Vance's Dive bLogs

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

2012-01-28T08:48:00.000-08:00

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 Nicky 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, Nicky and I plunged as far as we could but reached only 22 meters where I didn't see the telltale sea grasses I was supposed to be watching for. So we worked our way back up the channel where Nicky 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 Nicky 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.

Started PADI Advanced o/w course with Luke Ingles in Musandam with Nomad, Jan 20, 2012

2012-01-22T09:55:00.000-08:00

My logged dives #1105-1106

It was just Luke and I, Luke driving, as we set out on Maroor Road in Abu Dhabi just before 7 a.m. and arrived at Nomad Ocean Adventure just after 10 a.m. We got Luke a 5 mm wetsuit and before heading for the harbor we plotted a multilevel profile on the giant presentation wheel at NOA which Luke would execute on his first advanced deep dive.

The profile was

27 meters for 20 minutes
18 meters for 10 minutes
18 meters for 40 minutes is allowed, but we decided to limit ourselves to 20 min at 12 meters
which would put us in W pressure group

In the event, we didn't have enough air for a 50 min dive including some time at 27 meters, and we came up from the first dive at 40 minutes, or 43 including the safety stop at 5 meters. But since we didn't have a wheel with us and couldn't recalculate, we went with the conservative measure and used that to calculate how long we could stay down on our next dive. If we had a 2 hour surface interval and limited our next dive to 16 meters we would have 59 min dive time. As it turned out we went down with only 1:45 min surface interval which I realized as we were descending on the second dive. But we were carrying tables with us and were able to recalculate as we descended that after surfacing from a first dive as W divers, with a 1:45 min surface interval, we would be ok at 16 meters with 55 min dive time.

I'm really cheeved at PADI for discontinuing production of the wheel, a remarkably versatile instrument for such situations. The new electronic planner can't be taken underwater so it's impossible for beginners to recalculate on the fly underwater unless they are carrying computers, in which case no recalculations necessary. But there is great value I think in knowing how close you are to DCS, and in being able to visualize that, whether you have a computer or not. Of course my computer was mostly showing 99 minutes of no-deco time on these dives, but if you're diving tables, then an electronic dive planner that can't be taken with you in the water is a really poor replacement for tables and wheels.

So much for the technicalities of our diving. The dives themselves were not great but were pleasant and replete with fish. On the first dive at Ras Sarkan we saw a large cow-tail ray trying to hide out in the sand. The others on the boat saw turtles. On the second dive at Lima Rock we saw not much more than a moray eel plus the other fish you normally see there, triggers, batfish, snappers, trevali, etc. Vis wasn't great, the water was cool, but with 5 mm wetsuits we were fine. In was much colder up on the boat.

Seas were calm but skies were overcast. That night it rained, and it was drizzling in the morning so the gear we cleaned and left out to dry stayed wet. I had an email from Freestyle telling me they had cancelled their Inchcape trip for Saturday due to expected bad weather. We assumed the UAE coast guard had restricted boating. The Omanis don't impose such controls for Musandam but Nomad weren't going out either, except maybe to the caves, so Luke and I decided to make the best of a less than perfect situation and get home and do things we needed to get done back in the real world. We re-booked our dives for the following weekend and headed back to Abu Dhabi.

To be continued (next week) ...

Certified Tim and Laura Charge with Nomad Ocean Adventure December 8 thru 10, 2011

2011-12-11T08:21:00.000-08:00

My logged dives #1101-1104

We had another lovely weekend in the company of our friends at Nomad Ocean Adventure this weekend. The occasion was the training of Laura and Tim Charge, recommended to me by Graham Mullen through the grapevine at the British Embassy. Laura and Tim agreed to do the elearning online and meet me at NOA on Thursday. Bobbi and I managed to get there by around 7:30 pm even though I had to go back to town and pick up my passport (new 3-year UAE visa!) and Bobbi who was able to get off work before 4 pm. We had to leave Nicki behind though, we would have arrived in Dibba too late for pool training, but she came up with Andy the next morning.

Laura and Tim had completed their test and form filling by the time I got there, so we were able to get confined water dive #1 done in the NOA pool Thu evening, before sitting down to a delicious meal of Mauritian cuisine. A winter chill has touched the evenings and mornings in the UAE and we had to get up at 7 am to do modules 2 and 3 in the icy pool, so we were tired before getting down to the harbor and motoring out to the dive sites mid-Musandam.

December 9 we went to Lima Rock and Ras Lima with Theo in charge. Vis was poor in both places. At Lima Rock we got our team into the water for what was actually my students' second time ever on Scuba since they had done a discover scuba course previously in Malaysia. Still they were well aware of their limitations. Plus to counter the cold 17 degrees in the pool and 24 degrees in the ocean, Laura and Bobbi and I all had 5 mm wetsuits which are like balloons in shallow depth, requiring more than the usual degree of buoyancy control, so the new divers were going up and down between our max depth at 16 meters and the surface whenever I led the dive shallow. Still we saw batfish being cleaned by blue wrasse, a copious variety of trigger fish, morays, and many more of the usual fish suspects. It was not an exciting dive for Bobbi and Nicki and I but Laura and Tim seemed to enjoy it. Their air lasted not bad for new divers, around 42 minutes, and when I took them up to the boat, Bobbi and Nicki waited for me below, since we three still had 100 bar. As I was delivering my student divers back onto the boat at the surface Theo warned me about a down current to the west of Lima Rock, the direction we were headed, and when I submerged I found Nicki and Bobbi not below me where I had left them but at the edge of my vis in that westerly direction. I was able to call them over and get them headed back to the east, the way we had come. Thus we dived another quarter hour without incident, apart from Nicki finding a nudibranch on a rock that I wouldn't have seen had I looked straight at it for 5 min, but she's good at spotting small stuff in busy backgrounds. Back on the surface, we heard tales of divers who had been swept deep by that swift westward down current, so lucky we turned back.

We motored over to Ras Lima for the surface interval and had lunch moving in and out of sunshine as the boat drifted into the shadow of the headland, and divers complained of cold and the boatmen moved out into the sun again. We did our dive from where we were on the headland. Bobbi and Nicki went on together and I took Laura and Tim to do some surface interval skills but conditions weren't right, there were stingers in the water, and we didn't accomplish them at the beginning of the dive. So we went underwater and did the dive #2 skill set, and then dived in shadow and through algae bloom in kind of dreary conditions, limiting ourselves to 14 meters. We had another 45 minute dive, relaxing, and with much better buoyancy control from Tim and Laura. When we surfaced the boat was nowhere to be seen. Conditions were better though, so we completed our surface skills there.

The boat ride home was cold so when we arrived back at our accommodation we just wanted hot showers and cold drinks, and then another great meal at NOA. There was a french group there who had been diving all week from Chris's place, showing slides each evening of what they had seen that day, and today one of them had promised photos of a 'petit poisson' which turned out to be a whale shark that just two of them had seen and photographed that day at Octopus Rock (not a good place to take beginners unfortunately).

The next morning we started again at 7 am, a lie in for Bobbi and I these days, with Laura and Tim doing much better in the pool than previously, completing the last two modules well before 10 am. An hour and a half later (after Pascal showed us where they hide the espresso machine at NOA) we were motoring off toward Lima Rock on an exceptionally lovely morning. Aliona was in charge of the diving for the day. The sea was calm and glassy, and we could see Lima Rock from just out of Dibba, the sky was so clear. Usually it's too hazy to see it before we reach Fishhead Rock.

We weren't actually going to Lima Rock through. We had mostly students and novices on board so we agreed to start in the protected bay on Ras Morovi. Aliona was proposing to lead the advanced divers out to a place where barracudas are almost always seen. I didn't know that spot and offered to take my students there by following Aliona as far as 18 meters. Most of the divers wanted to do something similar so they all went in the water together. Nicki and Bobb were in that group but delayed descent waiting for Tim and Laura and I, who were last in the water. When we were in position at the surface they had all gone down and we were set to follow, but we had adjusted weights in the pool that morning and despite best guesses for needs for an ocean dive. Laura was underweighted, and since the boat was right there and we hadn't descended yet, I surfaced and got 4 more kilos from the boat, stuck 3 in my pocket weight belt, and gave one to Laura, which made her descend perfaectly, but by then the divers had all gone. So we set out on our own dive.

It was a nice one and the best of the course. The coral at that spot is lovely, green whips, cabbage coral, purple soft corals, green tree coral, and coral boulders, all swarming with fish, triggers, big pufferes, surgeon tangs. I led into the sand looking for rays but turned back when we reached 18 meters. We continued a very pleasant dive, rounding the far underwater mountain, heading back to the north, and encountered Nicki, Bobbi, and Pascal, who were chasing a moses sole (flounder). I noticed then that my divers had gone down to nearly 50 bar, so I conducted them up the reef into the cabbage coral patch, sometimes a good place to see turtles. They controlled buoyancy sufficiently to make a safety stop there, and then I had them ascend on alternate air source. Their dive time was 31 minutes, 34 with the safety stop.

I still had 100 bar so I went back down to look for Bobbi and Nicki. On this foray I saw a turtle, and after I'd caught up with Nicki and Pascall, I spotted a scorpion fish hidden in the coral. Pascal photographed it and we all got a very close look..

Back on the boat, we had lunch against a setting of karst rocks rising from placid water, skies of blue, and warm sunshine to counter the chilly breezes. Winters in UAE can be quite pleasant.

We planned a last dive at Ras Sanut (Wonderwall) utilizing Nicki as divemaster. Nicki would go in first with her reel and set me up a line for CESA. Bobbi joined her at the surface and the students and I followed. I left Tim to do cramp removal, and weight and BCD replacement at the surface with Nicki while I took Laura down for her CESA. She was having ear problems and breathed on the ascent as often it happens that students need to repeat the exercise. She didn't want to do it right away because she seemed slightly overweighted. She was on her third BCD from NOA. All of them leaked and this one didn't support her properly at the surface, which contributed to her distress. So she gave her weight belt to Nicki to remove a weight while I took Tim down.

It wasn't that nice a dive actually. The algae was blocking out most of the light and there wasn't anything interesting to see apart from a moray eel. My students completed all their skills for dive number 4, Laura led us in a compass heading over the sand and back, and we carried on for half an hour underwater before people got cold and tired. When we surfaced we found we were last on the boat, so it was time to motor home to port, and from there drive 4 hours to reach our flat in Abu Dhabi, have dinner, and get 5 hours of solid sleep before crawling out of bed at 5 in the morning and head for work.

Andaman Islands via DiveIndia from Havelock, November 5-10, 2011

2011-11-11T15:01:00.000-08:00

My logged dives #1088-1100

Eid Al Adha was fast approaching. Nicki was going to the Andaman Islands http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andaman_Islands and had booked her trip long ago and sent Bobbi and I her details, but there was nagging uncertainty over whether and when I'd be employed (interview Sept 11), and once employed (not until Oct 16, at which time I needed to apply for a UAE visa sponsored by HCT, my new employer), when my vacation would be, and whether we'd have passports back in time to travel at that time. As that seemed increasingly unlikely before the Eid, our passports were simply returned to us without UAE visas, and some Eid trip was now required for us to renew our tourist visas to UAE. We were told to present our passports for residence visas after the holiday and it was touch and go then whether the Indian embassy could issue their visas in time for us to go there.

Meanwhile we had booked flights and committed money to the trip in the form of a non-refundable down payment to DiveIndia, the outfit that would organize our diving http://www.islandvinnie.com/. It was incredibly reasonable, and we could probably have even done it cheaper, but Nicki had organized a package for about $100 a night per person, and this included airport to airport transfers, which meant we got ourselves by plane to Port Blair, and the dive center would pick us up there and get us to the port for the 2 hour ferry ride to Havelock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havelock_Island, then pick us up there and take us the few km to the resort, and reverse the process in a week's time. Plus they would take us on two dives each day we were there, plus a night dive, plus let us eat three meals a day at will from the incredibly varied menu at their island-reknowned Half Moon Cafe, plus sleep on a nice double bed in a luxury tent with attached bath and electrical lights and extension cords. What more could you want? (short of Internet - there were some satellite dish possibilities just off the beach we were on, but they cost 5 rupees a minute, almost $10 an hour; I ended up checking my mail, occasionally, at the "Activity Center" store in town over a dialup for 2 rupees a minute)

We arrived at this laid back place after an all-night flight and a 2-hour ferry ride on the evening of Nov 4 and were shown our accommodation, a very comfortable tent with mosquito netted windows and door, plus a net for the bed which we never needed. With the fan there it made a pleasant place to sleep, open through window flaps to the night breezes out of doors. Temperatures there were ideal. We could wear tee shirts day and night, maybe long sleeves at sundown when the mosquitoes might nip, though they were never a nuisance. Even the water temperatures were a pleasant 28-29 degrees Celsius. I wore a 3 mm suit when diving but others wore less. No one complained of cold (and diving related, I discovered that I was fine with 3 kg weight wearing nothing but my 3 mm wetsuit).

