Best of the Maldives: Coral – Park Hyatt Hadahaa

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Tim Godfrey Gaafu Alifu cave

If the underwater stars that dazzle you are star fish, starlets and feather stars, then Park Hyatt Hadahaa is the place to swim to and at.

Adrian Neville tweeted last week, “Park Hyatt house reef, the best corals of any resort bar none. But oddly the fish life is as quiet as life on the island.”

Not much better authority than Adrian Neville. And he’s just finished latest research for his upcoming edition of his must-have book on Maldives resorts ‘Resorts of the Maldives’. Check out his Twitter stream for 140-character advance tidbits.

Hadahaa is in the Gaafu Alifu atoll which Harwood and Bryning’s book “Complete Guide to Diving and Snorkeling the Maldives” describes as “The coral reefs inside the atoll are in great condition and a marvel to dive and snorkel” (see picture above).

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Best of Maldives – Fish Breeding – Four Seasons Landaa Giraavaru

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Clarks Anemonefish juvenile

Question: For those who have been paying attention this past week, what is this a picture of?

Answer: Now that is a Nemo fish! I know because it has the three white stripes!

[Soundeffect]: Buzzzz! Wrong. Actually, the Maldive species ‘Amphiprion clarkii’ has three white stripes when they are young, but as they mature they turn a dark-brown/blackish colour.

Whatever you want to call them, one of the best places to see Anemonefish is Four Seasons Landaa Giravaru. Not just Anemonefish in general, but specifically the babies as their Marine Discovery Center has a breeding research project underway. One downside to the popularity of the Disney film is the popularity of capturing ‘Nemo’ fish for fish tanks. Landaa hopes to be able to improve breeding knowledge to both stock the ocean and to provide an alternative source of supply for fish tanks so they won’t be hunted from the reefs.

If you thought that Anemonefish were cute, the babies are all more the cuter. I couldn’t get my wife out of the Center she was so entranced watching them dart in and out of their host anemones in an incessant tease of pseudo-hide-and-seek. And not just the anemonefish, but the anemones themselves provided a bit of action. You could see them in all different positions all over the tanks. Resident marine biologist Harry Masefield (see photo below) explained that the anemones were quite active and often tried to escape from the tanks by crawling out the top and so they had to devise all sorts of guards. With their swaying tendril-like arms they seem more like colourful vegetation than the quite animated animals that they are.

Four Seasons Landaa Giraavaru Marine Discovery Center anemonefish tank

Four Seasons Landaa Giraavaru Marine Discovery Center anemonefish

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Best of the Maldives: Nurse Sharks – Dhiggiri

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Nurse Shark

These creatures should get an endorsement contract with ‘Night Nurse’, the cold medication to help you sleep. It seems all these Nurse Sharks do is sleep. During the daytime when most dives occur that is.

My wife Lori got to see a couple of them diving Furana Thila from Kurumba. Her log book notes…

“Highlight of the dive was a young nurse shark resting in a shallow cave approximately 1.5 metres long. The mother is often there, but not this time. Saw another resting on the sandy bottom.”

Nurse sharks can be found through out the Maldives. They like caves where they can sleep during the day time. My nomination for the top place to see them is Fulidhoo Caves near Dhiggiri. According to Tim Godfrey’s book on Maldives diving, Fulidhoo Caves is one of 4 cave sites meriting the top 3-stars marks in his ratings and a great place for Nurse Sharks…

“The reef slopes from there to 50 metres with caves and overhangs ranging on depth between 25 and 40 metres. The most interesting feature of this dive are the nurse sharks sleeping in the caves.”

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Best of the Maldives: Fish Frenzy – Velassaru

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Velassaru fish in lagoon

A perfectly tranquil lake-like ocean with shimmering shades of mottled blue…then suddenly it erupts with a hundred tiny splashes. What the…?

This is fish hunting. Big fish going after little fish. The little fish congregate in big schools for some sort of anonymity in numbers, but it only seems to concentrate the opportunity for the big fish like trevallys and jacks. These predators also work in teams casually circling, or should I say ‘encircling,’ their targets until…Wham…they dart through the schools trying to snap at any unfortunately glassfish or blenny they can get their teeth into. The prey shift gears from their near suspended animation to an immediate emergency retreat to any exit they can find including right out of the water into the sky if that means safety.

It is a delightful ‘Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom’ spectacle that you see across the Maldives. But, we were especially captivated by it during our very first trip to the Maldives visiting ‘Laguna Beach’, now redeveloped and renamed to Velassaru. My favourite picture ever taken in the Maldives came about because we were woken from our sleep all the way over in our bungalow early in the morning from the racket of one of these ‘feeding frenzies’. While we have seen many similar sights, we always felt that they were never quite as stunning as what we witnessed with predictable regularity and consistently large scale as what we saw at Velassaru.

