Second diving day was a hardcore one. Rough sea and 4 dives a day. Cooool :)
But let's start from the beginning.
The first two dives were in the Sha’ab Abu Nuhas Reef, next to the Island of Shadwan, where four wrecks are on the west side of the reef. First wreck we dove was the wreck of SS Carnatic. It was a steam clipper ship and sank on 12th September 1869 on its way from the UK to India, loaded with baking soda, gold and gin for the British army in India. I liked it a lot as it is an amazing artificial reef full of life. We can enter and exit the wreck at almost any place. In other words, it is a perfect freediving playground :)
Since the wrecks are on the windward side of the reef and we anchored on the leeward side, we went there on zodiacs. We saw a pod of dolphins on the way so we got extremely excited. We had to cope with massive swell, no dolphins showed up and some of us threw up. Yeah, this dive was intense. There is a reason why there are four wrecks at this place... 🌊🌊🌊
The second dive was at the wreck called Ghiannis D. which shipwrecked on 19th April 1983 on its way from Croatia to Saudi Arabia, loaded with lumber. It's not far away from SS Carnatic. This time it was much better. The swell was not so bad and eventually a dolphin family came to check us out. Unfortunately, exactly at the point I was getting ready for a dive for a macro of a school of glass fish. The encounter with dolphins was so short that before I managed to change the camera settings to wide angle, I could only see the tails :( At least I have a picture of his ass, hahaha 🐬🐬🐬
After this dive we moved to another reef which was pretty shallow so we had a lot of fun there, we saw a few stingrays and moray eels but actually nothing special happened there.
Until the night. As we stayed on the same spot overnight, half of us wanted to go for a night dive. But when the time came up it seemed I would have to stay aboard as suddenly no one wanted to go for the night dive. Eventually, I found two last boy scouts Viktor and Lukas, who went with me and saved my night dive. Thank you guys :) Because diving at night is always amazing! Indeed, I love as it is like diving to a completely different world. You can see what you usually don't see during the day. May it be hunting lionfish, shrimps, nudibranchs, octopodes, whatever… It Is really worth it.
In addition, this night dive was even more special. As we reached the reef we realised that the current changed not only direction but strength as well. It was like a river. Anyone up for a night drift dive? Well, why not. If you have a zodiac covering your ass it's priceless experience and it's definitely worth it. However, we didn't have it. And if you're at night in the ripping current on your own, it completely changes the game and stakes become too high. Hence, even though we loved it, we drifted back to the boat and called it a day.
Then we joined an AA group on the top deck to have a drink (or two) and socialise. However, although we had loads of fun, we kept it down compared the liveaboard anchored next to ours. There was a massive Russian B-day party. You can't equal to Russians when it comes to drinking :D Yes, we were invited. And yes, we were tempted to join. But none of us wanted to swim there to no avail. The chances that their crew wouldn't let us aboard were actually pretty high. So we stayed at our boat just watching them and guessing whether they would jump into the sea or not. Of course they did 🍻🍾🥂
After that we went to bed to be ready for the next day, satisfied that we were right.
Comentários