On Friday May 3, we left via Düsseldorf and Dubai to Male for a one-week cruise in the Maldives. After the cruise we booked 4 days extension on the island of Asdu.
After a long journey we finally arrived on the Nautilus. It is a beautiful ship, spacious cabins, large lounge, very large sun decks. There were 15 people on board, all Dutch, and it was certainly not crowded on the boat. Diving is done from a dhoni, the typical boats of the Maldives. All diving gear is left on the dhoni, so there was no mess on board. The noisy process of refilling the tanks, was simply done in a little distance away from the main ship.  So the guests were not bothered by the sounds of the compressor during their morning / afternoon nap.

The planned route started in Male, then from north to south through the Ari Atoll and then to the South Male Atoll. We were a bit in between the 2 monsoons. The visibility on the dive sites in Ari Atol was therefore very poor, in South Male it was a little better. Due to the change in monsoons, it was also not known exactly where the manta rays were. We unfortunately did not see them during diving.

In the beginning the weather wasn’t great. While anchoring in the lagoon of a small atoll for the night, at about 1 o’clock at night we were suddenly startled by a lot of shouting and running back and forth above our huts. Heavy rain and wind hit our skylight window. Soon we could hear the anchor being lifted. We were not feeling very safe in our lower deck cabin at that time, so, we went upstairs to the lounge. We were not the first to arrive there. It turned out that the anchor had started to drift, the wind was pushing the boat towards the rocks and we dragged the anchor behind us. We were moving backwards towards the reef and a large rock. Fortunately, a number of fellow divers had large dive lights on board. This prevented us from crashing on the rocks. 

Then the diving, that’s what we come for.
Almost all corals have been destroyed by “El Niño”. The result is that you actually only see bare rocks, which were once beautiful coral formations. In some places there is a glimmer of hope, and the coral starts to grow a little again.

This apparently does not really matter for the fish, because they were still present in large numbers. As always in the Indian Ocean, there were sharks (gray reef sharks and whitetip sharks), eagle rays, turtles, beautiful reef fish, moray eels, large hunting jacks and trevallies, bat fish, and friendly napoleons.

Have you ever been in a ripping current? Well, we did a dive in one!
After jumping in the first divers could only reach the reef with great difficulty. We had to swim against the current, so as not to be swept away completely. Hanging on to a rock, was all we could do to stay on the reef. Our bubbles had an almost horizontal path upwards, the masks almost blew from our face, looking back was not an option. Theo gestured that we had to move to the rock wall to find a sheltered place near a cave.

Unfortunately, the current was still the same. Then… a small tap on the mask, mask half full of water (in one hand a camera, with the other clinging to a rock, panic, NOT ENOUGH HANDS!). There was no alternative, we just let the current take us away along the reef. Clear mask. Everything under control again, we move fast along the reef. The general feeling was that this was no longer fun. For us “end of dive” after 6 minutes.

Final damage: 1 diver with flesh wounds of a few centimeters on inside fingers; various legs with scraped skin (in people with shorty); 1x eye squeeze on both eyes (this doesn’t improve the looks); 1 diver bitten by a moray eel (be careful which rock you grab). Fortunately, no further more serious consequences, our group had come up fairly undamaged.

May 2002