November 6 – Third Day of Diving (Whale Sharks)
The trend of the first diving being awesome continues today. Kudarah Thila is the name and fish is the game. This was an underwater pinnacle with a small amount of current and a large amount of fish…Blue Corner (from Palau) number of fish…
The two negatives were the visibility was still not awesome, but it is good enough to not be too much of a bother. The other bad side was that because this is one of the more famous sites, there were about 5-6 boats by the time we were done. We were the first ones in but we felt like we were under siege the whole time. Oh well.
Now that the dive is over, we are promised Whale sharks…we are going to go to the south barrier where they always hang out. We will see how lucky we are…
The dive briefing is called at 9:30 a.m. – the only drawing on the dive board is that of a whale shark…they seem pretty confident. The plan is to go catch it on a boat and then jump in the water in front of it so it swims past. They said not to get in front of it and to avoid the tail. This was all find and good, but we had to actually see one first.
As we get in the dive boat and head out, we see two things; 6 boats headed in the same direction and rain…neither of which are exciting sights. As we cruise along the shoreline, it starts pouring rain. That sucks because if we saw one, the lighting wouldn’t be very good because the sun wasn’t out. We press onward. As we pass ships going in the opposite direction, they indicate to us that they have seen a bunch of whale sharks…our hope grows. We press onward…the rain stops. We press on. Soon we run out of shoreline and turn around. By now we have been boating for almost an hour with no sight. There are maybe 10 other boats going back and forth around us…they said the thing to look for was snorkelers…we saw plenty but they were all on the boats…After what must have been 1.25 hours, we decide to call it and go for our dive. I joke that Beth is haunting the boat causing us not to see one…
The dive is basically along the same coastline that we have been putting in the boat. At first, we see a huge ray…probably 6 feet long…just chilling in the sand. Dad was hanging around looking at that when I see that the lens cap is still on my camera. It is frustrating because I told him to just leave it off and that it will get lost. I hand it to him and he puts it in his pocket. Shortly after, I hear BANG BANG BANG. I start to look around. The banging is much harder than normal and that leads me to believe there is a whale shark! Because we were the last ones to look at the ray, there weren’t very many people around,so I start swimming in the direction of the last person I saw. I see one of the dive masters and he is making the shark symbol and pointing into the blue. My heart starts to beat faster… I look back and Dad is still fiddling with the lens cap and I make the executive decision to leave him. Now, I would like to think that my legs are stronger than any one on the boats…I mean,running 35 miles a week has to count for something…so I put those bad boys into overdrive. I shoot off as fast as I can into the blue…all I see is the fins of some of the other divers. I blow past them and still just follow fins. I check my depth…100 feet…it isn’t wise to go all out that deep, but I go anyway. Soon, I see a whale shark fin appear between all the divers…my heart beats faster… I get close enough to see the whole thing, spots and all! I start recording on my camera and I manage to snap a picture. The shark is a ways beneath me, surrounded by divers. I check and I am still at 100 feet, so I decide not to chase after it – shortly after, it takes a nose dive and is gone into the blue. I manage to snap one still picture. We head back to the reef. I only saw the whale shark for 10-15 seconds, but I at least saw the whole thing! Dad missed it completely. Once back on the reef, I catch my breath and start cruising to a shallower depth. I spend the rest of the diving looking into the blue, but we don’t see anything…
Once we get back to the boat, some of the other divers share their story. As soon as the master diver starts banging on his tank, Jeff looks over and sees the whale shark – he b-lines it over. He said he was swimming with it for a good 2-3 minutes, close enough to touch it! Jim caught a video of it – it was the classic encounter that I was hoping for. I am excited to see it, but I am pretty jealous they got to get as close as they did. He did mention that he went down to 135 feet…on nitrox…That is about 36 feet deeper than the safest depth with nitrox, but he wasn’t down there very long. He made he was back up for a long safety stop.
To make matters worse, I went to download the pictures and video off of my camera and the memory card starts to crap out! I manage to grab the one still picture I took, but the memory card soon craps out and demands to be reformatted! OH NOOOO! All my pictures are lost for the trip – I didn’t take that many so I didn’t bother downloading them yet. Dad says “oh yeah, I think that’s the memory card I’ve had trouble with before.” NOOOO Why didn’t you give me a working memory card??? Why didn’t you throw that one away…they are so cheap…it’s not worth it??? Oh well, it’s not like I got anything good anyway…After lunch, we are going to head back out and see if we can see another whale shark.