One of the great perks of Vinnie's Cabanas was the open air Half Moon Cafe there. Divers on the package could have three meals a day of whatever they liked from the menu. There were traveler's, American and Indian breakfasts. My companions favored the lemon and honey or Nutella pancakes, easily carried onto a dive boat in case of hurry, but I settled after a while on just a bowl of fruit, since there were always samosas on the dive boat for after the first dive. The boat would get back from the morning's dives around 2 pm and there was nothing to do then but shower and order lunch. The choices were phenomenal: succulent curries and tikkas of fish or chicken, kabobs in various marinades, veggie dishes to die for like capsicum in roasted eggplant, aubergine and yogurt salad. We ordered lots of foods we'd never heard of just to try them, and we were never disappointed. We munched it down with garlic nan or coriander parota, washed down with fresh lemon or fruit juice with ginger and honey. Vinnie's was unlicensed (served no alchohol), which was probably a good thing. The tables outside under the palms seemed appealing at first until we noticed that coconuts would sometimes land with a thud nearby, and also the flies were considerably diminished when we stuck to the tables indoors.

This would carry us through to almost sundown, which came early in the islands, around 5 pm. By that time we might have made our way to a beach, or into town to the friendly, active market, or to a bar for sundowners. Nicki, Andy, and Bobbi and I would generally hang out socially till we were bloated on frothy liquids and could think of nothing better to do than go back to the Half Moon Cafe where we could order dishes we hadn't tried yet from the menu, of something one of us had tried earlier that day and swore to the others it was not to be missed. We were never actually hungry before dinner but we ate as connoisseurs and because it was 'included' and always with an eye on the clock, so we could be early to bed, because mornings started early.

Vinnie's compound was dead quiet at night until things would get started at 6 a.m., maybe a dog bark, or tanks banging at the dive center. This was not a place for late sleepers, but perfect for divers! We'd get up eventually and go order breakfast, then go to the dive center to organize our kit. It was always organized for us. They took better care of our gear than we did! Our BCDs and regs always ended up on tanks already on the boat and at around 7:30 we'd just carry our other stuff out to the boats wallowing off the sandy beach, climb aboard, and be transported through the channels to wherever we were diving that day. The islands are forested with low hills, so the trips were always scenic.

There is a downside to diving anywhere this day and age. Reefs worldwide are deteriorating. The Andamans is not exempt. Probably the best days of diving here have passed already. The dive guides speak of the old days when mantas were seen on every dive and the coral was colorful everywhere, before tsunamis and corals bleaching, so that the number of viable sites has diminished to just a handful within an hour or two of Havelock. It's that way around the world. If you can find a site with thriving corals and lots of sharks, the surest sign of a healthy reef, go there. Fast. (And leave a comment about it in my blog please, so we can go there too :-)

This is not to say we were disappointed. November 5, 2011, our first day of diving, was a mind boggler. We arrived on a day of clear vis and were taken to one of the best sites, Dixon Pinnacle. Dixon, Jackson, and Johnny are three dive leaders who pioneered the modern era of diving here and whose names are attached to three of the best dive site in the area. They all worked for DiveIndia, and Johnny Poayasay was to be our dive leader throughout our stay.

The routine was the same for almost every dive. We rolled off the water from the local sampan-style boat with a solid wood prow, essential for protection from scrapes on shallow reefs. We grabbed the tag line to keep from being shot downcurrent and hauled ourselves to the mooring line. Usually, there were mooring lines with plastic water bottles tied to them to make them visible. The islands are on a campaign against plastic water bottles, mainly encouraging their recycling through being refilled with filtered water, but this was an obviously appropriate use for them. Once we were all in the vicinity of the line, we started our descent, pulling ourselves down a rope sloped 30 degrees in the prevailing currents, and toward the bottom the current became less pronounced below 18-20 meters, and we finned toward the reef, whose sand bottom was usually between 25 and 30 meters.

Dixon Pinnacle was beautiful in the clear visibility, reminiscent of Egypt or diving in the Caribbean in the 1970s. The coral was colorful and varied, and the fish life abundant. Schools of fish were all about, and little mantis shrimps and nudibranchs and other small creatures could be found in the rocky substrate. Tiny crabs were living in the anemones, much less obvious than the clownfish always present there. Cleaner shrimp and tiny wrasse flitted about the mouths of moray eels. There were all kinds of trigger fish there, blue ones, fanciful clown triggers, and the hulking titans. On our second dive there, we saw a pair of eagle rays and in the same tableau, our first glimpse of napoleon humphead wrasse, which we saw on almost every dive in the area thereafter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphead_wrasse.

We didn't mind at all doing a second dive on that spot. The top of the reef was at about 16 meters but the real show, the thing that made this such an eye-opening introduction to Andaman diving, was in the open water between the reef heads. Here we could swim through huge schools of barracuda and then make our way over to clouds of batfish. Between the large relatively stably drifting schools, dog tooth tunas and giant trevally roamed. The trevally were particularly interesting, large, easily a meter long, dozens of them, swimming right up to us. In clear water, where we could see the different schools of fish as part of a larger complexity, this was the most fascinating part of the dive. And these fish were present midwater on almost all our dives near Havelock, which contributed to making this always an interesting place to dive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_trevally

We revisited Dixon a few days later and found a completely different scene. By now a red tide had drifted through obscuring the large schools, if they were still there. The current kept us closer to the reef and allowed us only north – south compass swims to find the bommies. On the second dive we saw a large green turtle at the top of the reef, and a number of humphead wrasse, but perhaps we'd seen too many pelagics by then to fully appreciate them our second time. So Dixon turned out to be almost our best but also our most disappointing dive of the trip.

After coming up from our second dive we settled in for the long ride home. Sometimes there was a fine spray that would blow in off the bow and disturb our sleep but normally the trip back took over an hour and we four would usually use the time for napping. Even our valiant dive guide Johnny would sometimes succumb to the call.

We would then collect our kit in the burlap bags they gave us and wade in from the boat up the beach and wash it in the fresh water barrels, hang it out to dry, and then forget about it till next day when we would find our kit all dried and back in its bag. The staff there had remarkable memories of who belonged to what.

The restaurant was a stone's throw from the dive-shop area and it was best to walk over there and order before making the equally short walk to our lanais, unzip the mosquito flap, and wash the salt off in the shower mandi in the back. Then it was back to the restaurant, refreshed and chuffed from the morning dive, to join Andy and Nicki for a prolonged lunch, a journey of culinary fantasy through the various provinces of India, with succulent chicken and fish tandooris and kabobs, which would again take us almost to sundown, and the cycle repeated itself day after day for a week. Not all that stressful, really.

On November 6, our diving day two, the cycle repeated itself more or less, getting up at 6:30 to double-check our gear and have breakfast from 7 a.m., with 7:30 departure in the slow boat with blue canvas shade for tag line descent into two dives on Johnny Gorge, not all that different from Dixon, except that the coral was not as colorful and there was a red mist obscuring the shapes that were just on the edge of where we could see that Johnny knew there were sharks. I was a bit disappointed after the first dive when I only saw a couple of these ghost shapes, but I was first down on the second dive, the visibility had improved, and as I hauled down level with the top of the reef I saw a white-tip move over it and off to one side. I tried to follow where it had gone and somehow missed that it had returned and was passing just beneath me, but I soon got the picture when my dive buddies were all pointing at it, just below me and clearly visible.

We saw more white-tips there. Johnny was able to spot sharks quite well, even when they were obscure slivers of silhouettes resting on the bottom as seen from 15 meters above them. There was much to see on these dives on the reef and midwater, the big and small animals that were characteristic of the area. I managed to find where DiveIndia and others have posted some videos of some of their dive sites on YouTube; e.g. this one:

The following day, November 7, was again quite remarkable. We did our first dive on Jackson Reef , a similar spot to the others, but also home to dozens of blue spotted rays http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluespotted_stingray. I've seen this kind often before, they are not the most attractive of rays, but they were a great surprise in just their sheer numbers. Often we would be looking at one when another nearer one would bolt because we were swimming over it unawares. The visibility here was again not bad, and we finished the dive in the company of couple of large humpheads before ascending slowly amid the trevally and barracuda.

We moved the boat to the second dive site of the day, called Broken Ridge. Today the sea was like glass and we could see there were dolphins in the area. Nicki decided to enter the water to snorkel down her surface interval, and when Johnny entered, Bobbi and I joined him. The water temperatures were comfortably tepid, so snorkeling there was delightfully pleasant. We kept moving toward the dolphins, and then suddenly they were swimming below us, 4 of them, moving swiftly side by side. We kept above them and they didn't seem to mind us until they wanted to surface, and then they looked at us in some confusion, as they started their ascent, noticed us, and then swam off together looking for an escape to somewhere we weren't.

That was exciting but it got better as we began our dive. Coming down the rope we saw they were still there. One went upright on its tail and pirouetted in midwater. Another danced nearer the surface and checked us out in the depths below in reverse of the position we'd all been in when it was we observing from the surface. And then they disappeared and let us get on with out dive, which proceeded pretty much like the others, a litany of creatures large and small, then ascend, ride home, long lunch, and enjoying some cold ones before yet another fine meal at the Half Moon Cafe, the place where when you die that's where you want to spend eternity in heaven.

The next day, November 8, was the day of our return to Dixon reef, which we found less attractive than on our first day. But our evening routine was broken after lunch with a night dive. We were having lunch from around 2 to 4, and the night dive was a perfectly timed 4:30, and just steps away to the dive center to get our gear, not quite dry from morning, then back out on the boat and moving toward the Wall just off the ferry harbor as the sunset to the west was turning the clouds orange and purple.

The night dive was relatively devoid of fish life, except when we came on sleeping puffers, a large scorpion fish that refused to acknowledge our lights, and at one point, a sleeping Napoleon wrasse lodged in a rocky niche. But the macro life was thriving there. When I shined my light in rocks I might see glowing eyes and find the body behind, and there were lots of tiny shrimp, and miniature crabs in the coral fans, and little legs crawling on coral stems, all somehow more evident when attention is focused on a light beam. Also, it was easier in lamplight to see the tiny seahorse faces on the pipefish, the size and thickness of a needle. We had seen pipefish already on our dives, as they freeze in position and then move abruptly, so it's hard to get close enough to make out their features. One of the more interesting finds was a pair of dimsum nudibranchs that Nicki somehow distinguished from other blobs on the reef. They were orange and glutenous, looking almost exactly like a pair of dimsums with the feather-like processes characteristic of nudibranchs.

On November 9, our next to last day diving, we were grouped with other divers we had met at their table at the restaurant and put on a speedboat for sites that would have taken 2 hours in the putt putt local boats. Our first dive was on White House Rock, a small table rising up from the ocean floor. Our group I suppose was considered the most experienced, or at least the most efficient, and we were pretty much ready to jump when we arrived at the spot and were given permission to enter the water first. So it proceeded pretty much like all our other dives, the 4 of us pulling down a mooring line against a current, all the usual fish making the reef interesting, but vis not ideal, with haze starting at around 20 meters, plus a cool thermocline sapping our enthusiasm for diving deeper, so we essentially circled the rock. Johnny called our attention to the black corals there, which ironically appeared as white feathers reaching out from the rock. There were also some nice gorgonion corals here, and some of the corals were crawling with purple worms with crowned heads which they waved in the current whenever they lifted them off the rock.

We found 2 octopuses on this dive. The first had gone in a hole when I got to him. I shined my light in on him to find two eyes or blowholes blinking back at me from a body crimson in the light. We thought this one would stay where he was for a while so we left him, but we found the second one sitting exposed against a rock, looking like a grey blob that shimmered translucent whenever we hovered too near. Octopuses are amazing creatures. They can look like silly putty but suddenly stretch and look like an entirely different animal when they decide to move, as this one did, to reach the safety of a rock, where again, he took on a different form still while Nicki poked her camera at him, and at one point, she says, he reached out and poked back.

Having a light is handy. When we saw white antenae protruding from under a rock I was able to shine my light in and find not one but three huge crayfish hiding there, and illuminate them as they tried to crowd deeper in their hole.

The second dive on the nearby Inchkett Wreck was even more interesting for all of the small animals that inhabited it. This was a Japanese freighter that had come to grief and strewn a cargo of coal over the surrounding seabed. Johnny said that it had been upright before the tsunami but now it was lying on its side, more shattered than before. Still it was a substantial pile of rubble that started with a hunk of metal just meters from where we went in off the boat. Hanging on the mooring line, on snorkel preparing to descend, I saw a pair of white antennae protruding from the shallow top of the wreck, and on descent examined further to find these attached to a blue crayfish ensconced in a chink in the encrusted metal.

Exploring the superstructure, we circled the wreck in the sand and found an interesting crocodile fish there. There were tableaux of lion fish in the metal, and again using my light in the dark places, I found a huge hulking fish under the stern hull, at least a meter long and half as bulky. We couldn't identify it but it had a jutting lower jaw with prominent teeth, and it seemed dark purple in my torch beam. There were various nudibranchs and one niche was hopping with at least 3 different types of crustaceans: small grasshopper shrimp, a more elegant leggy daddy longlegs one, and some of the finely picturesque red and white striped crabs. A salient feature of this wreck were its propellers, impressive indications of what must have been the size of the ship itself to require that sized propeller.

