Favourite Dive Site in September
I know I am trailing behind but I will catch up in giving you our favourite dive site of each month. This is why Dharavandhoo Corner was number one in September.
We were sitting on the sundeck of our diving dhoni chatting about our dives and relaxing during our 60 minutes surface interval when we spotted some action on the surface. When we got closer to the action we realized we had a huge group of mantas right in front of the boat. A quick decision had to be made – either just quickly grab our snorkel gear and get in the water as fast as possible or suit up and put on our dive equipment. We chose the latter… and indeed got extremely lucky. We were inside the Atoll in front of Dharavandhoo island when we jumped and we drifted together with the feeding mantas towards the corner.
This group of mantas displayed 3 different feeding methods:
Chain feeding close to the surface where the mantas were swimming head to tail behind each other with their mouths wide open and scooping up the plankton.
Barrel rolling which is an acrobatic looking somersault backwards to catch more plankton.
Cyclone feeding where all mantas swim in a circle in the same direction to create a current and all of a sudden start swimming in the opposite direction and suck in the plankton with the vortex created by this.
National Geographic or a BBC camera team would have had a field day. Instead one of the divers had a waterproof instant camera to record this magnificent display. You can find the video clip of this spectacle on our facebook page.
Eventually while watching the feeding we drifted to the cleaner station of Dharavandhoo Corner and at around 8 meters was a female with mating scars on her left wing together with probably the “guilty” male both were getting cleaned while we were watching. And as incredible as it sounds, this was still not the end… the “grande finale’ was when we saw 5 bottle nose dolphins together with a little baby dolphin at the safety stop.
This kind of dive does not happen every day but I hope I could paint a nice picture of our special dive for you at our favourite dive site in September Dharavandhoo Corner.