***********Beth's Interjection in the story...***************
Daniel sent me only this part of the story first. I happened to wake up around 4 am (EST) to use the restroom and read the message above. This was my response:
Hey babe,
Ahhhhhhhhhh. So full of cliff hangers and frustration!!! I woke up to pee amd then got hooked on your angst! Sounds amazing and frustrating at the same time! ...maybe I am cursing you after all. Hmmm if I'm the "bigger person" and wave my whale shark wand I wonder if you'll have more luck. ...you know the WSs and I are one in the same at the moment size wise...
(Before you roll your eyes at me, yes I know I am not remotely pregnant whale size yet...but when you are currently bigger than you have ever been in your life...bigger feels HUGE)
*I will also say that after only a moment's hesitation I literally, physically waved my hand as if I had a "whale shark wand" and went back to sleep...which would have coincided more or less with the moment Daniel is dropping into the water for his next dive...
*********Daniel's Post Continued**********
The next dive briefing is at 2 p.m. – I spent most of the time being envious of the other people’s encounter with the whale shark. The next dive is not a whale shark dive but it is on the same side of the island. The plan is that we will look for sharks on the way out, but we aren’t very hopeful. As we near the dive site, we start to hear some yelling, “whale shark! whale shark!” I literally fly to my equipment, throw it on as I am jumping out of the boat and start looking around. I don’t see anything, so I poke my head up to see where everyone is looking…as they look up it almost appears that they are looking up at me…almost like some sort of horror show effect. I look back under the water and I see a huge gapping mouth headed right towards me! I start taking pictures/movies. I swim as fast as I can for as long as I can…I can keep up with it! I don’t even look back to see if the boat is following me…I don’t care. I dive down, take pictures really close to the eyes, and almost forget that I need to surface for air again. It was a very similar experience to the Mola Mola from the Galapagos!
I finally give up, out of breath and panting. I see that the boat is picking up a string of people who couldn’t make it as far as I did…I smile. Once I get back on the boat, I hear everyone saying “hurry, hurry, we’re going again!” I couldn’t believe it. This time the whale shark is easy to find because it has a long string of snorkelers. We head up current and get ready to jump again. This time, I don’t go first to let the other people have a shot. As I jump in, the water is full of bubbles from all the other people jumping off the boat. Through the bubbles, the whale shark emerges – it was almost scary! I manage to swim with this one for another 10-15 minutes. This time there are divers that are keeping up with him…one of the divers even gets “run over” by the whale shark; he laid flat on the bottom of the ocean and let the whale shark swim directly over him. By this point, the water is relatively shallow – maybe 25 feet. As I keep following him, the water gets deeper and deeper. I give up after he reaches ~30 feet…I can keep up with him, but having to dive that deep while swimming that fast becomes too much…I couldn’t believe the experience…it was amazing! This one was about 25 feet long…it was impressive. I wish that Beth could have been here to see it too…under normal circumstances, she would have had no problem keeping up…being pregnant, I am not sure how easy it would have been…
The third dive was a bust – horrible visibility. It was a deep dive (~80-85 feet), which was a bit much after the last deep dive (I reached 100 feet). It wasn’t very good anyway. The ride back to the boat was almost 45 minutes and it was pretty exhausting. I wasn’t sure if I was going to do the night dive, but I’ve gained some energy back up again. Speaking of which, the bell has just tolled…
The night dive ended up being … interesting. There was a strong current, so it ended up being a pretty quick drift dive. There were only 6 of us, so the amount of extra light was smaller…meaning it was harder to see the full picture of your surroundings. Also, people kept trying to stop to take pictures of something, which meant I had to fight the current to wait for them. All of that wouldn’t have been too terrible but I forgot my dive watch! I didn’t realize until I started going down and the boat was already pulling away. My dive watch has my depth gauge…I had absolutely no idea how deep I was! Night dives are already unnerving, but this didn’t help.
Also, on a side note, one of the things that are different about this Aggressor trip compared to other dive boats is the lack of remoteness. There are 1199 islands in the Maldives and almost all of them are populated…many of them with resorts. That means that when we travel to a dive site, there is always a chance that other divers will be there. There are always lights on the horizon wherever we go. We see lots of boats, planes, and fisherman. None of that is very distracting, but it’s just different than normal. One of the plus sides is that we have 3G coverage everywhere (I still have Brian’s wireless password, so I have been checking emails throughout the trip), but I don’t like having that connection…half the people on the boat have their noses stuck in their phones the whole trip…making phone calls. I like getting away from that aspect of technology and this time I’m not as far as normal. That said, here I go about to check my email…
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