Back aboard the boat a couple of the ladies were talking about how they had seen a manta, or maybe it was a devil ray, they weren't sure. The dive guides were saying that mantas were never found there, and if you're not sure, it's not a manta, then. You have to see one to understand that.

November 10, 2011, our last day of diving, dawned cool and overcast. We had our breakfast and set out under grey skies, just the four of us again on one boat: Nicki, Andy, Bobbi, and I with Johnny our gentle dive guide. We were heading for Johnny's Gorge where we'd seen sharks on a previous dive, and then planning to move over to Broken Ridge where we'd seen dolphins a few days back. We were expecting nothing special, though each day so far had presented something new. Johnny had joked earlier that if you want to see something badly you don't see that, but you see something else. There was an invertebrate on the fish charts called “boring clam” and we decided that was a good choice for something we should ask to be shown, rather than articulate what we really wanted to see, which every diver who comes to Andaman wants to see, but few do.

By then it was looking like we were going to depart there without seeing manta. We were told this wasn't the season for them. There were two months of the year where they could be seen on almost every dive, we were told, but I'm sure if we came back then, we would be told, well, sometimes they are here at this time, but not this year. It's kind of like predicting whalesharks in Oman.

I realized as we were kitting up that my computer and small dive light were back in Havelock on my bed where I had stupidly left them, so Bobbi and I agreed I should stay above her and dive on her computer. It wasn't a kosher plan, but Johnny always entered the water first and waited for us, and he didn't notice I was diving without my computer. It wasn't a big deal, but these were taxing dives, 24 meters deep minimum, and with current almost always present.

The reef was beautiful as we descended on it. Vis was almost clear, maybe 25 meters before turning into a milky haze. We descended near a school of barracuda and pulled ourselves along to near the bottom of the line, Bobbi and I diving as a team, leaving the line at about 18 meters, approaching the reef at the level of its top. Johnny wanted us to descend out of the current and in the sand near a large bommie we saw a big marble ray covered in sand. Johnny kicked current its way till it moved and shook the sand free, and settled into an alcove. Nicki took lots of pictures but Bobbi and I, at Johnny's suggestion, started pulling ourselves over coral towards to the top of the reef. This gave us a view of the other side, a classic blue water reef terrain of boulders full of tropical fish and coral. We knew that anything could be here. Johnny started pointing excitedly at sharks that only he could see, until finally we saw one sleeping in the sand. There was also a huge cod / grouper, that Johnny pointed at, causing us to think he'd spotted something much more exotic. Nearing deco, we rose a bit off the coral bed finning against the current in free water at about 16 meters. This was taxing, and 37 minutes into the dive Andy was at 50 and was at around 70. I was uncomfortable without my computer unable to calibrate my own depth and air consumption against remaining deco time. Johnny set us into a drift and of course we drifted right onto the line and headed up it, thanks to Johnny's excellent guidance.

The DiveIndia speed boat we'd been on the day before was a little ahead of our slow sampan and the boat was just bringing divers up from their first dive on Broken Ridge, our second planned dive of the day. They had dived in two groups and one group had just seen a manta and three sharks. They were preparing to do a second dive on that spot, but we were due to enter the water first as we were already a half hour into our surface interval. Our group didn't mess around with kitting up. Bobbi and I were in the water and on the anchor line before the 1 hour was up and when Nicki and Andy looked to be ready Johnny sent us down the line to wait for them at 5 meters. There was no mooring line and the boats had anchored separately just off the reef, pulling hard on a strong current so that we descended over coral splotches only to come on the reef rising up ahead of us as we pulled on the line to overcome the current.

Once we were near the coral reef and could hide behind it the current slackened at depth and we were able to fin ourselves over the tabletop reef. It was small, about the size of a couple of football pitches side by side, and dropped away on all sides to the sand a few meters below. We were skimming the top of it to minimize current impact when we saw what looked like an airplane approaching out of clouds, clearly a large manta. It turned and flapped its wings, easily three meters across, and headed away from us. We tried to follow but it easily escaped us in the milk-mist. So we slowed up and looked for it wherever it might have gone. Since I was calibrating my deco on Bobbi's computer I elected to rise above her to about 16 meters where the water was clearer and where I could get a better overview of the reef on all sides. Within minutes I saw it approach at my level, coming directly at me. I don't carry a camera but I like to describe what I see. It's mouth was wide open, I was staring down it, and the flaps at either side of its jaws were still. Sometimes mantas like to curl those around This one came straight at me but when it realized I was in the way it changed course to move around me, so it slipped off to the side, where I could see it was almost solid white on top. Often there is dark coloring there, though they are white on the bottom. I exhaled to descend slightly and saw its gill slits there as it passed away above me now. We all got a great view of him, but he didn't linger long and never returned. This video, found on YouTube, gives you an idea of what seeing a manta is like in the places we were diving:

Soon another diver diving alone with a divemaster from another company descended and made their way around the rock, nothing much there. And as we ascended the large group from the other DiveIndia boat were descending but they didn't see it again either, on that dive.

Meanwhile we burned out air bobbing about with the napoleon wrasse there, and admiring the barracuda and trevally and whatnot midwater, as we burned off our air feeling chuffed we had seen all we had come to see in the Anamans. A manta! And what luck, on our last dive, and such a clear encounter. I hope Nicki posts photos I can borrow for my blog.

In a what-next gesture I wrote on my slate and showed it to Johnny, “Boring clam”? Johnny laughed through his regulator, as wed been kidding him about showing us boring clams to avoid articulating what we really wanted him to show us, a manta. But on the trip back, as we were coming into Havelock harbor for our last time, he pointed out the boring clams in the reef we were passing over. They are actually interesting, as they bore into the coral and become essentially a blue mouth sucking up nutrients at the same level as the coral. Not much was boring on this dive trip, not even the boring clams.

DiveIndia's descriptions of their dive sites:
http://www.diveindia.com/havelock/sites_1.html

Certified Ed Lewsey in PADI O/W diving at Freestyle in Dibba, October 21-22, 2011

2011-10-29T07:27:00.000-07:00

My logged dives #1084-1087

This weekend I had the pleasure of certifying someone who not only already knew how to dive, but was fit enough to keep up with me :-) Ed had done a discover scuba diving course three years ago on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and went on to do five dives with an instructor there. He called me up early in the week and was so keen to start the course that he did the elearning in the week before the weekend and caught a cab to the airport in time for Bobbi and I to pick him up at 7 a.m. there and take him over to Dibba. Bobbi and I met him there because we were living near the airport in temporary accommodation in the new city rising from the sand there called Khalifa A.

It's always nice to see our old friends at Freestyle Divers. Andy and his team are accommodating of my small groups. This weekend it was me diving with Ed on the course, and Bobbi diving with Vaughn, an assistant instructor who is new in town and got in touch with us through Froglegs Scuba Club, and was tagging on for a weekend of diving. Coincidentally Vaughn was getting a visa put in his passport, as were Bobbi and I for my new job with HCT / CERT / Naval College, so none of us had passports that would give us the option to cross a border to dive anywhere in Oman, Damaniyites or Musandam, that weekend.

Ed didn't seem to mind. We were at Freestyle and kitting up before 10 a.m. since from the airport it takes less than 3 hours to reach Dibba. There was a brisk breeze blowing from the mountains, causing mild chop between the shore and Dibba Rock, but the water was relatively clear. I reminded Ed how to assemble his gear and don it and we traipsed down to the seashore for a quick run through the module 1 skills, which had to be completed before we could go for a dive at noon.

The vis wasn't bad, and water temperatures were ideal, probably about 29 degrees C, refreshingly cooling for me in my .5 mm lycra. The outside temperatures were balmy, the only discomfort was the wind chill when exiting the water or walking around wet. Other than that the sun brushed us mildly, but was not intense. It's that time of year in the UAE when it's great to be outdoors and diving, a short-lived period before winter sets in and diving gets chlly again.

We were dropped at the acquarium mooring, a lovely place to begin a dive, teeming with snappers and golden treveli and puffers and parrots and rainbow wrasse. I led us the usual route along the acquarium and then to the west where the clacking of the animals living in the coral could be heard loudly. Bobbi and Vaughn saw a shark there but Ed and I were ahead and missed it. Bobbi said later she saw cuttlefish and flounder later in the dive, but meanwhile we as a group went to the southern point of the L shaped reef but I couldn't find the way to the east out the L. It petered out on me and I reversed but again couldn't really identify the reef, so I turned north and ended up on compass over sand bottom. I was lost and decided if I headed north I would cross the reef, but that didn't happen, we started getting to around 10 meters, which was too deep, and I noticed Ed and I had lost Bobbi and Vaughn. So the two of us continued and when we got to 11 meters I realized I was on the west side of the reef and I should go east to find it. East didn't help much, it seemed to be getting deeper, could I have gone past the island on the seaward back side? By now the sand seemed to be sloping slightly to the south so I headed that way and happily ended up back in the acquarium and familiar territory, where we found a big crayfish hiding under a rock.

Ed and I had been diving for 45 minutes now but Ed's air supply was holding out so I led back past the beautiful fishes and back to the reef as at the start of the dive. We passed over the reef and sort of hung out there. I led to the shoulder, what I now call Shark Shoulder, because that's where this weekend we would go to see sharks. We hadn't seen all that much this dive, I had got us lost, it was Ed's first dive in a while and he didn't seem to mind, but we were coming up on 58 min of dive time with not much to show for our house reef. At 59 minutes, we needed to go up. And that's when the shark appeared, coming in over the reef pretty much at our fin tips where we hovered, and flashing off to the right just as the 60 ticked over on my computer, and I signalled up. Ed was chuffed.

Between dives, Ed and I did the next two pool modules. They went smoothly with him. We went in off the beach where he took his mask off and breathed for a minute in no time, and we decided to go up to the pool for module 3 for fresh water and a look at the young buff Russian girls in their thong bikinies. The only problem was it was almost 3 pm.and we'd have to hurry so as not to hold up the last dive of the day. I've had a lot of experience with Freestyle and it almost never happens that a 3 pm dive leaves any earlier than 3:30, and Ed was speeding through the pool work. All went according to plan. Ed completed the pool training in 15 minutes, and with over 170 bar in our tanks we were back at the Freestyle beach. The time was precisely 3:19. I know because that was the time on my watch as I looked over the top of it at the Freestyle boat which was at that moment pulling away from its mooring right off the beach with a boat-load of divers on board.

They could have cut the engines and taken us aboard. We were fully kitted, buddy checked, and still wet from the pool, ready to hop aboard. Later I heard from those on board that the boat was full (uh, we'd booked the dive), and from another perspective, there was an instructor on board who thought a dive scheduled for 3 pm should depart at 3 pm and according to that reasoning, we'd missed it. Whatever, the boat left without us. So we decided to just swim out to the rock.

The wind was the main problem, blasting in from the west, so we had to angle slightly on our northerly heading so as to keep moving toward the left shoulder of the island. Other than that, there was not much current, and Ed managed to get in a 300 meter plus plus (about half a km actually) surface swim with mask and fins, and also a surface compass heading, albeit somewhat more extreme than we usually have beginning divers do.

The dive itself was not all that great. The wind had churned the waters and a silt had moved in, clouding vis a bit. We managed to find one of the raspberry coral reefs to drop in on but there were no big animals there. We worked our way east and then north along the reef where the only large animal mid-water was a lone cuttlefish on a mission (to find another, perhaps) beelining over the reef. Still the schools of snappers and treveli in the acquarium were captivating, and there we reversed to head south and west back over the L shaped reef. We made our way west until we found the spot of raspberry renewing itself and hovered there observing the small fishes and hoping for something larger. When our air dipped below 100 bar, and 50 min into the dive, I signalled a southern heading back over the sand. This should have got us home but the current was pushiing to west and we angled past Freestyle so that after a long underwater swim we ended up in the bay of the palace overlooking the sea. We surfaced on alternate air source as called for in PADI o/w dive #2, and the hardest part of the dive was finning against the current to get us back to Freestyle divers. People there had been watching for us. They had seen us miss the boat, all kitted and ready to go, and I had mentioned to Bobbi that if that happened we would shore dive. They hadn't expected us to swim all the way out to the island though. Ed was pleased not only with the accomplishment but that he had saved 100 dirhams on the shore dive. The price of that trip has doubled in the ten years we've been dving this spot.

Ed and I weren't finished yet though. We went in the pool for his last two pool modules and then we cleaned out kit and stocked up on beverages from the off license. We returned to Dibba and foraged for food at Lulu's, and then settled into our accommodation at the Seaside for the night. Despite a morning prayer call and sermon from the mosque outside our window, Bobbi and I got some blessed sleep, a break in our routine of up by 5 each weekday morning on account of my new job. In the morning we were back at Freestyle to knock off the rest of Ed's dive course.

