum length ever encountered, according to Wikipedia.  We felt like we were only about 3m away.

The sharks were definitely the crazily good highlight of the dive but there wre also two white tip reef sharks, two morays side-by-side of different colours (black and white, and black and yellow) and a large sting ray.

After the dive, I notice the female customer gets more attention in terms of having photos WhatsApp’ed to them.  I had to ask several times and had actually given them a USB-drive as well, which never got returned to me despite asking a couple of times.

Fri 07 April 2023:  Dhigu Thila (again)

I started with 4kg again today and had 2kg added into my BCD in the water.  I guess the divemaster wanted me to be balanced and not have just 1kg in one pocket of my BCD.  I felt over-weighted.

The dive started with us going slightly against a current in an area of dead coral.

During the dive I saw an eagle ray in the distance, a turtle and a white tip.  The divemaster signalled another sighting of rays and I saw some fluffy-looking commotion in the distance.  Upon resurfacing, I learnt that those were more rays.  The others saw more sharks too, presumably at a distance too.

It was a real “nothing” dive after yesterday.  The others two in the group, being new to diving were quite impressed.

My mask fogged quite frequently today and that may have hindered some sightings.