One week of underwater safari in Tofo, Mozambique

After Kruger, we boarded a plane from Nelspruit to Inhambane in Mozambique. Mozambique is supposed to be one of the last frontiers in scuba diving, unspoiled beaches and hoards of big critters in the water. We were going to put this to the test!

The dive shop we chose was the one who answered all our questions on internet and were willing to take us crazy motivated divers for three dives a day for the whole week - Diversity Scuba. This is no Thailand liveaboard. We have to launch the boat every dive from the beach, the boat gets pushed into the water by the car, but then we have to push the boat into the water, us, divemasters, and boat crew included. Then it’s a bumpy, initially scary ride into the big blue...



The weather was great, the temperature was hot (mid thirties) and water temp at surface was about 28 centigrades. We hit a few thermoclines around 25-26 degrees into the deep.

Nitrox proved useful on this dive as a lot of dive sites were in the 25-30 meters range. Beginner divers aware, this is no easy diving like Thailand. We are very proud of D who dove all dives! I’m thinking of divemastering at that dive shop one day, just for fun J

And were the critters ever there!!! On our first day, second dive and first deep dive, less than 24 hours after having spotted the leopard in Kruger, we saw at Galeria 1) four manta rays 2) a whale shark (!) 3) fifteen devil rays dancing around at the safety spot.

On the 15 dives that I did, less than five did NOT include any manta ray sightings. Having hit low season right after the holidays, we were the only group of the dive shop (three of us!) with the odd solo person joining our bunch. Visibility was awesome, the reef was pristine, and the fish were plentiful. Of note is the world-famous Manta Reef, which we dove no less than four times. Our last dive (yesterday!) on manta reef finished with four mantas dancing around at 21 meters for an eternity. And we did our own whale-shark safari by swimming with a little juvenile of oh, just 6 meters, as a surface interval between dives. Pretty amazing!!!

One of many mantas that indulging in posing


Little mobula dancing


Mobulas aka devil rays dancing at the surface intervals
Seeing mobulas = there are no sharks (they eat them!)


Mozambican bubbles


Very curious grouper who followed us around


Crocodilefish eye


Praia da Tofo

Back to the Similans! And more tsunami stories...

So on a bit of a whim, back to the Similans with a different bunch of divers!

Interesting post found in Patong

patong, originally uploaded by Galadryel.

This time it was with GF from Vancouver and IG from Malaga, met in Kapalai. A mere 3 days on the South Siam 3 boat, elbowing the day-trippers, and the same playful mantas as in January in Koh Bon. Actually, there was even a whale shark which we must have missed by about 2 minutes. The managing team of the boat seemed to enjoy producing decibels and ordering about. Thankfully we got N, a Thai divemaster who was like Buddha in the water - he would come back from the dives at 100 bars while GF and I were at 50 bars!

The boat manager J recounted us his experience with the tsunami in 2004. It was rather interesting. They were diving off Breakfast Bend, one of the famous dive sites, and because of strange currents the dive had been cut short. They were doing their 5 m surface interval when the tsunami arrived. Breakfast Bend was literally falling apart: reefs were torn away, and fish and sea snakes were dying in front of them. The water became dark and all of a sudden the computers indicated 40 m depth when they had been at 5 m seconds previous. J grabbed the least experienced diver, who had saucer-size eyes by that time, and took control of his buoyancy. He indicated to everybody that they were to fin as strong as possible to surface, which they all did. They had to fight some serious currents as it happened, and from the surface, they could see the boats fighting strange vortexes and doing roundabouts. Finally after 20 min the boat picked them up and still, nobody knew what was going on. Only when the boat got closer to shore did they hear from the Thai navy, and even then, they thought that there would be another wave, not that they had already gone through it. The liveaboard continued its trip onto other undamaged reefs in the Similans. Paradoxically there was minimal damage to the dive sites (except for Breakfast Bend which had been thoroughly destroyed) but the season was ruined as everybody cancelled their trip afterwards.

On South Siam 3, there was also T from Germany who was a divemaster on South Siam when the tsunami hit. The boat was on Koh Bon when it happened and they were on surface interval. T was turning his back to the Koh Bon opening when one of his guests said 'Look! The hole has disappeared!'. He didn't believe it. But indeed the hole was sunk under 8 m of water, upon successive waves. Not much else happened - no vortex here, just higher water than usual. It also took them a while to realize what had happened. This is T's first time coming back since the tsunami. Thankfully he was greeted in Koh Bon by a whale shark, his first sighting!