We always chalked up the difference to ‘first-timer nostalgia’. But then we had the chance to re-visit the island on our last trip in July and what did we see the very minute we stepped off the boat…cinematic feeding frenzy. In the picture above, you can see the vast shoals of tiny, silvery fish in the lagoon. The light-shaded shapes in the midst of them are the wake of reef sharks who have joined the trevallys in their stalking. The fish wisely clear a path as the juvenile sharks wiggle through their masses. The picture below shows the dynamic more clearly and you can click on it to see even more close up.

I’m suspecting that the intensity of the feeding frenzy action at Velassaru has something to do with its massive shallow lagoon. In the direction of the water villas, the lagoon extends for 2 kilometres. While the long, sandy table means no house reef, I think it does attract more schools like this looking for the protection of the shallows.

Velassaru shark hunting

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Maldives Tour 2011 – Day 13: Kurumba Farewell

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Kurumba is perhaps the most unsung house reef there is. You don’t often hear about it being mentioned as one of the tops, but I must say that Kurumba is simply the best house reef we have ever snorkelled. And we have snorkelled dozens. Especially for reef sharks, Kurumba is Shark Central (though a local tells me that Bandos is also extremely good for reef sharks). Our first snorkel at Kurumba we lost track of how many sharks we saw at about 20. Some well over a metre long. When they swim, sharks shake their butt more than a double-jointed salsa dancer. We thought maybe it was a fluke. Sometimes you see things snorkelling and other times you don’t is typically how it goes. But every single day we snorkelled at Kurumba, we saw tons of fish and lots of reef sharks of all sized.

But that wasn’t all. Lots of sting rays (mostly by the water sports centre), every type of lion fish, a turtle we swam with. A friend we met found an octopus in the lagoon and took lots of pictures. My wife’s favourite was finding a Zebra Moray (see picture below). They are very shy so she waited by his hovel for a long time hoping for him to pop out a bit more for a better photo op.

Dusk seems to be a particularly good time for fish activity. What we recommend is starting your snorkel around the front/reception side of the island (a bit to the left of the restaurants) around 4:00 pm and circle the house reef leisurely until you hit the Sunset Bar. Pull up there just in time for a sunset pina colada. Then, order your dinner right there too and eat on the beach while the sunset sky changes hues and the stars start popping out overhead.

Kurumba zebra moray

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Sex on the Reef

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Coral Polyps

Now that I have your attention! (you know, sometimes titles just write themselves…though ‘Polypamory’ was a really close runner-up). 

The Maldives is renowned for newly betrothed couples consummating their nuptials with a honeymoon celebration. But the very microscopic creatures who built the Maldives over millennia, coral polyps, will be celebrating a honeymoon of their own this week in rather distinctive style. Their rather exotic ‘bedroom’ habits certainly put the ‘moon’ in the ‘honeymoon’. That is according to this month’s Scientific American featuring a piece about Coral Polyp reproduction…

“It is hard to court the opposite sex when you are cemented in place, which explains why polyps—the tiny creatures whose exoskeletons form corals—do not reproduce by mating. Instead they cast millions of sperm and eggs into the sea, where they drift up to the ocean surface, collide, form larvae and float away to form new coral reefs. Polyps may not be picky about their “mates,” but they are sticklers for timing. The polyps in a coral reef will “blow” their eggs and sperm simultaneously in quick frenzies for just one, or maybe a few, consecutive nights a year—and they usually do so shortly after sunset on evenings closely following a full moon…A reef generally picks one day during a full moon in summer to blow, for 20 minutes or so, during the twilight hours.”

I guess if we were going to grant a ‘Best of’ accolade for ‘Reef Romance’ it would have to go to none other than the to Sheraton’s eponymous ‘Full Moon’ resort.

As it happens, this June’s Full Moon offers a special treat as well of an ‘extra long Lunar Eclipse. MSNBC reports “This month’s full moon will pass almost directly through the center of Earth’s shadow on Wednesday in what will be an unusually long total eclipse of the moon, 100 minutes. The next total lunar eclipse of exceptional length will be July 27, 2018, and will last 106 minutes.”

The Full Moon this week rises at 8:14 pm on Wednesday 15th June. It promises to be quite the eventful evening from sea to sky.