Conditions in the morning were lovely. The wind had died down a little and water visibility was restored. Ed and I were looking forward to a great day diving. We had decided to start off with a controlled emergency swimming ascent, which takes a little time, so Bobbi and Vaughn decided to go off on their own. Andy moored the boat on the buoy nearest and to the east of Dibba Rock, so our CESA was performed in the aquarium. Ed wanted to try diving the back side of the island but first we wanted to check out the raspberry reef at the north shoulder of the L. I'm starting to call this "Shark Shoulder" because this is where we've been seeing those creatures most consistently. We were not disappointed on this dive. We were practicing hovering in the spot where they usually appear when two appeared, swam off, and then reappeared. It's nice to see two sharks together. We waited neutrally buoyant for them to return but when they didn't we headed back toward the aquarium. Here a third shark came into view, swimming right across our bow as they often do.

We spent the rest of the dive on the back side of the island without seeing much of anything. Ed was now just one dive short of certification. On this last dive the boat discharged its divers just west of the reef on one of the moorings midway down the L. The four of us, Bobbi her buddy Vaughn diving with Ed and I moved in over the ruins of the once thriving reef. I was ahead and saw a large, at least two meter long, Spanish mackeral cruising over the reef. I think the others missed it. That's pretty much all I remember about that dive, except that we went to the back side of the island, and all divers performed well. Ed was enjoying himself at the end of the dive, which we called to a halt as our computers ticked into 60 minutes.

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

2011-10-08T21:14:00.000-07:00

My logged dives #1082-1083

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Froglegs Scuba Club participates in EDA - ADGAS’ Abu Dhabi Islands Clean Up Saturday September 17

2011-09-17T07:12:00.000-07:00

Vance's logged dive #1081

Froglegs participated in ADGAS’ Abu Dhabi Islands Clean Up Campaign on Saturday 17th September 2011. We joined EDA and Al Mahara Dive Center in their dive against debris in the waters around Abu Dhabi International Marine Sports Club marina area and Lulu Island.

This was the froglegs team: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FrogLegsScubaClub/:

Top cover: Anna Elwood

Divemaster: Nicki Blower

Buddy teams:

Instructor: Vance Stevens

Rescue: Bobbi Stevens

Advanced: Roger Norkie

Open/water: Stephen Elwood

Bobbi and I dived together in fairly murky water underneath the boats and against the jetty forming the marina. Depth was about 3 meters and time 30-40 min, including surfacing often to resolve buddy separations. There were a few small fish there that liked to nip the top of my head when I blew bubbles. We also found a pair of miniature cuttlefish each the size of a child's fist. Like cuttlefish everywhere, they ranged cute to iridescent. We surfaced three bags full of discarded garbage. Actually for a harbor, it wasn't that filthy. Under the boats we found broken carapaces of dozens of crabs, the remnants of someone's meal(s).

Here is the map to parking and registration information:

http://screencast.com/t/E78p0g4GxGm

For more information: http://www.divemahara.com/component/content/article/89-dive-against-debris.html

Bobbi and Vance fun diving in Musandam, Oman: Fanaku, Musandam Island, Ras Sarkan, Ras Morovi, Lima Rock, Sept 9-10, 2011

2011-09-10T12:34:00.000-07:00

My logged dives #1077-1080

We had a great weekend diving with our good friends at Nomad Ocean Adventure. We had been planning a trip to the far north of Musandam for weeks beforehand, to have three dives, starting Friday at Fanaku or Kachelu, and then doing two more dives as we worked our way back down the coast toward home port. This was set to start at around 8 a.m. Friday so we'd be driving down on Thursday. As soon as people could get home from work Thursday evening, Bobbi and I started collecting them. Nicki rode with us in our car and we met Gillian at the Club entrance for the 3-hour drive across the UAE to Dibba on the east coast, arriving over the Oman border just in time for a dinner of baked chicken served at Nomad. After a bit of conviviality with our friends we went to bed and slept very soundly till time to grab coffee and a croissant and meet at the harbor for our three-dive day.

We set off with 12 divers and 36 tanks. Divers included Bobbi, and I, Nicki, Ian Wing, Daniel and Randa, Gillian Hendrie, Jonathan Seda, Bob, April, and Lucy and Sara just there for the day. Sea conditions were a little bumpy on our bums as we endured the hour and a half up the pristine coast of Musandam till we finally shot the gap between the mainland and Musandam Island and steamed ahead to Fanaku sitting all on its own just to the west of smaller Kachelu. We pulled alongside the east side and while Ivor was giving the briefing the boat was swept the length of the island, so we decided that divng there was maybe not that good an idea. So we swung around to the calmer west side and selected a likely spot at the northwest point for an entry. Here the current was mild and we had no problem entering the water and forming into buddy teams before descending in our groups.

Diving conditions were excellent all weekend. First of all, it was a relatively warm 27 degrees in the water with cooler temperatures in thermoclines at depth. I was wearing my thin lycra under my three mm overalls, plus long-sleeve top to complete the combo, for a total of 6.5 mm on my torso, but it was warm, so for the next dive I replaced the 3 mm top for a half mm rash vest, and the following day I skipped the lycra and just wore the combo. I was warm at the surface but glad I had it at depth. Bobbi started off wearing her 5 mm wetsuit but had changed that for 3 mm the following day. And secondly, the visibility was excellent, 15, maybe 20 meters in some places, and no less than 10 meters in case silt was at all present.

Depths in these islands are as you like them. Bobbi and I were diving in a group with Nicki keeping an eye on Gillian. Bobbi and I went ahead and down and stopped short at 30 meters with no end to the wall in sight. Not much to see there so we angled up to pick up Nicki and her group, who had made it to 27 meters as Bobbi and I angled up to conserve air and no deco minutes. It was everyone's first time at this site and no one knew what to expect, so we were all probing, wary of current (in the briefing Ivor warned us about our bubbles going down, indicating a down current, and meanwhile back at the hostel, Chris told us a story about how he got caught in one with two advanced students, managed to catch them at 35 meters and shepherd them to the surface, had them both breathe from his only two oxygen cylinders, and the following day himself developed symptoms of decompression sickness and he had to go into a recompression chamber).

It was a lovely dive, lots of bright red rust coloring the reef, masses of reef fishes, and pretty easy despite a current which at its worst Bobbi and I pulled ourselves through with the help of a long rope someone had lost on the bottom. This caught us up with Sara Gough and Lucy, the only others from our group that we saw from that point on in this dive. We outpaced them, hit a still stronger facing current and rode back on it till we reached the end of the island in a colorful coral patch, and had to come up, near the end of our hour. All our dives on this trip were an hour or more with safety stop.

We retreated to Musandam Island for our lunch break, to a place that Chris and Ivor have christened Sphinx Bay due to the profile of a guano-covered rock in the vicinity. After sandwiches and pasta salad consumed in the 1 hour surface interval, we dropped in for our second dive over a bottom pockmarked from thousands of hollow footprints left by coral since disappeared, and strewn with nudibranchs. We saw a few dozen of the thousands that must have been there. Again Bobbi and I pushed to 30 meters depth, found it just kept going, and turned around to angle back up the reef and meet up with April who had joined the other two girls Lucy and Sara. A remarkable feature of this dive was a fault seam at 8 meters that we followed for some distance, where we found caves, not just alcoves, but actual tunnels you could swim into. One of them had a huge batfish inside sharing space with an oversized puffer. Another ledge had two very large crayfish inside, unreachable, yet fully visible in their lair.

It was 3:30 by the time we came up and joined everyone back on board and motored south. It took us an hour almost to reach Ras Sarkhan on our way home. Ivor suggested we dive the point and work our way back toward the mountains. Meanwhile the boat drifted back from the point and people started entering the water. We were no longer at the point but they were stuck with it but Bobbi and I and the three ladies were still on board, so we had ourselves taken back to the point as planned. The point is where the action is most likely to be, but it is risky because there can be currents here (that's what brings the fish) and you never know if the current will be coming in or going out, though Ivor thought it would be a return current. So I briefed our divers to be prepared for anything and we all went over and down.

We were lucky. The current was slack, and we had no trouble finding our way to the point, with its constant swirl of fish in the blue soft coral. We found a huge turtle sitting on the bottom at 30 meters, his back covered with white barnacles. We angled up and out the point and found ourselves surrounded by hundreds of treveli swirling past. At the point itself a stiff resistant current told us it was time to go back. We stayed high on the reef and came across another turtle. Toward the end of the dive we found a large cow-tail or feather-tail ray in the sand. He let us settle in next to and in front of him before he started to ripple, taking his time to eventually rise out of the sand, turn, and head out to sea. We followed close behind and he turned and headed back to the reef, then headed up it, silhouetted nicely against the bright surface, putting us on a nice show in graceful motion for 30 memorable seconds.

That was it for diving for the day. Unfortunately the gear box on our boat malfunctioned and we limped back to Lima over the next hour, but Ivor got on the satellite phone and the boat owners sent another boat out to get us, intercepting us just off the town of Lima. We transferred our gear to the new boat and it was 45 minutes before we finally made it home in the darkness. Back at NOA there was still time to chill out in the pool before dinner, which occupied us until time for bed.

Next morning we had arranged an earlier than usual boat departure so we might get back to port earlier that evening for driving back to Abu Dhabi, but we were still able to sleep in past 8 in the morning. Bobbi and I rolled up in the dining area to check email and have our coffee and meager breakfast. We were joined this morning by Nicki, Ian, Daniel and Randa, Jonathan, Bob, and April and Gavin, her chef boyfriend. Lucy and Sara had returned to Dubai the night before, and Gillian had developed sinus problems and couldn't join us diving. The boat was supposed to leave the harbor at 10 and it was only a quarter hour late when it finally did pull away, not bad. An hour later we were passing Lima Rock on our way to Octopus Rock, but we found the current there a little strong, so we retreated to Ras Morovi to start our first dive in the bay where I often take my beginning divers. There was almost no current there, and the visibility was again excellent. Had there been rays in the sand we would have seen them. We went south along the reef without seeing much of anything, but at the point where you can opt for the saddle to the left to take you into the channel or keep going south to round the submerged island, we came onto a large school of barracuda.

We rounded the submerged hilltop keeping at about 25 meters, a bit high off the sand at 30 meters. It was beautiful, but again nothing striking until Bobbi found a crayfish in a rock, and then spotted a turtle ahead. Later she found another big crayfish under a rock, I spotted the second turtle, and we found several morays and lion fish. We came all the way up the channel to the north but as we rounded the corner we hit a stiff current. Although 40 minutes into our dive we both had plenty of air left so we dropped to almost 18 meters in the sand and just powered through it. Eventually it slackened and we ended our dive in a bay full of coral and fish life, especially swarms of blue triggers. When the boat finally came for us over there we got some oblique compliments from the younger divers regarding our stamina in finning through that current, as they had all turned back at that point.

We had our sandwiches and a tasty potato salad listening to Ivor's jokes (and Gavin's, and a few of mine), bobbing gently in the water, in the bright sunlight surrounded by mountains rising out of clear blue seas. Then we headed over to Lulu Island just across the bay toward the fishing village of Lima but there was a boat there already picking up divers way north of the rock, suggesting they were having trouble with currents, so we decided to go to Lima Rock.

Here on the sheltered north side we had the best dive of the weekend, thanks to Bobbi's sharp-eyed fish spotting. The first thing we saw was a turtle and we were following that when Bobbi pointed into the void. That's how she and I were the only ones to see at least two devil rays passing. As on all our dives we saw coronet fish, and batfish and puffer fish being cleaned by cleaner wrasse. The most fun part of the dive was when we encountered a school of squids. They entertained us in midwater and later we found them gathering around a rock. They seemed to want to get under the rock, Nicki thinks to lay eggs there. Due to their focus on whatever they were doing there, they didn't seem to mind us coming close and hovering. They were captivating. We spent 5 or ten minutes watching their antics, motionless, breathing little air. At the end of the dive we found a large honeycomb moray and did our safety stop above its lair. He was being cleaned inside his gaping mouth by a tiny blue wrasse, which escaped unharmed.

Our Roster

Vance Stevens (PADI instructor)
Nicki Blower (PADI divemaster)
Sarah Gough - (PADI divemaster)
Bobbi Stevens (PADI rescue)
Ian Wing (SSI Master Diver, including SSI Deep Diver, with PADI Nitrox)
Bob McGraw (PADI advanced o/w)
Gillian Hendrie (PADI advanced o/w)
April McMahan (PADI advanced o/w)
Jonathan Seda (PADI advanced o/w) - driving up Friday morning
Daniel Jewers (PADI advanced o/w)
Lucy Hives (BSAC sports)
Randa (o/w)

Well, ten days of the month our gone, and we have to be out of our apartment by the end of it, so apart from helping Kathleen with an EDA beach cleanup next weekend, Bobbi and I won't be doing much more diving until we emerge into October.

