Diving in the Andaman Islands

  Havelock Island, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India Monday, September 29, 2014

Bryan was itching to go diving here so booked into Barefoot scuba diving on Havelock Island. He had visited a number of dive schools, most only do Discovery Scuba Diving (DSD) for complete beginners.  This we are told, is due to a Bollywood movie which came out not so long ago where they go scuba diving and since then Indians want to give it a go. Most Indian’s that now try it, can't swim or even put their head under the water so to try scuba diving is a huge step for them. But never the less people want to give it a go (and why not) so many small operations have been setup to allow them to do this. We did come across Dive India, but they were fully booked for the next few days.  Barefoot had spacing in two days time, so I booked on and waitedMonday morning came and we all set off on a small boat at 7:30am, kit checked, connected up my Suunto pressure sensor to stage 1, High Pressure, and it fitted.  At last I’ll be able to use my watch fully with the sensor (all of this will mean something to other divers). We all headed to the Dixon dive site, named after the man who discovered it, a three pinnacle dive down to about 28m, with a plateau topped of at 16m.  We were planning two dives here as reports are it is a very good site. The boat hooked up to the buoy marking the spot and we put on our kit, only to find, not one but two regulators were failing, this meant I was not going to be trying my sensor today.  Not a happy bunny. I entered the water, a cool 30c, and then we all followed the buoy line to the bottom.  Upon hitting the sea bed we got to see a stone fish, and then two lion fish, a good start! This was followed by huge quantities of fish of all types, it was more like swimming in fish than swimming in the waterI took lots of photos but I do need a red filter for my Go Pro as I found out later. The highlight of the dive must be seeing a sea snake swimming away from us in to the blue, the most poisonous snake known to man. Our second dive was just as good, going the other way around the pinnacles, and seeing even more fish. Great days' diving. What would tomorrow bring?? Day two  Johnny's Gorge We arrived on a speed boat, flat calm, but the current was about 5 knots in the water, so a tight hold of the rope and making a slow movement along and down the rope all the way to 20m. The current was strong but the last 5 metres calmed down so I started my camera recording. Two lion fish, good start again, hundreds of yellow 5 striped snappers and then we saw a white tipped shark lying on the bottomIt was about 1.5 metres in length and whilst we were all swimming towards it for a better look, a green turtle swam right by me and I got an amazing shot of both the turtle and shark swimming together. Amazing. The dive was cut short as our Fin lost fin (did you try Emerald Gecko Jani ) and my air was very low due to my octopus free flowing (more dive speak) but today I did have my pressure sensor working fully.  I did need to reset the watch to sync back up to the sensor before hand.  But it was working, reading about 10 bar less than the manual gauge. Our second dive we moved to the light house, but on the way we got to see a school of dolphins, about 8 dolphins in all, amazing to watch as they swam right under the boat. The light house dive was a shallow dive, so we were able to dive for just under 55 minutes, not much underwater, a giant grouper, an octopus hiding in the rocks and a number of star fish. Over all, the dives in Havelock are very good, the coral is mainly dead, due to a heat wave about 4 years ago, but the fish are just amazing and plenty to see. If you are ever in this part of the world then i would recommend it. http://diveandamans.com/ Bryan Avery [gallery columns="4" ids="8486,8489,8500,8504,8514,8520,8528,8533,8542,8552,8560,8565,8574,8579,8587,8591"]