Bhatala 1998

Ari Beach 1999

Bhatala 1998                   

My first trip to the Maldives was in February 1998. My wife and I spent the first week on a tour of Sri Lanka, which will be documented separately. At the end of the tour, we flew from Columbo to Male and the by sea plane to Bathala island in the Ari Atoll. I picked it for 2 reasons, it was small with an excellent house reef and because of the sea plane transfer; one of those things I had always wanted to experience. We had a wonderful week on our desert island. There were only about 40 beach huts, the dining room had a sand floor and you could walk round the whole island in 10 minutes. All of the other guests were German and it was obviously a popular place. The German Doctor I buddied with was on his 15th visit and he was not alone in being a repeat visitor. The main thing I can remember now was the strong currents and I had to learn new tricks (from my buddy) in how to handle this situation. The dive guides seemed oblivious to the divers puffing along in their wake, but we survived and enjoyed some excellent diving. As it was mainly a family holiday, I only did one boat dive a a day. However, my enduring memory is of the the many times I spent snorkelling from the jetty onto the house reef. In fact many people spent much of their time diving the house reef rather than taking the boat trips. You could just about swim round the island on a tank of air. Standing on the jetty, you could often see sharks swimming just out in the blue and every evening a small shoal of Stingrays would visit  the shallow waters at the top of the house reef. Boat diving was done from the Dhoni's which also provided  all the other routine transport between islands and from the seaplane mooring  Overall I was not disappointed though the quality of the pictures I took was embarrassingly poor, not helped by low res scanning.

    On this trip I dived at:

Grumpy looking blue & yellow fish over some healthy looking hard coral	Corals on a reef wall
Goat fish	Bhatala from the dive boat
Our end of the beach from the jetty	Our desert island room
Pipe fish	Sweetlips
Stingray under the jetty	Another Stingray, also under the jetty
Titan Triggerfish	Wall to wall Three Spot Wrasse at feeding time under jetty
Scorpionfish on top of Coral	Squirrelfish

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Ari Beach 1999

This was also a family holiday but we went for 2 weeks so I managed about 12 dives  in total plus a lot of snorkelling. Ari Beach is at the bottom end of the Ari Atoll and much larger than Bathala. It took a good hour to walk all around and while we were there, they were extending the accommodation by building huts on stilts into the lagoon. We went in October and it was It was much windier than I remember from Bathala, it also rained several times, never unpleasant but obviously normal as all the rooms were equipped with golf umbrellas. We used the sped boat for outward transfer and the Sea Plane (at considerable extra cost for the return trip as it gave extra time for sightseeing in Male. Flights were via Bahrain where we had a 2 hour layover, time to spend a lot of money in the duty free shop. 

This period coincided with the El Ninio current which raised the water temperature and affected the hard corals so I may not have seen the place at its best. Certainly the pictures (which are not very good) do not reflect anything very exotic in the way of hard corals, though the soft corals seem ok. Most of the dives seemed to be on fairly deep reefs (25-28M) with not so many wall dives or places to fizz off. I did see sharks on several occasions and a Manta Ray.  Though there was a good mix of nationalities amongst the holidaymakers, the majority of the divers were German and my buddy for most of the time was a young lady called Silke. Though the island had  large a shallow lagoon it was frankly not too interesting being mainly sand with the odd coral block. It was not really possible to get over the dge of the lagoon onto the fringing reef. Each day they would provide a Dhoni to take snorkellers to a reef about 1/2 mile offshore. This was in about 4 metres of water and whilst there was  a good variety of fish life, getting decent pictures was not easy as you had to keep duck diving. Annoyingly, I missed the snorkelling trip on our last full day and thereby missed out on a Whale Shark  which decided to swim by! 

Overall a good holiday and writing this has made me keen to pay another visit to the Maldives. Really there are 2 obstacles, fisrtly its much more exensive than the Red Sea. Secondly, its a very long flight - 10-15 hours including stops against 5 hours for the Red Sea.

I dived the following sites, some more than once:

      Pictures from Ari Beach

Squirrelsfish and Antheas	My buddy Silke Swimming under the Coral Arch
Bannerfish	Black Coral, quite rare and valuable if collected
Blue and Yellow Surgeon Fish. You can see the tangs at the base of the dorsal fin	My buddy Silke from Gernany
Clownfish and Anemone	Cornet Fish
Lion Fish on a coral block in the snorkelling Lagoon	Big Fan Corals in a deep gully
File Fish	Small Grouper
Climbing the ladder into the dhoni	Me posing in front of a mangrove tree
On board the dhoni	The jetty at Ari Beach
Moray taken whilst snorkelling of the House Reef	Grey Reef Shark asleep on the bottom
Manta Ray swimming close to surface. we were at 20M or so	Spanish Dancer, lovely purple colour
Stingray	Tulip Coral
Turtle	Nice Soft Coral
The Cafe area at Ari Beach	My daughter Vicky examining the water for fish

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