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

2011-09-05T00:01:00.000-07:00

My logged dives #1073-1076

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Certified Jay Fortin as PADI Rescue Diver August 25-27, 2011 in Dibba Rock and Musandam

2011-08-29T01:37:00.000-07:00

My logged dives #1068-1072

I know that Kathleen is seeing whale sharks and manta rays in the Maldives during these Eid holidays, before breakfast even, but meanwhile back in the UAE, someone's gotta churn out those certified divers :-) This week it was the turn of Jay Fortin, who flew over from Doha to engage me for a one-on-one rescue course. Bobbi had to work on Saturday to prepare her classroom for the coming school year, so I was missing her company this weekend.

I picked Jay up from Abu Dhabi airport on Thursday and we drove over to Dibba, reaching Freestyle Divers in plenty of time to kit up and enter the water for some self-rescue practice, and dealing with disoriented and distressed divers underwater and at the surface. At one point a turtle passed by, in the shallow water just off the beach. We ended up with handling the unresponsive diver at the surface, ventilation and equipment removal, and finally experimented with effective carries to exit a victim from ocean to shore.

We then shopped for dinner at Lulu's, their Indian chat concoctions are to die for, and ate our purchases accompanied by duty free beverages at Seaside apartments, occupying just two of the three beds for only 250 dirhams in Ramadhan, very cheap. Next morning we drove 15 minutes up the road to Freestyle Divers to knock out the rest of the rescue diver exercises in three dives there, planning the scenarios for the following day with Nomad Ocean Adventures.

Dibba Rock was a lovely dive at 9 a.m. Jay and I started off with two exercises: simulated underwater recovery and surfacing the non-responsive diver. I entered the water with a yellow shopping back I carry as a simulated victim and I left Jay at a place I could find again near the aquarium where we often start our Dibba Rock dives. I then conducted a square pattern, just me, on which I concealed the 'missing victim.' It was Jay's job then to find it. He did this in a U pattern and speedily accomplished the goal, but focused on the task he missed spotting the large cow tail ray that was wondering what these silly divers were doing finning up and down like madmen.

Once Jay had found the victim, we conducted the exercise where we surfaced it, me in this case. I survived so Jay passed that one, and then we descended for a fun dive. We passed back by the aquarium and then headed over the reef where I almost immediately saw a shark cross our bow. The schools of barracuda haven't been seen here in some time but there was one big one hanging out in that area. Some German snorkelers on our boat asked me later what the big long fish was. When we reached the western end of the reef and turned south on the L we found 7 or 8 turtles all together there.

We did two more dives on the reef, completing response from the boat to swimmers and unresponsive diver on one of them (saw a shark swim by a turtle right at the end of that dive!) and conducting the last one where I went down with the missing diver bag, hid it, surfaced, and called Jay to come find it using a square pattern, and then surface me to complete the scenario. On all the dives we saw turtles and sharks. On the last dive we hung out where the raspberry coral is coming back at the south end of the L and I saw three meaty blacktip sharks buzz by while hovering there (different ones, different sizes). Nice diving on Dibba Rock that day, and highly productive from a Rescue Diver course perspective.

We checked out of the Seaside and took ourselves across the border into Oman where we turned up at Nomad Ocean Adventures in time to relax over cool drinks and then enjoy a beef stew buffet. Next day we dove Lima Rock and Octopus Rock.

The dives were good ones. We didn't see much on the sheltered north side of Lima Rock (I do recall a batfish, hovering mouth up, enjoying the administrations of a blue cleaner wrasse) but most of the divers in the group felt confident to push the currents at the east end of the island. Jay and I went to the end and found a saddle where we hung out in the surge hoping for some devil rays or big barracuda. There were jacks or trevally, or some kind of carangidae out there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carangidae and lots of blue trigger fish, but nothing amazing, so I led us over the saddle to the south side of the island. Apart from a huge honeycomb moray hiding in the saddle, again nothing amazing here, so I took us back hard against the current this time and led around the rock where I knew the current would spit us into the ocean. Again I was hoping for schools of barracuda here but they were not there that day. However the boat was waiting at the surface collecting all the divers who had opted for the freight train exit.

We did our remaining scenario during the surface interval, recovery of diver at the surface, getting the diver to and onto the boat, and then reviving the diver on board, during the surface interval. Jay did well but the boat was crowded with 15 divers and most of those aboard treated the procedure as lunchtime entertainment, not doing much to help or clear space to receive the victim, so the scenario broke down at the point where in a real situation we would have thrown the bcd's overboard to make space to treat the victim (they'd have floated on the surface, but understandably no one did that, and had we pushed it we could have become a different kind of victim :-)

Rescue course out of the way, Richard requested Octopus Rock for the second dive, and since the currents were relatively benign, the request was granted. Relatively benign but not absent, Jay had trouble following me down our first attempt at descent there and we had to meet up at the surface, then regain position for descent, which worked well the second time. The trick was to descend into the current to where I correctly discerned that the current would be relieved near the bottom, which it was, leaving us free to wander into the valleys to the east of the rock. We swam amid a school of big barracuda there and found clear vis, but no rays where they ought to have been in the sand at 25-30 meters. Also my compass was not rotating properly so I couldn't properly orient. We circled one submerged rock which I realized only after coming a second time on an encrusted anchor whose boat had long departed. I changed direction and tried to find our way on estimated compass direction but this led into the blue, so in the end I used the upwardly sloping bottom to get us back to the rock, which was swarming with fish, really beautiful, again nothing amazing for us, though others on our boat came across rays and for one lucky group, even a guitar shark.

For the record our dives on Dibba Rock lasted around an hour each and were conducted to 8 meters or so. In Musandam we dived to about 25 meters each dive, and each lasted 50 minutes. Water temperatures were warmer than the week before, maybe 26 degrees in Musandam, warmer at Dibba Rock. Visibility was decent. And Jay got certified, congratulations! my student in open water, advanced, and now rescue, well done!

Certified Luke Ingles in beginning open water August 18-20, 2011 in Musandam

2011-08-20T22:40:00.000-07:00

My logged dives #1064-1067

Nice easy weekend planned with just one student, Luke, who turned out to have about the smoothest passage conceivable through the PADI open water dive course. He did his elearning prior to our picking him up at his office Thu after work, 3 pm ramadhan timings. We went over all the course explanations of what we were going to do in 3 hours on the road together, and we had him at Nomad Ocean Adventure by 6:30 that evening and in the pool an hour later. Two hours after that we were having cook's delicious beef stew with appropriate liquid accompanyment, and two hours after that we had played some guitar and gone to bed.

I overslept the time to meet Luke in the morning but he was so proficient at his skills that we only needed 15 minutes in the actual water to get him through the module 3 skills and ready for the open ocean. This was a bit harder to arrange in a boat with 14 divers in choppy seas, waves crashing up against the musandam coasline the whole hour in transit. We skipped Lima and tucked in to the shelter of Lima headland. We did a first dive there, touching near 18 meters at depth, 48 min. before Luke ran low on air. Our second dive, for the record, was on the relatively sheltered north shore of Lima Rock, getting even closer to 18 meters this time, 51 minutes.

Both dives were pleasant in cool 25-26 degree water. Luke had picked up a 5 mm wetsuit but Bobbi was wearing a shorty over a lycra suit and I was wearing 3 mil long over lycra with a half mil rash vest on top, and on the 2nd dive I was chilled. The vis was good. There were tableaux of lion fish floating in full panoply and morays here and there, in including a large honeycomb on Lima. There we saw large batfish, lots of puffers, and a small monarch bull ray in a cave. It was a great day for Luke, a kind of mediocre one for Bobbi and I, but not a bad day out at all for any of us.

We got Luke through his dive #1 and #2 o/w skills and a few of the flexible ones as well, and after enduring the choppy ride back against an oncoming sea, I took Luke back in the pool and finished off his last two pool dives and 200 meter swim and float. Luke asked if he could do the float in one of the inner tubes there while sipping on a beer, and I thought that was such a good idea I went and got one myself and kicked back in the center of the pool while he swam his laps around me :-)

Next day we slept at will, all rising in time for diving at 10 or 10:30. You never know exactly but with Ivor in charge and not so many people on a Saturday, things ran more like clockwork and we were being asked to get ourselves down to the harbor at just after 10. Seas were still contrary but the sun came out on the last half of the trip north and sea conditions ameliorated as the day progressed.

Our first dive started in the same cove on Lima headland (Ras Lima) we had been in the day before. The first day we had gone to the back of the cove and eased down through the sloping corals there to give Luke plenty of reference for his first ascent, but today we found a sandy patch and dropped onto it at 5 meters depth. We then moved down to 8 where I tied off my SMB and ran it up for CESA. I had Luke do his compass heading out and back and complete his other skills for that dive there in the sand before completing the CESA so when we arrived up top I could grab my marker and carry it back down with me deflated, and then pack it up as we went on our dive.

We had good luck with animals today. We saw lots of lion fish and snappers and much larger species on all our dives, and several morays, plus a small torpedo ray on this dive, and a small ray poked head first into an alcove that was half as deep as he was round. I think it was similar to the ones with darker coloring here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blotched_fantail_ray. We also found a flounder on the dive, a curiosity to first time divers.

Sea conditions were still not settled but dropping to the point where Ivor decided we could head over the bay to Pearl Island which was still getting waves on its east face, and some surge but not so bad on the western sheltered side. Bobbi and Luke and I took our time getting in the water so as to be C divers with a surface interval of 1:32 min with 53 min NDL at 16 meters after having spent 50 min at 18 meters our first dive (which put us in T pressure group). To prolong the SI we got Luke's weight and BCD removal out of the way at the start of the dive, in the sheltered part ol Lulu Island.

Lulu is a nice dive. The idea is to round the island to the north and then head east over the sand to arrive at the second island further out. It's a nice spot that sometimes has barracudas. Not today thoough we did find a large crayfish in a lair when we arrived at the submerged arm of the outer island. We also found morays and a large marble ray there, without a tail, impressive creature, and the regular suspects such as trumpet fish, trigger fish, placidly improbably puffers, and tiny blue striped wrasse cleaning everything from eels to batfish to all of the above.

Back on the boat one of the divers in another buddy pair who had also seen the marble ray said its tail wasn't missing, "it was a cow tail," as if it was born without a tail. Garbage, we looked it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowtail_stingray but these don't look like the ray we saw. The cow-tails at that link look flatter than the one we saw, which had a prominently raised head area, more like the marble ray here: http://news.scubatravel.co.uk/2010/03/marble-ray-is-creature-of-the-month.html. There's no end to fish identification, especially after the fact, :-)

Nice weekend, nice people at Nomad as usual. Good food, good company, some dodgy guitar in the evening and even dodgier jokes, but we all laughed politely and had a good time.

Abu Dhabi wrecks again, Ludwig and somewhere near Jasim, Aug 5, 2011

2011-08-12T14:58:00.000-07:00

My logged dives #1061-1063

Bobbi, Dusty, and Michelle and I accepted an invitation from Al Mahara divers to come dive with Kathleen and Peter, our old friends (but not as old as we are :-). We were trying to dig out our old GPS coordinates and locate the wrecks for one thing, and Kathleen wants to find them so she can take divers there for her new dive center.

I was helpful in locating the Ludwig. That's always been one of my favorite wrecks. That dive was a nice one. We dropped anchor after inching near the wreck but we couldn't get the boatman to get on it so finally we dropped anchor 200 meters from it, and the anchor dragged showing that distance increasing to 300 but then held steady.

In any event the Ludwig is not hard to find. It's a big wreck. It looms large if you know which direction you need to go to find it. So Bobbi and I and Michelle crept up on it upcurrent at 26 meters or so till we saw the shadow of its hull. When we arrived there I led us to the stern and looked in the sand there for rays, found none, and so I led around to the deck side and then went up along the fo'castle to the high point of the wreck which happens to be the starboard side of the wheel house. There the door was removed long ago making it easy to enter the wheelhouse which, being on its side, is a descent to the port side, which now lays in the sand. The wheelhouse is roomy and doesn't feel that confined since there are window holes there that still overlook the ghostly deck. But the big surprise was at depth where there used to be rubble there obscuring the exit to the sand. It's been removed. It's now an easy thing to go in the top of the wheelhouse, descend to the opposite side, and find and exit to the sand. Who's been cleaning up this wreck? Nice of them!

After that we proceeded along the bottom of the deck where the ship lays on its side until the bow. I was keeping an eye on my computer, hoping to find something interesting at the bow (used to be lots of barracuda there) and knowing that we could then follow the deck up so as to manage the fact that we were then just one minute to deco.

To make a few more minute story even shorter, we followed the deck up as it contoured to 20 meters, the time to deco kept getting bigger but then counting down as we watched the fish up top. We were by now with Kathleen and her crew who were also finding their way up. There was a rope trailing off the deck and I got my crew on it so as to have a reference for safety stop at 5 meters, and the entire dive lasted perhaps 40 minutes.

From there we motored south towards home and towards our GPS points for the Jasim, but we had worse luck here. I was unsure of where my coordinates came from. Kathleen had some as well but in the end we tried mine, and these turned out to be on the tall buoy some distance from the wreck, so we never did find it. Our dive with my group was half an hour in the sand at 25+ meters, to come up when the first person went low on air.