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Best of the Maldives: Protected Marine Areas – Coco Palm Dhuni Kolhu

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Baa Atoll Marine Protected Areas

In the spirit of World Oceans Day, the Maldives established a record number of protected marine areas last week in what many consider to be the most spectacular atoll in the Maldives, Baa. The map above links through to the UNESCO map of the areas.

The first 5 areas are in a string right across the centre of the atoll, and at the eastern edge is Coco Palm Dhuni Kolhu. In fact, Dhuni Kolhu is right next to Hanifaru Reef, the closest any resort is to a protected area.

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Best of the Maldives: Diving – Nika

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Gangehi region Ari diving - small

Question asked on Quora last week ‘Where are the best scuba diving sites in the Maldives?’

I turned to my two trusty Maldives diving resources…

Godfrey uses a 4-star rating system where only 4 dive sites out of the nearly 300 he reviewed got the top mark…

Harwood and Bryning are more liberal with their 5-star rating giving 14 dive sites the full marks out of a similar number reviewed.

To no surprise, one can start by looking at the Ari atoll. Three of Godfrey’s four tops are there as are 4 for Harwood and Bryning. The other atoll mentioned by Godfrey is Male and Harwood and Bryning cite 6 in Male atoll (North and South). But I’m weighting Godfrey more because he is being more selective with his top gradings. Furthermore, the Ari atoll has a generally distinctive reputation as being the top atoll for diving in the Maldives. It is the most renowned area for whale sharks in the plankton bloom seasons. Finally, the Male spots are quite spread out, but the two North Ari sites are both very close to each other which secures it.

Godfrey describes Miyaruga, “The landscape is stunning and divers can easily circle the reef in one dive if the current permits…Much of the thila is undercut with caves and the surface is coated in soft coral and colourful sponges.”

Actually, three resorts – Gangehi, Nika and Velidhu – lie close to both these resorts, but mathematically, Nika is the absolutely closest.

Disclaimer – Obviously, ‘the best’ diving is subjective at best. Do many variations of taste and interpretation. Also conditions will vary considerably season to season as well as day to day. A normally mundane area could come alive during certain periods and conditions. Furthermore, the grading system of stars is crude at best. Finally, a number of atoll where there are fewer resorts are not covered at all in these books. This post simply tries to distil some of the basic research and assessment that has been done on the Maldives to date.

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Best of the Maldives: Aquatic Topiary – Four Seasons Landaa Giraavaru

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Four Seasons Landaa Giraavaru coral garden Yin-Yang

While the ‘house reef’ is the ‘main event’ in snorkelling, lagoon snorkelling can be its own treat. During our first, uninitiated trip to the Maldives, we spent nearly the whole week there delightedly snorkelling among the modest coral and rock croppings in the shallow, sandy lagoon. We didn’t even know that there was such a thing as a ‘drop off’. We still enjoy the charms of lagoon snorkelling with some real highlights in our history – a playful octopus, a digging sting ray, a passing manta, and a whole host of turtles and fish.

If you can’t get the snorkelers to the reef, bring the reef to the snorkelers. Often the main problem with house reefs are their accessibility. Eventually, you can get to a drop off point, but you have swim over long expanses of relatively boring white sand. So as a part of its award winning reef regeneration efforts, Four Seasons Landaa Giraavaru has taken a creative twist on reefs with what can best be described as ‘reef topiary’.

Its showcase piece is the Yin-Yang Coral Garden pictured above. From an aerial view, the coral forms a yin-and-yang symbol. The resort is now planning an encore with a ‘Crescent Moon’ in the works.

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Best of the Maldives: Manta Research – Four Seasons Landaa Giraavaru

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Four Seasons Landaa Giraavaru Manta 2

Mantas are the most magical creatures I have seen in the wild. They have an a otherworldly aura to them that seems almost like a beneficent alien spaceship. And they too appreciate spa treatments that they get from wrasse fish at ‘cleaning stations.’

Similarly smitten Martin Clunes recently produced a television show ‘Man to Manta’ on ITV which is on ITV Player.

The resort most smitten with Mantas has to be Four Seasons Landaa Giraavaru. One of the major focus areas of their Marine Centre are mantas where they run their Maldivian Manta Ray Project (MMRP). The programme was founded by Senior Marine Biologist Guy Stevens and is supported by Save Our Seas. It has the largest number of identified manta rays on record in the world. Landaa honours this work with a distinctive Manta sculpture in its Marine Discovery Centre. And, the Maldives section of Clune’s show is filmed at Landaa including an interview with Stevens.

The picture above was taken during one of our Landaa dives in November.

Martin Clunes Man to Manta

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