Scuba Diving in the Maldives
I visited the Maldives on a liveaboard in May 2012, an though it is a pricier trip, it was well worth it to dive the Maldives. Air temps were in the 90s and sunny almost the entire time, and water temps ranged from 80-83.
Topside, it's gorgeous. We were greeted with the brightest blue sunny skies and aquamarine waters, that it was almost surreal. The islands all looked lush and dense with greenery, with beautiful sandy beaches. Since we were on a liveaboard, we only had a few opportunities to visit any of the islands, and on one occasion, the liveaboard had arranged to bring us to an island to see the sunset and they had setup a full BBQ cookout. It was a lovely way to spend the evening exploring the beaches and lagoons amidst all of our diving.
Since it was a 7 day trip, we covered South Ari and the North and South Male Atolls. We regularly had 100 ft viz, though it was as little less on a few of the manta ray snorkels as we ran into pockets of plankton.
I had my favorite night dive of all time here at Mayaa Thila. We saw so much life and behavior on this dive! Starting with a large sting ray, free swimming eels, eels hunting and going from crevice to crevice in the reef looking for sleeping fish, juvenile white tip reef sharks competing for food.
The Kuda Girl wreck was also a beautiful site. Home to amazing schools of fish, abundant invertebrate growth, and we also encountered a frog fish and two stonefish on this wreck.
Some of the the other marine life highlights included a large nurse shark, turtles, titan triggerfish, and schools of triggerfish, and snorkeling with mantas and a whale shark.
Though you could shoot macro on some of the dives, I probably spent about 80% of the time shooting wide angle as my preference based on the marine life.