I still had 90 bar and Kathleen wanted to try her coordinates and see if we could find the wreck on a third dive, so I accompanied her, but she had no better luck, so we emerged from that one wrecklessly.

Finley the shark, seen below, wearing my face mask, gave his version of the Ludwig dive here: http://www.projectaware.org/blog/divemahara/aug-24-11/finley-goes-wreck-diving-abu-dhabi-and-gets-ready-mighty-mussandam. Finley, apart from these here, where are your pics ???

Shorediving Dibba July 25-26, 2011: Pinnacles (3 Rocks) and Dibba Rock

2011-07-26T21:28:00.000-07:00

My logged dives #1059-1060

On Monday morning July 25, 2011, Bobbi and I and our son Dusty, and daughter-in-law Gulya, and her daughter, our granddaughter Gwen, our 3-year old Malinki Princess, all got up early and headed for Dubai airport. Gwen and Gulya were flying to Uzbekistan to see her other grandmother. When I hugged Gwen goodbye she gave this knowing shrug and said “but I'm only going to Doha.” That's where she was living when she boarded the plane, and she thinks her father went back there. But her dad went to Brazil for his holiday and now she's gone to Samarkand and another set of family dramas there. Eventually she'll wind up back in Doha but she'll never see her bobo and bibi again in their apartment across from the park on the Abu Dhabi corniche. No telling where we'll be when we meet again.

But as long as we had driven to Dubai Bobbi and Dusty and I thought we might as well go on to Dibba and go for a dive. And as long as we were there we thought we might as well spend the night and dive Dibba Rock the following morning. I called our favorite dive shop there, the one where the owner Terry died and his good son Andy took over, but Andy went on holiday to Thailand leaving James to look after the business.on that day. James said he was doing a rescue course on Monday, from shore, and wouldn't be taking a boat out, but we could boat dive there on Tuesday any time, so we booked that. Bobbi went online and found that the Holiday Beach Motel's rooms just two beaches over from Freestyle were only 300 dirhams with breakfast when booked the night before check-in, so we booked that as well.

Bobbi had also tried booking diving anywhere on the East Coast for Monday, but everyone we could find was ridiculously expensive. At JAL, now the Radison (3 beaches over from Freestyle) the cost of just a 10 min boat ride to Dibba Rock was 165 per person (using our tanks and equipment), almost $50. the price of a prolonged meal at an all you can eat and drink in the all you can eat and drink restaurants in Abu Dhabi, almost twice what it costs from Freestyle. There were some other possibilities at the other dive shops further down the coast. We could dive Inchcape I with Divers Down for 165 each or the Pinnacles (3 Rocks) for the same price. We hadn't dived Pinnacles in some time but, that boat ride would have been again 10 min, using our tanks and gear, and it's possible to shore dive it. Also, Bobbi found at the last minute that the dive shop at Holiday Beach Motel would take us to Dibba Rock in their dingies for 100 dirhams each, reasonable, so we were considering that, and according to them we could go at 3 or at 5 pm.

We arrived at HBM at around 12:30 on a scorching hot UAE summer afternoon and we figured we should check out what shore diving might be like at the Pinnacles and then try to dive with HBM out to Dibba Rock at 3 or 5. After checking in at the Motel, lovely rooms if you're not paying normal prices, we all got in the car and drove down the coast to the stretch of highway just opposite the Pinnacles. These days you never know what you'll find on this once-pristine coastline, and there are a lot of hotels a-building over by Sandy Beach Hotel a stone's throw away, but this spot opposite Pinnacles was as yet still undeveloped and we could drive off road and park where we always did, just like old times.

And just like old times, it was a very rocky entry, tricky getting us all into the water for the swim out. The swim out was difficult as well with a stiff current pushing to the north. Dusty and I made it to the rocks in about 45 min but Bobbi was having some difficulties and let herself get swept to the north where we watched her pretty much barely holding her position as she tried to join us against the current. Eventually Dusty swam over and got her and brought her over to us using the fins on shoulders tired diver tow I always teach as being just the tow for difficult conditions. I had meanwhile found the place at the south of the rocks where the current seemed to be broken by the rock to the north, and when Bobbi got there and recovered her breath, we went down on that spot. It was by then 3 pm, a whole hour after we had set out on our swim for the rock.

Once under water we had a pleasant dive there. We didn't see anything hugely unusual, no sharks or rays or turtles or cuttlefish, but we found strange flounders, puffers and lion fish and eels and shoals of reef fish. As long as we kept moving east and west and avoiding the current as it picked up at either end of the rock we could move at will, but eventually I decided to lead us through a gap in the rocks to the north side of the collection of islands, and here again the current was fine, protected now directly by the rock. We had been diving now 45 minutes and we all had well over 100 bar left in our tanks.

This time I led us toward the west and we followed this out until the boulders got smaller and smaller, but always there was something to see. I knew we were out of the protection of the rocks but at depth the northerly current effect was only slight. My course was west north west but by angling on a westerly heading we could fin that way and be pushed gently to the north. It worked perfectly. 15 min later we were in the shallows and by 4 p.m. we were exiting the ocean right where we had parked the car. Bobbi was relieved she didn't have to swim back on the surface.

We were back on the road by 4:30 and we tried calling the dive center at HBM to see if we could get on the last 5 pm dive to Dibba Rock. We called their mobile and then tried through the hotel but they didn't answer either mobile or land line, so we stopped in at Royal Beach Hotel, where Freestyle Divers is, to pick up supplies at the off license bottle shop there and have a cold one on the lanai with the view of the beach and sun dropping over the mountains. While we were there we washed our gear in the showers and left our empty tanks to be filled. We confirmed with James that we could come at any time next day so we said we'd call when ready and James said he'd fill the tanks and be ready for us and just call ahead and he'd be there from 9 o'clock on.

We then went to our hotel and had a very relaxing swim in the pool and walk on the beach, and had them bring us dinner on our front porch, which was delicious, comprising shrimp and curries and tasty sweet coconut nan, and we were by then tired and sedated so we went to sleep and slept soundly until Dusty received a text msg next morning which woke us all up. But that was a good thing since it was by then a quarter to 9 and we needed to get up and get to breakfast.

I tried calling Freestyle from our breakfast table but there was no answer, odd but maybe as we'd set no time and we were the only customers, it was ok if James was a little late. Then at 9:20 he txted to say he'd be delayed, he had to work out something with the Dept of Water and Electricity, the bill had been paid but they were threatening to shut off utilities anyway. So we txted back we were at breakfast, what time would we be diving? He txt'd back it would be around 11.

It was only mildly inconvenient to have to wait, but the clincher came at around 10:30 when James txted again to say sorry, he wasn't going to be able to make it down there that day at all. I txt'd back, “What about my tanks!?” but also if he'd let us know at 9:00 we could have possibly booked something else that morning, but at 10:30 our choices at that point would be pretty much what they were the day before. Except that the Holiday Beach Motel dive shop with its 100 dirham boat rides to Dibba Rock wasn't operating that day. as I discovered when I walked over there only to find out that they always took Tuesdays off.

Dusty and I were keen to shore dive Dibba Rock anyway, and James had txted back that he would send his worker to open the equipment room for me. Bobbi didn't want to join us after her experience the day before so she stayed behind to keep the room cool for us and Dusty and I went over to Freestyle where I txted James that we'd be shore diving there and we'd be there for at least two hours. He txted back “No worries” but that was the last we heard from him, and the worker never turned up that afternoon, nor after our dive, and when we were checking out of our hotel I was unable to reach James, so we were forced to return to Abu Dhabi, 3.5 hours by car, without our three tanks. I'm not sure now how or when I'll be able to get back there and collect them, not happy about that :-( well, someone took them eventually to Freestyle's office in Dubai and left them there, and my son Dusty eventually made a trip there and picked them up, so the tanks are back with us now :-)

Meanwhile, fortunately we'd brought 6 tanks down, so Dusty and I had a nice dive on Dibba Rock. The weather was hot in the low 40s but bearable in the water. Sea conditions were calm and there was hardly any current, and we made the swim to the reef in about half an hour. We found the clacking coral and dropped down on a free swimming eel. Like the day before we didn't see much else of note but we made a nice tour of the rock and its undersea wonders. In most dives we do there, we are asked to limit our bottom time to 50 min and we usually come up after an hour, but today we could stay as long as we liked. Dusty ran down to 30 bar 90 min into the dive; I still had 70 – our no deco time remained at 99 min throughout the dive.

We went first on the east-west leg of the L shaped reef, where the raspberry coral is coming back, but still we haven't seen any turtles or big fish on that part of the reef in a long time, though there used to be lots of turtles and sharks there. It's hard to connect the different parts of the reef these days if you're not properly oriented on it, and so I had trouble finding the northward leg. On the northerly heading from the east-west part of the L, trying to find the north-south part, so just east of it and inside the right angle of the L, Dusty and I came on a mooring we hadn't seen before with slabs of rock oddly placed around it, Dusty thinks it was writing in Arabic, but he's thinking of the rainbow sheikh's writing his name Hamad in such a way that it could be read on Google Earth (and it can be, check it out: http://news.discovery.com/space/big-pic-hamad-abu-dhabi-space-graffiti-110721.html).

Eventually we came on the clicking and clacking reef and followed it without seeing sharks till we had to turn east to avoid running off the reef, from where we made our way to the aquarium. The aquarium is always nice, full of fish with a backdrop of rust-colored coral. We each had over 100 bar so 50 min into the dive I led to the back side of the island. Here we found batfish in cool thermoclines in 12 meters of water and sand where we looked for rays but found nothing but pipefish. We meandered over the sand and then back to the rocks on the back side where we had a choice. Circumnavigate the island and come up where the coral is sparce and head south for home from there or backtrack along the way we came with some chance of seeing sharks. I chose the latter, back along the boulders at the back side and up the shoulder to the aquarium, then east toward the clacking coral and south along the reef on a hunt for sharks, but there were none today. Still a 90 min dive was nice and relaxing, worth staying over the extra day (for Dusty and I ;-)

Diving with Freestyle Divers July 9, 2011 - Family outing on Dibba Rock

2011-07-11T00:53:00.000-07:00

My logged dives #1057-1058

On July 9, 2011 Bobbi and I and my two boys Glenn and Dusty awoke at a reasonable hour in the morning and by 8 a.m. we were on the road for Dibba where we turned up well before noon in time for a dive on Dibba Rock which eventually got under way at 1:00. We did two dives there, both from the mooring on the northwest corner of the island. They both went about the same way. The mooring is right off the aquarium so on both dives we started there. On the first we were in the lee of a strong westerly current which we only discovered as we were fairly carried to the reef to the west and then had to struggle to stay on it as we continued along it south. By the time we had come to the end of the L and were turning to the east, we found we simply could not, the current was too strong against us. So we went back to north and then back east, in the shadow of the island, to the aquarium, and then penetrated a little to the back side until we hit the thermocline there. By then we had consumed an hour and varying amounts of air, so we surfaced.

We didn't see much on that dive, and the thermocline had been uncomfortable because we were not wearing wetsuits, so I put on my 3 mm for the second dive. This got delayed a bit due to a fuel shortage on one of the boats that had gone away for a looooong day trip. But we didn't mind kicking back on the restful lanai at Freestyle, turtles broaching the shorebreak just off the sands of Royal Beach Hotel, and eventually we were back in the water for our second dive. This followed the same route as the first one, except we were by now at high tide, with some relief from the current, and we saw more animals. We were just leaving the aquarium for the reef when the schooling fish overhead did an abrupt about face. I looked around for the cause, though only Bobbi saw it and signaled shark with her hand at her forehead. We continued on the reef to the south without seeing much, but this time we were able to turn to the east and make it as far as where the coral is coming back. By then we were at half a tank to 150 bar so we turned and drifted back along the coral, where we saw the cuttlefish and eels that Glenn videoed.

Meanwhile I was leading back to the north and it was my good fortune to come right on top of a beefy blacktip reef shark. He scampered alongside and ahead of me, Bobbi was a little behind and the boys behind her, so I was the only one to see it. We continued north on the reef and then east back to the aquarium, and then went on into the sand at the back of the island without seeing anything much of note apart from big eyed puffer fish and lion fish, and the usual schooling tropicals.

Back on shore we had an off license beverage with Andy and reminisced about old times, very relaxing as the sun went down over the misty mountains and turned the sky over the blue-green sea from balmy blue to shades of orange and grey.

Certified Steve and Anna in beginning open water, and Roger as advanced open water, June 24-25, 2011 in Musandam

2011-06-25T22:36:00.000-07:00

My logged dives #1053-1056

Another great weekend, what else to do when temperatures are in the 40’s in the UAE. Water temperatures in Musandam can be only slightly less, in the warm 30’s near the surface, or a bracing 20’s, depending on which thermoclines you pass through. Visibility varied in the thermoclines as well. Sometimes the cold water brought clarity; other times the cold water was green-brownish with algae.

