Absolutely the best thing about the hotel was the dive operation. The dive team were extremely professional, friendly and knowledgeable. The equipment was all in excellent condition. The dive boat was a large wooden dhow. Everybody had numbered crates for their gear so you could easily keep all your kit together for the entire holiday. There was none of that Caribbean scrabbling around on a central console for yesterday’s weight belt that someone else had commandeered.
The first dive was a shallow one on the house reef. There were just two of us led by Ahmed. The visibility was poor but there were lots of fish and large batfish swimming up to our faces.
In total I did 13 dives and I have to say they were very average. The visibility was dreadful, sometimes the current was overpowering and the coral had clearly suffered in the last bleaching of 2016 so was under-whelming. It was recovering but I have experienced much better dives in the Caribbean in places that are not reputed for great diving. The hotel has a marine research lab and they are re-seeding coral which looks healthy and is growing well.
The good points were that there were very few divers, the dive team were great and I met a truly inspirational couple. They were in their 80’s and only took up diving 10 years ago when they retired. Since then they have clocked up 1100+ dives all over the world. The wife Jeri took videos of the dives, which she posted on You Tube and made a tidy sum from advertising with her 10000 followers! I said that much as I love diving , I prefer safaris. Their response was that they did too, but would do that again in the future, when they were too old to dive. What a great attitude!
On our last two dives we were returning to the hotel when we were surrounded by a huge pod of dolphins – probably 100 or more. We stopped the boat, slipped into the sea and were privileged enough to snorkel with them. What a fantastic experience.
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