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| I know this looks chilly, but it was actually much warmer today... and flat! |
We set off from the jetty, and like earlier in the week, I only had four divers. Although having said that, there were about fifteen snorkelers on board, so the boat was quite a lively place. Teamed up with Jo and Amr, we opted on heading for a mooring dive first, so that the snorkelers could get themselves settled in and confident. So we headed up towards Jackson Reef.
I had been on the Nabq pick up this morning, so had taken a sneaky peek at the sea in Tiran on the way, and was most pleased to see mill pond like conditions. Not a wave on the water. So was hoping that nothing had changed in the meantime. As we ferried up through the glassy sea, I even got a call from our manager up at the Sensatori Ocean College telling me that it was flat calm up there. Woo Hoo... we would be able to do what we wanted. In Tiran it is always the weather that limits our dives... most of the time, we need to make careful judgements to ensure that we do not drift too far and find ourselves beyond the shelter of the reef and trying to get on the boat in rough water. This can, on a bad day, make things very stressful for the guide. Added to this, just the journey up there can occasionally be a little rough which is not particularly ideal. Obviously today was not going to be one of those days, thankfully.
As we pulled up to Jackson Reef, it soon became apparent however, that mooring up would be impossible. With no Northerly breeze at all, there was no way of keeping the boats off the reef once tied up, so the boat was just going to have to hang around near to the snorkelers ensuring that they had an easy swim back should they decide they had had enough. With two guides and a floating ring, they were well catered for, even without the boat being on a fixed line.
We, in the meantime, jumped in for our SCUBA dive.
As we had missed out a little on Jackson's main garden the other day, my plan was to spend as much time there as possible, venturing out as far as I could onto the corner. Worst case scenario was that if we did get caught in the current, we could just keep going, the conditions were so good.
We dropped straight into a dense horde of fusiliers being hunted by several rather large bluefin trevallies... so spent the first chunk of our dive just enjoying the spectacle before heading over towards the garden. The fusiliers form a bait ball, shooting off like little blue darts whenever the trevallies get too close. It really is quiet spectacular, although not fun, I am sure for the poor fusiliers.
Well, the current gods were well and truly in our favour today... again. We had a slight reversed current pushing from the reef, ensuring that there was no way we would be pulled around the back. So, we took our time bimbling around the garden. We ventured right out until we could see the schooling banner fish below us, and what a shoal of them there were... loads of them! I shallowed off and hunted for a turtle hanging around on the fire coral garden, however did not strike lucky sadly. But still it was very pretty. If the sun had been out, it would have been spectacular. Instead the colours were slightly muted in the hazy shade. We eventually meandered back onto the sandy plateau, checking out all the colourful corals there, and I even managed to find a particularly pretty, big scorpion fish. He was really colourful, matching the surrounding corals, I guess.
Eventually we started to drift from the garden back towards the wall, staying really shallow, unlike the other day, we ventured into each of the little lagoons enjoying the aquarium of fish there.
I surfaced with the first group, and guess what... out came the sunshine! What poor timing that was. Yes we had the reef completely to ourselves again, but the sun could have come out half an hour earlier and we would have had stunning technicolor too. Hey ho... you can't have it all can you?
Lunch was spent moored up in the lagoon where we also had a few moments to chill out with a few Risso's dolphins or Grampus as we call them. Often they are referred to as belugas, but they are not whales, even though their blunt noses do give them a beluga-like appearance. These dolphins are very chilled out and don't take kindly to the whooping and whistles that the spinner dolphins love so much. So we watched quietly, as they one by one, popped to the surface with a "Phoof" of air from their blow holes, and then just sunbathed. One even came half heartedly towards our bow in order to enjoy a laid back riding of the bow wave... very unusual for this kind of dolphin.
Our second dive was a drift around Thomas Reef. This is one of my favourite dives, and on a day like this, we would be able to enjoy drifting with the current as far as it would take us. We had no worries about rough waters as the sea was still flat calm. Of course having been sunny all lunchtime, the sun chose to hide behind a cloud again, just as we jumped, but hey the dive was still glorious regardless.
The current was mild enough for us to enjoy the drift without fearing a major counter current on the back. But on the corner, it was absolutely spectacular, rather like the other day on Jackson... we flew! I kept turning around to check that my less experienced diver was dealing with the drift and she was in good form. There was no time to stop and look at things, we just got neutral, stopped kicking and enjoyed the ride.
As we reached the back of the reef, the current slowed a touch, and once again, we could enjoy the scenery. The landscape here changes considerably... moving from pretty, coral encrusted reef, to shady, dark over hangs and little caverns. The reef formation is more boulder like, with a layer of felt-like, burgundy algae or coral, dotted with bright green nobbles. Here there are also quite a few very large, lime green whip corals. These often have tiny resident goby-like fish, also lime green, which can be found sitting along the thin shaft of coral. Very shy, whenever I try to point them out, they scoot a little further along the branch in the hope of disappearing.
We managed to make it a little further along the back of the reef, however didn't make it anywhere near our starting point. Well, we had taken our time a little on the front of the reef, and everyone seemed to hit seventy bar at the same time, so up we went for our safety stop. By this stage the current was very slightly against us, so we just chilled in the shallows enjoying a little sunshine.
The journey back was again delightfully smooth, not a bad end to my week's work.
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