Hello, Nurse!Every trip with Carpe has gone to visit AlimathaFushi - the nurse shark night dive experience. Ifigured I knew the dive. I had already been theretwice with Carpe. According to Maldivan stories, Alimatha was theisland where fishermen cleaned their catches backin the day. When? I don’t know.Back in the day. Because of this,sharks and rays would come tothe island waters by thehundreds for the free meals.Now, even though it isagainst Maldivan law tofeed the sharks, therumor is that theAlimatha resort stillfeeds them. Yes, thereare still hundreds ofsharks and rays…butthis dive was a littledifferent.Sharks!This dive was an entirelydifferent experience. We enteredin just as dusk started. Way earlyfor a night dive, but Rede explained wewere trying to beat the other live-a-board divegroups that would arrive at dusk. I rememberedseeing a LOT of divers last time, so I was eager tosee the difference. Not only did we start earlier than most, we were at20meters down, out on the outer edge of thehouse reef, away from the feeding docks. Weweren’t in the maze of sandy through-ways,between coral outcroppings, twisting around, withsharks everywhere. Instead, we were on the edge, where the currentwas passing the reef. This was certainly different. Ididn’t see a shark for the first ten minutes. Thenwe were surrounded.My dive buddy was hooked onto a stone with therest of my group. Instead of hooking with them, Ifinned a bit ahead of them to film a huge nurseshark laying on the sandy bottom of the current.After a few shots, I looked up and saw ten ortwelve more sharks above us, gently swimmingagainst the current. That was an amazing site.What I later realized was this wasn’t just a nurseshark experience. Like the photo shows below,there were several varieties of3 Kinds of sharks: nurse, black sharks all over the place. Theretip reef, gray reefwere gray reef sharks above,black tipped reef sharks too.The bottom was spottedwith resting nursesharks.I didn’t see anydancing nurse sharkslike last time. Bydancing, I meanwhen the nursesharks get fed upwith the little pilotfish swimming justout of reach of theirjaws. The little fish swimjust beyond their jawsand feast on any randombits of fish the shark drops. Itpisses off the shark and the nursesharks barrel roll, twist and turn, andsnap at all the little fish until they bugger off.The fish just look for a new shark to bother. That’sthe behavior I saw last time.This dive turned out to be fewer nurse sharks ordancing, but a better variety of animals to watch.Alimatha is a wonderful experience no matterwhat. Go for it. You’ll surely hit this site with aCarpe dive-cation, but I can’t speak for the othercompanies. If you haven’t been “bumped” by a nurse shark,which is nurse shark language for “hey, you are inmy sand spot!” then go for a night dive experienceat Alimatha Fushi. Hello, Nurse!20
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