Arabic Sea Adventures
In 2024 I returned to Oman, this time only for 5 days.
My main purpose was diving, given to the limited time I concentrated 6 dives in 3 days, 4 day dives and 2 night dives.
The diving center that organized my dives is Arabic Sea Adventures ( https://www.instagram.com/as.adventures/), in Ras-al Hadd. I warmly recommend it. Faiz speaks fluent English and replies quickly and exhaustively on Instagram and WhatsApp, so to contact him and organize the dives with him is very easy. He’s a passionate underwater photographer in love with nudibranchs, so if you want to learn about them, just flick through his instagram page.
He came to fetch us (my buddy and me) in the morning after our arrival for the first two dives.
We go to the diving center that is located on Al-Batin beach, we load the boat with the equipment and we leave. It is 4 people in total: Faiz, the captain, Arafat the sailor, my buddy and me. A real luxury, we have all the boat for us. We arrive on the diving spot and start getting ready. While we wear our gear, my buddy has a small accident: the rubber band of her fin breaks. Her expression of disappointment is heart-breaking, but it does not last long. Faiz fixes it in a few minutes with a rope and two knots (don’t ask me which kind of knots, I have no idea).
The water is quite warm (we have a 5mm wetsuit, but a 3mm is fine). We start looking around and I must say I have never seen such an abundance in terms of quantity of marine life.
We are diving on a wreck, the maximum depth is 14 meters. Faiz explains us, that we are diving where the Oman Sea and the Arabic Sea merge and because of the two currents blending, there are a lot of particles suspended in the water and this has an impact on the visibility. However, that’s also the reason for such a great marine life. My buddy and I keep on at calling each other to show enormous squids, any kind of nudibranchs, crabs, fishes, shrimps, morays eels of every size and livery, torpedos, rays and turtles. There are sea creatures everywhere, for the first time in my life I regret I only have one pair of eyes.
During the surface interval we are offered dates and watermelon. A fishermen boat comes to us and we all drink coffee together. No need to speak Arabic or English, smiles are enough to communicate.
On the second dive, as we are on a reef, I start searching for the Harlequin Shrimp, scrutinizing each anemones I bump into. My persistency is rewarded: here they are, two of them, super small, almost transparent, but easily recognizable. It is the first time I see them during a dive.
One minute later, my friend shows me a giant fish, possibly a big batfish. She is so busy in showing me the batfish that can’t see what I’m pointing with my arm. So I get closer to her and I lift her: a giant stingray (maybe a dragon stingray) is sleeping under the wreck and could not care less about us.
