Diving The House Reef

Today it was our first time scuba diving for two years and our first since completing our Advanced Open Water Course in the Maldives.

The dive school at our resort, Coraya Divers, required us to do an orientation dive first and this involved us having to do a couple of skills before heading off around the house reef. The first was to remove our regulator and put it back and the second was to take off our mask, replace and clear it. I was a bit nervous about doing them but in the end I managed to do them quite easily.

Once everyone had done the tasks we were split up into 2 groups and with our dive partners we headed off around the south reef. Unfortunately because of the winds on the surface the visibility wasn’t very good and so we didn’t see a lot.

The corals weren’t as bright as I remember them being in the Red Sea before and there wasn’t the abundance of fish that I was expecting to see. But it was good to get back in the water to experience it all again.

In the afternoon we had a second dive, this time on the north side of the reef. A zodiac took us from the jetty around to the top end and we entered the water. However I had problems trying to descend, I think due to my BCD not deflating correctly, it needed The Wife to hug me to expel the air from it.

Once we were finally down we headed back along the reef but the visibility had deteriorated since the morning dive and so once again we were left a little disappointed with what we managed to see.

While we were down, The Wife seemed to be going through her air really quickly and as there was still a long way to go (we had to cross from the north to the south side) she had to share the dive master’s air supply just so that she had enough to make it back safely.

So it may not have been a great dive in what we saw but it certainly was an eventful one!