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CORALREPUBLIC Maldives,
2010
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Trip
dates: |
Combined trip to Sri Lanka 19 - 28
August, then to Maldives, 28 August - 4 September 2010, arranged with Elephant
Island Tours (the company is no longer operating or no longer has a website). |
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Boat
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Helengeli Island Resort, North Male Atoll. The resort was acquired since by Oblu and considerably updated and improved,
now being probably a lot more pricey than when we visited. |
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Surprisingly, most of the divers in
the Island were not avid photographers, so the centre did not seem to think
it a priority to set up facilities for that, even if they were really
helpful. Count on doing everything in your room, including rinsing and
charging. |
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11 dives in 5.5 days of diving. |
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Again, typical monsoon conditions,
but not too choppy. Medium to good visibility, 29°C water temperature. Strong
currents at Helengeli Thila,
and I mean strong. Mild to medium in other sites. |
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After a busy week of touring
beautiful Sri Lanka (including a memorable Esala Perahera on 24 August in Kandy), we gave Maldives another
try. Initially, we wanted to dive Hanifaru Bay,
where mantas and whale sharks congregate in this time of the year. No luck.
There are three resorts close to Hanifaru, in Baa
Atoll, two of them impossibly expensive, one reasonably priced, but fully
booked when we enquired months before our trip. I would have been tempted to
spend the money in any of the other two, but the sites gave no guarantee
whatsoever that they would take us to Hanifaru,
actually, and the resorts were the honeymooning kind, so I thought it was not
smart to pay so much and then find once there that we would not be able to
dive the Bay, so we decided to go to a divers’ island instead. You can see a
few topside images at the gallery here. We liked Helengeli.
Small, cozy, Swiss-run, great food and truly kind
service. It is full of repeat guests and the place feels like an intimate,
unpretending and friendly resort. Decent dive centre, they gave us a bonus as
repeat Ocean Pro guests (they had run the centre in Coco Palm two years
earlier, but no longer operate in that island). We dove with competent divers
and were taken to good sites. The best dive around Helengeli
is the house Thila, in the southern channel. Sharks
were plentiful, but the current almost tore the regulator from my mouth. I
was diving on this trip for the first time with my new gear, a Canon 550D
camera in a new Hugy housing and my regular strobes
and arms. When we jumped in at the Thila, some of
the guys looked at me apprehensively, when we surfaced, they told me they
were surprised I still had it. It was ripping. I was hardly able to shoot
while holding to the reef for dear life. Although visibility was not great, we
did manage to see a couple of sites with healthy coral cover, particularly Morena Reef. I liked that very much, and there are really
big schools all around. Still, the reefs are not as rich as I recall.
Obviously, some coral species are coming back more easily than others, but
some comeback is there, for sure. Otherwise, the house reef is great at Helengeli, well-marked and easy to dive, even with the
currents. My best half, however, cut his hand pretty bad on our third day and
had to stay dry for the rest of the stay. They took him to Male to get
stitched, efficiently and nicely. At the time of writing this, though, we are
still waiting for our insurance reimbursement, 4 months later. The fast boat
to Male cost us 600 USD. I told Paul that was surely the most expensive taxi
ride he’d take in his life. One thing I did not realise when
booking the trip is the following: in July-August, the wind comes from the
south-west. I believed it would be best to go to an island located in the
eastern part of the Atoll because it would be a bit more protected from the
monsoon winds. Wrong idea. What you want is incoming currents, because they
bring clear water into the atoll. Where we stood, currents were outgoing from
the atoll into the open sea, carrying all sorts of sediments and therefore a
lot less visibility. Better to be exposed to the winds (a bit choppy in the
beach) but have clear water to dive in close by. So if you dive the Maldives
in the Northern hemisphere Summer, book an island in the west rim of the
atoll (whichever one you choose). |
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