Our fourth trip to Maldives, and the first time doing land based diving. Getting there was messy: flew overnight from HK-Singapore-Male, only to find that our morning flight from Male to Fuvamulah was delayed by 8+ hours. By the time we flew over and got the the resort, it was close to midnight; so we canceled our first dive scheduled for the next day. We stayed at the Tigershark Residence, designed, owned, and run by a bunch of divers. The room is comfortable with a large bed, a nice semi-outdoor bathroom, with A/C and a nice long table for camera gear, charging etc. The electrical sockets are multi-system, so no adaptor is required. There is a swimming pool and fruit trees outside, and a lounge with TV that feels a bit like a larger version of the lounges on liveaboards. All meals were included in our package, and served buffet style in the dining area - a covered front patio.
The Food
The resort is owned by a bunch of Singaporean/Chinese folks. They have managed to grab a damn good chef from China - we ate pretty much Chinese food for all meals, and it was phenomenal.
Typical lunch would have 3 dishes (a Maldivian tuna curry, a vegetable+chicken dish, and a veggie dish with rice). Typical dinner had anything between 5 and 8 dishes, including a huge plate of tuna sashimi which was absolutely fresh, and several
other veggie, chicken and beef dishes (there is no pork). The star dish on several nights was a fish called Kattlehi - one of the best tasting fish we have had (similar, but better I think than Wahoo).
Diving:
The typical diving routine is to leave the resort around 8am, a 15 min drive out to the pier, and another 15 min boat ride to the morning dive site. Then we do the surface interval in the boat (which is very large, and comfortable for the 10-odd divers we had),
followed by dive 2, and then return back to the resort for lunch. Then we'd leave at 2pm or so for the third dive of the day. We didn't do any night dives.
We skipped the early morning dive on our first day, but they swung the boat back to the pier to pick us up for the second dive. After that, we made all dives, for a total of 14 dives in 5 days.
Most popular site for the first dive is Ferikede, where we routinely were at 35+m, or even 40+m, where some of our group saw hammerhead sharks on one day. There were also thresher sharks, but the two that we saw were at 50+m when we were up around 30m or so.
Almost all non-Tiger dives, we were 30+m and pretty much all dives were completed in the shallow, clearing deco. Visibility was good, and temperature was around 28-29 degrees C. Occasionally there was a thermocline aorund 30m.
The tiger shark (which is the main attraction of Fuvamulah) site is just outside the pier, and only around 12~15m. Each resort is allocated a 30min time slot each day, so the site is never crowded. It a sandy bottom, and occasionally large boats chug past, overhead.
So the water is sometimes murky. This also happens when there is some surge. There are relatively few dive sites around the island, so we repeated several sites, particularly Ferikede (looking for hammerheads and threshers), and Havitha Fannu (looking for the Sand tiger).
Dive guides were local guys who are very good (particularly Nazeef, who is also maintaining a log on the behaviour of the sand-tigers).
7 Jan: (missed morning dive), Tiger shark dive, Havitha Fannu
8 Jan: Farikede, Tiger shark dive, Rasge Fannu
9 Jan: Farikede, Rasge Fannu, Havitha Fannu
10 Jan: Farikede, Thoondu, Tiger shark dive
11 Jan: Coral garden, Havitha Fannu, Tiger shark dive
About the photos
This was a frustrating trip photo-wise for me. It's a slight learning curve to pick up the new camera (Saony A7 IV) and housing. Also, I was going to try the WWL-1B form Nauticam (actually, only tried on one day). It is basically the first time that I was trying mainly wide angle photography - which is so different from my usual fish portrait and/or macro. On top of that, I wanted to pick up making videos. In the end, all of the learning, together with deep dives and lower ambient light made for lots of poor photos/videos. Hope to get better at the game over the next dive trips. There is a video compilation at Youtube link (4K): Fuvamulah dive trip, Jan 2024.
Gear: This was my second time out with the Sony A7 IV and 28-60 lens in Nauticam housing; On one day I used the Nauticam WWL-1B wide angle wet lens. Inon Z220 strobe in slave and a small X-Adventurer 2500 lumen video light. Canon G12 in Canon housing; AdventureX 1200 lumen video light. Kitty used the Sony Nex-7 in Nauticam, and a 1200 lumen video light.
