I first did some land based diving with Ocean Junkies as soon as I arrived (2 dives in the afternoon after arriving and 2 more dives the next morning before going on the liveaboard). Those dives were actually surprisingly good:
so many eels in a hole
The next morning, I went back with Ocean Junkies for 2 more dives, and they were quite good too:
got lucky to see a tiger shark so close to town
I then went to Carpe Novo, we were supposed to get a checkout dive that day, but it never happened, so in the end we started diving the next day:
We did a couple of dusk/night dives:
we got to see a whale shark in passing
rally realy small octopus
this was really special, we saw 2 octopus having sex
poor shark went for a tasty lure
beautiful jelly fish
We definitely got to see a lot of eagle rays:
We also got to see a fair amount of nurse sharks, they are so cute. I found this one:
One of the highlights was this dive where we saw 8 or 9 mantas that stayed with us for the whole dive:
It's a good thing that I had two cameras (RX100M3 and RX100M7), as the M3 I normally used, ended up fogging up from how many pictures I took, and I was able to continue with the other one:
We got lucky with octopuses, plenty to see, one even went feeding for us
And that was it for the dives, 9 days, unfortunately not a lot of dives for that amount of time (only 25 dives), but apparently in Maldives, it's hard to get more for a variety of reasons (3 dives/day seems standard, and it's not allowed to boat at night if the weather isn't good, and it wasn't).
We had a fair amount of rain, and bad visibilty and low light most days, but all in all, we still had a good time and saw things.
We saw some nice islands from the boat:
The day before last, we got a covid test so that we could fly out:
'till next time:
If I come back, they recommended a south trip the 10 day trip coming back in April-May, or a north only trip (which they don't currently offer).