A whale shark was spotted on Friday off the east end of Lima Rock while we were there but not by us. On Friday there were slightly rough seas. When we came up to Lima Rock on the south the swell was not pleasant for my novice divers Steve and Anna, on their o/w course on the eLearning package. We had Dusty and Michelle with us, and Nicki to dive with Bobbi, plus Roger completing his advanced course with Peak Buoyancy diving. Also we had three pleasant and experienced Arab divers who were agreeable to whatever we wanted or needed to do.

I got in the water to test the current, not bad, but vis was poor, so I suggested we move to the north side where there would be shelter. All other dive boats had reached the same conclusion so there were dozens of divers in the water when we went down there, including some BSAC people with mechanical scooters. The scooters were annoying but effective. It was they who spotted the whaleshark, and they said they found a pod of dolphins to boot. I guess the scooters are just the thing for the currents at either end of Lima Rock, which I usually try to avoid with my students.

I was doing dive #2 with Steve and Anna which has a set of the basic skills in it. When we got through those I led along the rocks and Anna discovered a huge honeycomb moray. There were a lot of swim-throughs for Roger to practice his peak buoyancy skills in, and more morays and I can’t recall what else. It wasn’t a great dive, but a pleasant one, in decent vis. When Steve and Roger ran low on air and we surfaced together at over 50 min into the dive, Bobbi, Nicki, Dusty, and Michelle were not yet on the boat. Anna and I still had 70 bar so we decided to go back down for another 15 min, extending our dive shallow, very pleasant and cooling.

For the second dive I suggested Ras Morovi, a good place for open water skills. Steve and Anna had done a discover scuba course with me on June 11 (2 dives) and had completed modules 2 and 3 in the pool the night before and that morning, so according to PADI standards they were “qualified” to do just one more dive on their course that day, and the first dive on Lima Rock was technically their 2^nd PADI O/W course dive. Thanks to the flexible skills system we could continue diving a second dive that day and record the skills they did against dive #2, although this was their 4^th dive in their logbooks.

We had lunch while being buzzed by wasps, sitting ducks for them on an open boat in the small bay in Ras Morovi. It was nice to escape them by getting in the water for surface work. We worked on compass headings, cramp removal, and snorkel regulator exchanges and then found a rope attached to a fish pot on the bottom in 8 meters of water that I thought would do nicely for a controlled emergency swimming ascent. With those skills out of the way we went over to the wall and headed down to the sand. We found a nice outcrop and Anna led us west from there and then returned us to the east to approximately the right spot, given there was a some current pushing us south.

We proceeded on a very pleasant fun dive. I know the site quite well. If you follow the wall you come to a flat spot where you can go left and come up the tongue on the other side or keep going and circumnavigate a submerged hill. I had briefed everyone to check their compasses to understand where they were headed, since if you keep the reef on your left, you don’t notice otherwise when you are rounding the hill or coming up the other side, going from a southerly to northerly heading. In our case when we reached the saddle we had a current preventing our further movement south so I led us over the saddle and down the other side.

Here we came onto brilliantly dancing squids and their counterpart cuttlefish. We also saw morays during the dive, and I can’t remember what else. Maybe Steve or Anna can leave a comment here if I’m leaving anything out. We surfaced in the channel, the boat collected us, and whisked us back to port.

Anna and Steve and I refreshed in the pool that evening, finishing our last two confined water dives in plenty of time for communal dinner. Over beverages afterwards, Ivor pulled out a guitar and showed us more of his talents. I’ll need to practice for the next time if we’re going to start that nonsense. Steve played a mean Red Hot Chili Peppers song that used to be covered by Voodoo Hedgehogs. Nicki produced a platter full of smelly cheeses but many of us avoided that because we had sampled the night before and we all had awakened groggy with headaches, presumably from the cheese.

With the pool work out of the way we had a relaxed start on Saturday morning. I got Steve and Anna to do their swim tests, but that was all there was to do before heading down to the boat. We were booked with Ivor the divor today. Sea conditions were flat, finally, for a change, it would be a good day for the near side of Lima Rock.

The dive started on an excellent note. We put in to clear water and were just easing over the edge when we found ourselves confronted by two large eagle rays coming right at us. The lead one looked almost like a manta as he curled his wings on approach, then noticed us, and warped in muscular contraction to turn suddenly and speed to open water. I watched their shadows circle in the distant water and disappear.

Unfortunately there was a dhow anchored there at just that moment discharging at least 30 divers aboard, and they caught up with us in the direction we were about to go, so I didn’t go to the east as I’d thought but went back to the west toward the middle of the island. I hoped to avoid currents as well. We saw lots of fish here, particularly bat fish, and fusiliers, snappers, parrotfish, angelfish, damsels, jacks in midwater and morays in the rocks. Nicky and Bobbi had moved on so it was only Roger and I and Steve and Anna. Suddenly I saw another eagle ray cross just ahead of us and head to sea. I noticed rocks there we could hover over so we went there and all my group hovered comfortably, not seeing the ray again, but surrounded by biomassive schools of fish.

As we neared the west end of the island the current picked up and I decided to try and avoid that so I reversed our direction and to conserve air led higher up the rocks, 9 meters or so. I was hoping to return to calm water but perhaps there had been a current all along, unnoticed, and now we seemed to be swimming incessantly into it. This was wasting breath and tiring us, so I changed my mind again and decided to take them with the current on around the island.

Using hand signals I tried to get the three of them into position for the quickening current. I couldn’t tell them in words, but I wanted us all together, low down where I was, and next to the reef. Venturing into open water would be anathema here. They did well. They weren’t sure what was coming, but when we were caught in the current they followed me well. We started getting knocked about a bit as we came to the edge of the island and the critical moment was to turn a sharp right and get into shelter out of the current and start heading up the back side of the island. My divers were right behind me.

We found a last honeycomb moray back there, and a large crayfish, but we surfaced on the opposite side of the island where the boat would be looking for us. Nearby there was the crack in the rock with a keyhole passage to the other side that I’ve often seen but never really visited. It had surge in it but it was gentler than it looked and wouldn’t really smash us on its ceiling. I entered and the guys followed. We passed through this beguilingly aquamarine passage and on the other side encountered the swirling current we’d just left, ready to sweep us clear of the island. Anna was not with us so I pointed the three of us back into the gap and we reentered and swam through to where Anna was waiting for us, hesitant because of the surge. Later we found that Bobbi and Nicky had used this passage to scuba to the north side and thereby avoid the worst of the current at the end of the island.

The boat eventually picked us up on the north side and once we’d recovered Bobbi and Nicki, we headed for the shelter of Ras Lima for a calm-water lunch. The wasps were not so bad here. Steve and Anna were but one dive away from completion of their o/w course. This dive would be at Lulu Island, which is interesting because we always put in from the shelter of the first island off the mainland and then swim underwater to the EAST to arrive at the second island. Steve and Anna had tank and weight belt removal and replacement at the surface, tired diver tows, and then Steve could demo his compass skills by leading us to the east to the underwater island.

All worked like a charm and we arrived at the island after the easterly heading right at the sweet spot. I led us to the north along the wall and on around the island from there to come south on its far side. We saw lots of morays here, sometimes surrounded by lion fish. It was interesting but the vis was murky with algae and the thermoclines here were the coldest yet. As we turned into the current I hoped for barracuda but there were none. Heading back west now it was time to bail to the other side of the island but the current was against us for getting over there. I tested it, made headway against it, and figured I could get us where it would dissipate. This worked well, my divers followed again despite conditions marginally poor for beginners. However when I finally found shelter from the current on the west side I was surprised to see we had arrived back at the sweet spot we had reached by going east from where we descended.

So we rounded the island again, slightly higher this time to avoid the chilliest of the water. We continued to the point where we again confronted the current and basically got boxed in there and surfaced.

Congratulations to the newly certified divers Steve and Anna, and to Roger for completing his advanced open water.

Photos from Steve Elwood's Facebook photostream

PADI advanced and rescue courses, plus Discover Scuba Diving, in Musandam June 10-11, 2011

2011-06-12T00:26:00.000-07:00

My logged dives #1049-1052

I had a lot going on this weekend. I had a guy who wanted to do an o/w course on the elearning program and Graeme and Rachel wanted to work on their rescue course so I tried to book them in at Nomad Ocean Adventure. Nomad was fully booked and couldn't actually accommodate everyone so the elearner decided to postpone. Graeme and Rachel still wanted to dive and our mutual friends Steve and Anna decided to join us snorkeling, so I offered to give them a discover scuba course just to sweeten the appeal and they accepted. And then Roger whom we had given our Blazer to decided to join as well and start on his advanced course, so in the end we had an interesting mix of agendas that made for some fun diving and plenty to keep an instructor fully entertained and busy.

Logistically we started out with Roger's deep dive as dive #1 on Lima Rock, north side. He rode up with us in the car that morning so I was able to explain the dives he'd be doing in the car on the way up. We worked out a nice 24 meter 24 minute multilevel profile with a second level at 16 meters for 16 minutes, followed by 12 meters for as much as 35 minutes, which is to say, until the air runs out. The profile was so mnemonic I don't know why I hadn't hit on it before, and next day I proposed he use it to conduct a multilevel dive for his 3^rd advanced course dive.

The deep dive itself was pleasant but not exciting. Vis was excellent for a change. Sea conditions were rough, with wind, and whitecaps foaming off the south of Lima Rock, which was why we went for the back or north side. It was fairly calm there. This time last year we had seen whale sharks here (on the front or south side), but there were none today. Roger and I went straight to depth and did his exercises in the sand, leaving the others behind, but then we returned to the rocks and found the others. We continued until at about 40 min into the dive, our first divers needed to surface. I remember a huge barracuda swimming amongst us at about that time, a large one with a tuna shaped head, a lone wolf, unschooled as it were (get it? alone, unschooled?). Rachel and Bobbi and I ended up completing the dive, coming up after 65 minutes. No one was limiting us, it seemed, very comfortable. We saw a large honeycomb moray with a blue wrasse cleaning its teeth toward the end of that dive, pleasant and relaxing.

We went over to Ras Lima to get out of the wind and swell and had lunch. We found a calm bay ideal for Roger's u/w navigation. Nice spot, about the right depth, with corals on the floor to give us something to look at and navigate on. I started by deploying my submersible marker buoy and tying it off to give us a reference and then leading us out from there 30 meters in a direction that Roger should be able to retrace. Roger calibrated his fin kicks on my estimate of 30 meters and then led us back to the SMB on dead reckoning. Then I had him take us 30 meters to the north and left a weight belt at that spot before we returned on a south heading to the marker. The weight belt would become a lost buddy for Graeme and Rachel who were kitting up to come in and rescue it. But I needed it for Roger's excercises just now. From the SMB I had Roger do a square pattern starting on a westerly heading followed by a turn to the north, so that on the third leg to the east we came out right on the weight belt. Perfect.

I had Roger wait with the weights while I ascended and called out to the boat that I had lost my buddy at that spot. Bobbi on board the boat was making note of the coordinates and would direct Graeme and Rachel to the spot where they would descend and conduct a square search pattern, 5 kicks one way, 5 at right angle, 10 at the next right angle, 10 at the next, 15 and 15, 20 and 20 and so on until the object was found. Meanwhile, Roger and I moved off the spot to the south and found my SMB, completing the square and his tasks for the u/w navigation dive.

I left the SMB in place in case we needed a reference to retrieve the weights, in case they weren't found by the rescue divers. I took Roger along the wall and we ascended to find Graeme and Rachel in possession of the weights and returning them to the boat. So all divers had accomplished their goals for this dive and it was time to have some fun.

The first day, Steve and Anna were snorkeling so they were not a part of the diving, but they saw 8 devil rays from the surface and another diver mentioned a 'massive' sting ray 5 feet across (almost 2 meters). We didn't see much that I recall. It was pretty diving but nothing to write home about (or to recall for a blog entry). Graham had an ear problem and ascended early on with his buddy Rachel. Bobbi and I ran Roger low on air and just after he ascended Rachel appeared with us having tracked our bubbles from the surface. We finally came up the three of us after 70 minutes on my computer, the entire dive spent above 18 meters.

The boat ride was pretty rough going back, and on arrival it was Steve and Anna's turn to start on their DSD course with an evening dip in the pool and then going over the flip chart poolside. After an hour of that we got their equipment together and went in the pool for those exciting first moments on Scuba. They were no trouble to train, and two hours later we had cleaned the gear and Bobbi and I were sitting down to an excellent meal of rice and meaty stew, with quiche, salad, and a mystery desert, all tasty and suitably filling after a long hot day of diving. We slept fine that night.

I wasn't sure what time we would start next day. There was a couch surfer among us who unfortunately arrived after Steve and Anna had finished but wanted to get in on the DSD course. I said if he was keen he should knock on our door at 7 next morning. Bobbi and I were safe though because he'd be coming from UAE Dibba where everyone else was staying, and he'd have to come by cab, so that didn't happen at 7 and Bobbi and I were still in bed at 8.

But we got up about then because we were expecting Steve and Anna to come try on wetsuits and take them in the pool with weights, and I was going to co-opt one of them to be victims for Graeme and Rachel, whom I could show rescue techniques for saving unconscious divers at the surface. But taxis in UAE dibba were scarce apparently (two many staying over there to fit into Steve and Anna's car) so they didn't arrive until almost ten.

