Here are some stills taken with our new Panasonic NV-DS5B Digital Video camcorder, and digitally imported directly into the PC via the serial port - no scanner involved! It's a excellent camcorder.
We spent a week on the cruise ship MV Ocean Paradise, cruising in South Male and Ari Atolls. This was followed by a week on the island of Kuredu, the only tourist resort in Lahviyani Atoll.
Our cruise ship - MV Ocean Paradise
Visiting an inhabited island (hence the long skirt!)
Seaplane transfer from Kuredu Island back to Male
Kuredu is a huge island, for the Maldives (about 2km long and 400m wide), with 300 rooms. Our lovely room was on the north side of the island - lovely beach, nice cooling breeze, but quite rocky and stony (corally?) when you get in the water. When the tides are at springs, you can snorkel out to the drop-off, which is only about 200 meters off shore. The reef is broken and dead close to, but manages a bit of life as you near the drop-off. Linda spotted a black-tipped reef shark approx 60cm long swimming in the shallows just a couple of meters out. Must have been a baby, since they grow to 1.5m.
The south side is better for swimming, with a sandy bottom, but not so good for snorkelling (though there is a small area of really nice coral ("the Coral Garden") about 500 meters off shore), but sheltered from the cooling breeze and therefore stiflingly hot at times.
Snorkelling from the beach was nowhere near as nice as at Fesdu in 1997 or Thudufushi in 1996.
The food was surprisingly good - much better than Fesdu in 1997. Lots of choice, well cooked. Considering they have to cater for upwards of 600 guests, this is a creditable achievement.
The Dive Centre was extremely well equipped, very friendly, very well organised and professional, and completely relaxed while handling large numbers of divers and dive boats every day. You are normally expected to do a test dive on the house reef, no matter how experienced or qualified you are - but I managed to get out of this by pleading that I'd been on a safari boat in Ari Atoll the previous week, and had done my last dive only a couple of days before.
The Centre offers 45 dive sites around Kuredu. I visited five during our week there (Zafari Reef, Kuda Kandu, The Shipyard (two wrecks for the price of one), Fushivaru Outreef, and Kuredu Express). They were excellent - beautiful coral, reef fish (hundreds of species - all sizes, all colours), sharks (grey and white-tipped reef), morays (including honeycomb), rays (eagle and sting); and varied locations (reef tops for pottering about in the calm shallows watching the millions of reef fish, channel crossings for the bigger fish, walls and drift dives). Thanks to Markus, Tina, René, Angela and Sabine for some great dives. I was fortunate to be buddied up for most of the week with Tom Cross - an experienced South African diver living in Johannesburg. We were well matched.
My only beef was that you could not choose your dive destination - you put your name down for, say, the morning boat, but the Centre then allocates you to one of the maybe dozen morning boats. You don't know which dive site you're going to until you get on the boat.
This leads to frustration at times - for example, I hired a Sea and Sea underwater camera for one trip. You have to give 24 hours notice that you want to hire the camera - but when I got on the boat, I discovered that we were going to do Kuredu Express - a drift dive, where you are swept along at up to 2 or 3 knots by the tidal rip. Very exciting, but totally useless for underwater photography. So I left the camera on the dhoni. To their credit, the Centre cancelled the camera hire charge when I complained.