Our first day at sea after departing the harbour initially took us to a dive site where we'd do two things. A check dive and visit a Manta Ray cleaning station. The check dive is just a dive, which we undertook in a very uninteresting place, to check you gear. Get everything setup and then get in the water to test that all your gear is working properly. Kind of a warm up dive. A good thing we did it too because the heel straps on my fins snapped just as I was putting them on to get in the water. Luckily the crew had a spare set of fins I could use for the dive. Later I borrowed some replacement straps from a fellow diver.
A Resort Island near our dive site
The Manta Ray cleaning station was much more interesting. A cleaning station is an area in the reef with a decent current where little feeder fish live. The Mantas swim by and the little fish come up to give it a clean. The benefit to us is that you have an excellent chance of seeing a manta ray.
It just takes a little patience. You swim to the cleaning station and then you hook into the reef with a reef hook. This is a metal hook with some line attached that ends in a clip that you can attach to yourself. You hook into a bit of dead reef or rock on the bottom, and then float in the current. The benefit of this is being able to stay in one place for a while without exerting yourself swimming in the current as well as not having to touch the reef (which kills it!) to steady yourself.
Sometimes your patience is rewarded. We saw several manta rays swim by and I even had one swim directly over my head. After a while other divers showed up and did what you shouldn't. To get the best view the swam right up to the top of the cleaning station (we stayed near the bottom out of the way). Because of their position the Mantas felt their space was invaded and so would no longer come to the cleaning station. That effectively ended our dive and we returned to the surface.
I put together a video of the dive so you can share in the gracefulness of the Mantas we saw swimming around. Excuse the quality of the video, I have never actually put one together before:
!steemitworldmap 4.278941 lat 73.553736 long Maldives Trip Day 2 - Looking for Manta Rays D3SCR
Thanks for Looking.
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