So Bobbi became the victim and Rachel and Graeme rescued her a couple of times from the pool (poor Bobbi, sometimes married to a dive instructor, she really does become a victim :-). Meanwhile Steve and Anna had appeared and I had them try on wetsuits and then swim with them in the pool, and more importantly be sure they could sink there. I then had them add 4 kg each to compensate for salt water and air used on the dive, and if anything they were overweighted for their try dive (preferable to being underweighted).

We had a sunny day but rough seas again so we ended up on the north side of Lima Rock same as the day before. But this time I had first time divers on a discover scuba course and they were very brave to get their kit together on a pitching boat and enter the water with a backward roll first time ever, then wait in the surge where I had spotted some u/w boulders I thought we could use as reference on descent. I had already checked for current on arrival at Lima Rock so at least we didn't have drift to contend with.

Vis at that spot was as clear as a swimming pool. I had them come in to the rocks and descend on a beautiful patch of orange coral. They did well to come down gradually and I think they were so beguiled by the batfish there and the blue tangs (surgeon fish) and the parrots and rainbow wrasses that they soon forgot their trepidations, and next thing we knew we were all doing swim throughs and enjoying ourselves comfortably in the cool water.

Again we didn't see much apart from a huge variety of beautiful fish. Roger was paired with Bobbi and he conducted his advanced multilevel dive on the same profile as the day before. Graeme and Rachel had no skills lined up since I had needed Bobbi to team with Roger, but when Graeme and Rachel appeared suddenly I pretended to go catatonic so they could come over and recognize and handle a distressed diver situation.

My DSD divers ran low on air early and we were back on the surface after 40 min, having been mostly at around 12 meters but having touched around 17/18 meters. We then headed over to Ras Lima again, where we accepted to go because reports were that it was choppy at Ras Morovi, and also we were taken to a bay with a small beach, which I decided we could use in training. So after lunch I had Bobbi kit up again and go 'diving' alone, and of course she ended up on the surface face down in the water. Fortunately Graeme and Rachel and I had anticipated this and were already kitted up, so we entered the water and went to work on Bobbi, removing her gear in turns, and eventually getting her to the beach where we practiced carrying her onto it by practising a couple of dead lifts and carries.

The boat had drifted distant by then and I thought we could rescue one of us to the boat. Bobbi had been a victim too much today so Rachel volunteered, and said later that she learned a lot from being a victim. Graeme ventilated her every 5 seconds and removed her BCD while Bobbi and I waved and called the boat to come in a hurry. It came over to cut short Graeme's work and then we thrust Rachel's arms overhead and Sami pulled her onto the boat. We made sure he administered two more breaths before 30 seconds had passed, and we'll complete the scenario with CPR next time.

Now it was time for a last dive, an u/w naturalist one for Roger, and Graeme and Rachel could practice bringing a diver up from the bottom. I took a much more confident Anna and Steve on their second DSD dive of the day. The vis was not as good here and I didn't see much, just a moray, and one of those interesting helmeted crustaceans. Everyone else saw string rays. Bobbi saw one swim right over Anna and I, and Anna saw some in the sand where she was starting to get a bit deep, I thought, so I was staying higher up to get her to rise and so I didn't see them. Darn.

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

2011-05-28T19:54:00.000-07:00

My logged dives #1045-1048

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-05-21T20:48:00.000-07:00

My logged dives #1041-1044

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-04-30T07:24:00.000-07:00

My logged dives #1038-1040

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you :-)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-04-16T18:40:00.000-07:00

My logged dive #1037

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

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

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

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

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

2011-04-04T07:34:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-01-16T02:11:00.000-08:00

My logged dives #1031-1034

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seasons Greetings 2010 with Diving in Musandam

2010-12-25T20:59:00.000-08:00

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 rays in the same hole and was busy photographing them, oblivious to my vanishing air supply. 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

2010-12-13T19:11:00.000-08:00

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.

UAE National Day diving at Freestyle and Nomad, Dibba Rock and Musandam, 4 divers completed their PADI course dives

2010-12-05T10:18:00.000-08:00

My logged dives #1023-1024

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Thursday, Dec 2, was UAE National Day, so I arranged to take advantage of the long weekend by promising to finalize and conduct diving courses during 3 of the 4 days we had for the long weekend. Hasan came with us to Dibba Rock and finished the diving portions of his course Friday Dec 3, while Ian Nisse finished his on the Thu and managed to complete the advanced course diving on Friday and Saturday. Eric and Delilah drove down to Nomad Ocean Adventure on Thu but due to a wrong turn we will say no more about didn't start their course until Friday, but still they managed to complete it on surfacing from the last dive Saturday. Congratulations for great work on the part of all concerned, and a quite memorable weekend!

We started at noon at Freestyle Divers. Dibba Rock showed us the best diving of the weekend, remarkably so. For the noon dive, Bobbi and I were met there by Ian and Godelieve and her kids Ianthe and Rosanna, who are getting tall and mature in their diving. Freestyle seems so warm and friendly, especially in great weather. The water is getting a bit cool though, 26 degrees, needs a full wetsuit. We got in the boat impeccably piloted by Iva the Diva. He dropped us on one of the eastern moorings so we had a long easterly swim to what used to be raspberry coral where the vis was decent for a change, the better to see the sharks. Once we were on the coral, they appeaed over the reef with great regularity. I saw at least a dozen. Others saw fewer but I think everyone saw something, except possibly Godelieve, because she was with Rosanna, who has developed a keen ability to discover things in rocks and sand that I miss while hunting larger game. We all at least saw the turtles, and Ian completed the skills for his 3^rd open water course dive.

Hasan joined us for the second dive at 3, which was even better. This time we were dropped at a mooring east of the coral patch, where it was just a quick hop to where the sharks were. Our plan was to go north over the reef, pass by the aquarium corals to the east, then go north and east again around the island. However, divers in our group had some delays in getting down and moving on their way, and Mohammed had a group of beginners which due to these delays cut across our bow heading north, so I decided to move us down the reef to the south so we wouldn't be behind Mohamed's group with all the wildlife scared away. It was a good move because being in the lead like that I was able to spot a black tip right away and keep him in my sites long enough for everyone, I think, to see it.

We went to the end of the reef where I am sometimes no longer able to find the way west, and due to that I turned us around back to the north. There were turtles there, and in the distance I saw what I was sure was the eye spots and triangle shape of a devil ray, but it passed before anyone else saw it. We continued over the reef and picked up the school of barracudas we had seen on the previous dive, getting close enough for me to count 12. At the end of the reef I was lining up my compass on the sand patch for the trip to the aquarium corals to the east when suddenly a school of devil rays appeared between the two coral patches. We moved in close before they shied away. Bobbi said she counted 30, they were quite a sight.

We passed alongside the aquarium where there are always beautiful fishes, huge puffers amid a wall of snappers, parrots and fan tailed rainbow wrasse, but there was little else as interesting as what we had seen already. Hasan was low on air so I put up a marker buoy and attached it to Bobbi's bcd. I surfaced with Hasan and got Iva to pick him up and then went back down on the marker buoy. Bobbi was leading shallow in the rocks at the back of island, so when I reached her I took over the marker and headed down into the sand. We might have looked for rays and jaw fish there but only Ianthe was with us at depth (12 meters). The others were strung up the line between the bottom and the marker. So 45 min into the dive, we ended. Hasan had missed nothing after he left, but the first 30 min of the dive was excellent!

It was dark when we moved over the border into Oman. Due to national day in UAE the streets were festive with lights and cars decked out in flags and pictures of the country's leaders, kids standing with heads out of sun roofs, created a massive traffic jam. That afternoon there had been a regatta of gayly decorated boats, dozens of them, which motored across our shallow dive site, and it appeared they were about to do the same on the return leg as we were heading out in boats at 3. But the coast guard boat overseeing the event did a good job of nudging them away from the rock, so they were much more picturesque than dangerous. The cars on the road cruising Dibba and the roads into and out were less picturesque and a bit more dangerous.

But the worst thing to happen was that Eric and Delilah, heading up the 311, missed the turn for Dibba and continued instead toward RAK and over the border on the road to Kassab. They were almost there when they finally reached us and we turned them around and headed them back to where we were. I had agreed to give them a diving course this weekend and the plan was to go in the pool that evening at Nomad. However, they didn't arrive until almost dinner time, and they ended by taking the quiz that evening and picking out their dive gear, but not entering the pool for their first module due to the delicious fragrances eminating from Sophien's Brazilian BBQ. So we agreed to meet in the pool next morning at 6 a.m.

My logged dives #1025-1026

Friday, December 3, 2010

I was up then and about to knock on Eric and Delilah's door when it opened as they were just emerging wearing wetsuits, pretty keen for 6 a.m. in the morning. The trouble was the sun was hardly up by then, only an orange glow from over the ocean, and it was cold outside and especially in the pool! Freezing. Still we managed to get modules 1, 2, AND three done by about ten. For one of them Hassan joined us for his module 4, and when Eric and Delilah finished, I managed to get Hasan through his module 5 by 11:00. So in 5 hours that morning, I taught all the PADI modules, 1 through 5.

To complicate things only slightly, Ian was starting his advanced course as well, so I was organizing 3 open water dive students at different stages in the course and Ian's open water diving. Nomad was busy on Friday so we were on Chris's new boat and had other divers with us, but I was relieved of having to organize that as Mark, another instructor, was doing the honors.

We actually got away in good order, well before noon, and by shortly after 1:00 we had our first time divers in the water and diving for the first time in their lives. This created some awkward moments, as happens, and the first part of my dive was at 5 meters while I tried to keep people with ear and buoyancy problems moving in a safe space along the reef. Meanwhile the other divers in our group moved below us. When we got to the wall where the coral gardens end and the easterly currents begin I turned everyone around. Meanwhile my divers were getting their act together and we were moving among the fishes at 12-14 meters. I remember a lovely tableau of half a dozen lion fish hovering in midwater, but not much else about the dive itself, except that vis was good, it was quite pleasant, and everyone stayed down about 50 minutes.

We did our next dive at Wonder Wall, called locally Ras Sanut. Ian was managing his own advanced course, having done a boat dive the first dive and planning to do multilevel the next. He was buddying with Bobbi and he worked out a profile that would allow him to go to 18 meters for half an hour and spend the remainder of the dive at 12 meters or higher. Godelieve and her brood moved off on their own and I took my o/w students and got Hasan through his last exercises for the last dive and Eric and Delilah through their presentations. We then moved off through the brooding underwater island landscape of Ras Sanut and came up in the current that is often present off the point. I had warned Godelieve about it and told her if caught in it to just enjoy it and that is what she did. We were on the same ride as we saw them at the end of the dive. Everyone emerged from it happily being swept gently to the east.

My logged dives #1027-1029

Saturday, December 4, 2010

That evening Hasan left as did Godelieve and family, leaving Bobbi and I with Ian and Eric and Delilah. Next day dawned with all staying in bed until the sun was coming up over the horizon, when I met Eric and Delilah in the pool at the ever so slightly warmer hour of 8 a.m. They got through their last two pool modules in good order. Ian proposed doing 3 dives that day so that he could complete his advanced course, but the request was denied because there were others joining us in our boat. But then the others got delayed in Dhaid and couldn't make it on time, so at 11 we were given the go-ahead to dive as a unit, just us on the boat, which had on board 4 extra tanks for the missing divers, so Ian got his wish.

Ian and I kitted up and buddy checked prior to arrival at Lima Rock, and we jumped down to 25 meters for his deep dive, did the exercises required, and then explored down to 30 meters looking for the leopard shark that had been there the day before, but couldn't find it, so we returned to do a safety stop right at 20 min into the dive before returning to the surface. There Eric and Delilah were ready to go under the guidance of dive mistress Bobbi and we popped in for their dive #3, and Ian's peak buoyancy. On this dive everyone was comfortable and we had time to look around at 16 meters. We found several torpedo (electric) rays and many grey moray eels. We surfaced after 45 minutes.

From there we went to Ras Morovi for our last dive, Ian's navigation. On the surface I put Eric and Delilah through all the flexible skills, with Ian and Bobbi joining in the water just as we finished. I had devised a cunning plan whereby we would drop down and put up a marker buoy for reference. Then Eric led us to the south for 12 kick cycles while Ian continued for 27 with Bobbi, and we all turned 180 degrees and met back at the marker buoy.

So far so good, and this time Ian started his square to the west, with Delilah following just 12 kick cycles and taking us back to the marker buoy. While Ian and Bobbi completed the square I took Eric and Delilah 27 kick cycles to the south to try and find the cup that Ian was supposed to have left at that point. We looked for it there but couldn't find it, but meanwhile Ian and Bobbi appeared right on cue, having completed their square to that point. We all proceeded back to the marker buoy, which I retrieved and stowed as we completed our dive out on the reef at Ras Morovi, doubling back to the north to make our way through the cabbage coral on the far side of the reef. We didn't see much in the way of animals but it was a well executed dive, a great end to an advanced course and two open water ones.