Dive time: 00:57:00
Max depth: 15.2 metres
Temperature: 29 C
Visibility: 15 metres
Buddy: Brian
Surface interval 02:58:00
Mix: EAN 28 (MOD 38.6 metres – 1.4ppO2)

During our dive briefing for this dive, someone spotted a baby Oceanic white tip shark circling around our boat. This caused a lot of excitement, as we all ran to the railing to follow its swim around us. The dive plan was the jump of the back of the boat and swim to the southern side of the reef, with Ahmed stressing that we should descend to 5 metres as soon as possible to avoid becoming shark food!

Brian and I jumped into the water and went straight down to around 8 metres, hanging on the shot line along with everyone else to get a glimpse of the Oceanic white tip. After about 5 minutes, we hadn’t seen a thing so we swam towards the reef, which was about a 50 metres swim. It was a bit unnerving being in the deep blue, and quite disorientating when you can’t see anything but blue! Slowly, the reef came into view, and we drifted west with the current along the reef.

We came across a impressive hard coral, which was over 15 metres in height – Brian looked like a dwarf next to it! I saw a big moray eel out hunting and when it saw me, it sat in a fire coral watching me swim past. I briefly thought that it was going to swim out and attack me!

Around 48 minutes into the dive, we drifted past a massive wall of anemones, with lots of anemone fish watching us go by – amazing sight! I would’ve loved to have lingered to admire it a bit more but the current just swept us past!

A nice relaxing dive! I still had 120 bar in my cylinder but was a bit worried that the current would sweep us out to sea so ascended with another couple with a couple of minutes on our planned dive time to spare!