The hole in Koh Bon

hole koh bon, originally uploaded by Galadryel.

Elephant Head Rock, Similan no. 7 - Hin Pusa

Elephant Head Rock, originally uploaded by Galadryel.

Where's that boat picking us up?

where's that boat picking us up?, originally uploaded by Galadryel.

IG checking out the manta

igmanta, originally uploaded by Galadryel.

watersun, originally uploaded by Galadryel.

In Fiji in 2002, I learned that this little critter is quite skittish. Finally I managed to capture one on digital film:
Long-nose Hawkfish

longnose hawkfish, originally uploaded by Galadryel.

mantasun, originally uploaded by Galadryel.

Similans Jan 2007: Diving Life

Diving pictures from Similans trip, Jan 9-15, 2007

Bubbles in Andaman Sea.JPG, originally uploaded by Galadryel.

Soft coral and S.JPG, originally uploaded by Galadryel.

little clownfish.JPG, originally uploaded by Galadryel.

clown triggerfish.JPG, originally uploaded by Galadryel.

There was a lot of current at Koh Bon around the corner, just when the mantas float above you!

stuck in current.jpg, originally uploaded by Galadryel17.

While we were trying to shoot a picture like this at Koh Bon,

best safety stop ever.JPG, originally uploaded by Galadryel.

This came to investigate us and showed us its belly!

curious manta.jpg, originally uploaded by Galadryel.

manta sun.JPG, originally uploaded by Galadryel17.

Big Island Diving: to fit all tastes and budgets!

There was a bandwagon created by the first of our group arrived in Kailua-Kona. The first two L siblings who arrived the day before me got oriented and started diving right away. They got me to meet them the next day at the very reasonable hour of... 6h15 am. That day, we dove at 7h30 am, went to the airport to pick up the third L sibling, dove twice afterwards - once with dolphins, and then I went to pick up S in the evening at the airport again.

It continued like that for the rest of the week, almost like a liveaboard. Thankfully the weather turned out to be very cooperative and there were no more flash flood warnings like last week on Oahu. Since we are all diving fanatics (1 instructor, 2 divemasters and 1 to be, and 1 rescue) and there were 5 of us, it was quite easy logistically to get organized, and we were on a roll. 5 days of diving, 17 dives, 12 of which exhausting shore dives, 5 night dives. Scuba diving itself is not a sport, but shore diving is a completely different matter! Logging tanks and weights and hopping with dive gear on lava rocks, yay! I've learned that I'm a boat divemaster and not a shore one; that I tend to have very unclassy exits on shore dives; that bloopers is my specialty on videos, even when it's really the manta's fault; that one can have coughing fits underwater; and that I am definitely not gifted at underwater navigation, but then again, that's no news. Other things that I have discovered: tangs are surgeonfishes, sea urchin spines can go through my new 5 mm wetsuit (ayoye!), and dolphins can be heard cackling and whistling from very far underwater...

So diving in the Big Island can be either very cheap or very expensive. Try to guess which dive was expensive and which wasn't:

Hence:

1) Shore diving with unlimited tank filling and weight rental: 16 dollars for the day. We pulled 3 dives/day for a few days on that. We saw Hawaiian spinner dolphins, tons of moray eels, fish of the Pacific including moorish idols and yellow tangs (as opposed to the standard blue tangs of the Caribbean), turtles, and spotted eagle rays.

2) Boat diving all the way to Au-Au Canyon, blackwater diving in the great (black) big blue looking for pelagic jellyish spaceship-shaped things, and night manta dive: somewhere between 70 to 120$ a dive. Ouch!!! But it was definitely worth it. On our manta night dive in front of the Sheraton Hotel, it was a young female named Wing Ray who came to visit us, still awkward and tumbling around and hitting people with a wing here and there. Apparently she is less than 2 years old and 'only' has a wingspan of 6-8 feet. Notice the big-eyed diver on the manta picture above - that's me :). On our video I actually get hit by Wing Ray, and on my footage you can hear my onomatopeia when I have to dodge her.

S and Wing Ray

My footage of Wing Ray

So that manta curse that I was carrying around - not having seen any mantas in spite of having spent some significant time underwater in South East Asia... well that curse is broken now!