Exploring Uncharted Depths: Diving the Maldives’ most Remote Frontier

When I was a kid I dreamt of being an explorer, embarking on daring expeditions to uncharted regions to find the world’s undiscovered marvels. One of the greatest birthday gifts I received from my parents around the age of 5 or 6 was an “explorer kit”- a rucksack with a small telescope, compass, headtorch and a couple of utility pouches and caribiners. My parents were always great at fuelling my passion for adventure. Fast forward a couple of decades and I’m finally realising my childhood dream. I’m currently working on the pre-opening setup for a brand new diving and marine biology centre at an upcoming luxury resort in the Maldives. Unlike many areas with an established tourism industry, this is a super-remote sanctuary lying on the far west of the country with a vast channel thousands of metres deep separating us from the nearest Atoll. You can imagine my exhilaration when I realised that apart from the occasional quick stop from a liveaboard dive boat, this area had never been visited by divers- I was finally going to be able to call myself a real explorer! A short reconnaissance expedition here in December had given me a tantalising glimpse of what was to come- thriving corals, countless mantas, stunning blue water stretching into the horizon, but the discoveries that awaited us upon our arrival in February would go on to completely blow my mind.

Discovering the dive sites in a new area is a lot of fun, but its definitely a challenge. With the vast blue Indian Ocean staring enigmatically back at you, it can be difficult to even know where to start. Online information on this area was extremely limited and mostly outdated, and whilst we both (my colleague Susan and I) have a great deal of experience in diving and marine biology and know what topography tends to attract biodiversity (channels, outer reefs, pinnacles etc.), our best source of information was the population of the nearby local island- Makunudhoo. Fishing is the most popular pastime and livelihood in the Maldives (unsurprising for a country consisting of 99% ocean), and fishermen tend to know the spots with the most fish, where their catches get taken most often by sharks, and where they most frequently spot dolphins and mantas while they are out on their boats. Many of the boat captains and crew hired at the resort were local to the area and also able to give valuable information- where to find shipwrecks, how to navigate the shallow reefs, a few spots to find overhangs, thilas (long pinnacle reefs) and mulis (shelves protruding out from the ring of corals forming the atoll). The final piece of the puzzle was a day spent accompanying the Manta Trust boat. The Trust has been running expeditions to Makunudhoo for the past three years to study the local manta population here, so they were able to give a lot of insight into the hotspots for manta aggregations, the best methods for locating mantas in this area and some useful information about the local manta population.

Maamakunudhoo Atoll’s location in The Maldives

As we started to explore the area, we noticed some patterns that helped us find more sites. Mulis seemed to be especially biodiverse in this area, so we set about scanning the sea floor with our boat’s sonar to find as many of these oceanic shelves as we could and jumping in to see what was there. We noticed the majority of our shark and dolphin sightings were in the North of the Atoll, so we set about exploring that area in more detail. Mantas were much easier to find in the mornings than the afternoons, and by far the best way to locate them turned out to be with the drone, which soon enabled us to predict at which dive sites we would have the best chances of a manta encounter. And we started to see patterns- channels were better dived on an incoming tide, in many areas certain types of corals seemed to be much healthier in the shallows than at depth (a bit unusual), and dolphins tended to patrol up and down the outside of the atoll using the same routes each day. We quickly started to build a catalogue of impressive dive sites in the area.

It’s impossible to oversell how special this area is already proving to be. In the space of just 6 weeks and a few tens of dives, we have seen hundreds of sharks, mantas on nearly every dive, a plethora of eagle rays and stingrays (including an ornate eagle ray- one of the ocean’s rarest and most magnificent species that I have been lucky enough to encounter a handful of times now), pilot whales and an incredible diversity of fish, from all sorts of tiny blennies and damsels to monstrously huge tuna, barracuda and groupers. On one dive we were visited by a superpod of spinner dolphins several hundred strong- it took almost 5 minutes for the endless wall of dolphins to pass us by and the noise was deafening. And given that we are both coral biologists, one of the most stunning aspects of this area to us is the incredible health and diversity of the coral here, with many areas having 100% coral cover, heaps of rare species and many absolutely gigantic, healthy corals (many of which, based on their size, may be hundreds of years old). Sadly this is now a rare thing to see in the Maldives, as the country has been badly affected by coral bleaching events in 1998, 2010 and 2016. Finding such impressive coral here was bittersweet, as the Maldives is currently on the precipice of another bleaching event which is predicted to devastate much of the Indian Ocean in the coming months.

Exploration diving comes with a few quirks and challenges that may be unfamiliar to many recreational divers. Susan and I have similar attitudes when it comes to diving safely, and as such we have been conservative and careful in the way that we have explored these unfamiliar sites (staying close as a buddy pair, being strict with our maximum depths and No-Decompression Limits, not penetrating wrecks and caves without proper planning and consideration etc.). In many cases we have had to be inventive, diving some sites in a reverse profile (going from shallow to deep instead of the traditional profile of hitting the deepest point of your dive first and shallowing up from there) to enable us to explore shallow points of interest such as the Hayston Shipwreck without having to navigate there along an unfamiliar wall reef. Finding entry and exit points isn’t easy and sometimes takes a few tries- it’s all well and good finding a beautiful drop-off at 30m where you can watch grey reef sharks, tuna and schooling great barracuda, but try to shallow up at the wrong place and you’ll see nothing but sand for 20 minutes. Ideally all of the sites that we discover should be dived a few times in different conditions, tides and currents so that we know what we are dealing with before we start guiding anyone. And of course we are not sure what this area will be like at other times of year. The Maldives enjoys a few monsoon seasons per year with strong (but fairly predictable) winds coming from different directions during different seasons. This means the currents, surface conditions and wildlife distributions vary in different areas throughout the year, so we need to find sheltered dive sites at all points of the compass, as well as inside the sheltered lagoon of the Atoll.

So far it has gone relatively smoothly (as much as can be expected). But with the resort’s opening looming (I’m sworn to secrecy here so I can’t give any details about this place except that it will be incredible), there is a lot of work still to be done in discovering the area, mapping the sites and finalising our operational procedures for all of the diving and snorkeling activities, as well as all of the tasks involved in creating a brand new ultra-luxury dive centre (and coral restoration project). It’s been a busy few months, and it’s going to be like that for a good while, but I can’t stop feeling so incredibly lucky to be living out my childhood dream of exploring a new area, particularly an area as mind-blowing as this. It’s hard to describe the feeling of adventure when you dive somewhere never-dived-before, and the elation of discovering an overhang packed with fish, a pinnacle surrounded by sharks, or a bay filled with mantas. Hopefully this is just the first chapter in our exploration of this hidden gem in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

More updates to come…