Diving in Pemba

Sometime in December; Pemba Island, Tanzania. We knew we wanted to do some diving on our honeymoon, especially as it will include Ben’s 100th dive. We spared our divemaster the pain of doing what is apparently a tradition for dive 100 whereby you dive naked. Ben was surely glad to be informed that the water was cold enough that he’d have to wear a wet suit. A 9.30am start was welcomed. Quite often when we go diving, we’re in the water by 7:30am, but we got a chance to sleep in for this one. We were accompanied by some spinner dolphins on our boat trip out to Misali Island to our first dive site at Kijiji. There was one other couple with us that was doing a refresher dive with another divemaster. We were accompanied by Christian, a Frenchman that moved to Pemba with his 12-year-long girlfriend, the other divemaster. I could definitely tell that Christian used to work at a dive shop at the Red Sea in Egypt. When we boarded the small dive boat, he gave directions to sit on the center bench facing forward. His guidance was to sit on it like you’d sit on a camel. Visibility was good and the dive was OK. Not a ton of new stuff to look at it most of it is small life on the reef, as opposed to big fish. In addition, there is a wide variety of corals, including soft corals that I found different and interesting. Also, I was excited because I’m finally starting to notice and spot things on the reef that I used to pass up. Notably on this trip, I spotted a few Nudibranchs and hermit crabs.

Our surface break is on a beautiful white sand beach on Misali Island and we’re treated to a lovely picnic lunch.

The second dive was at Coral Garden and this time, I found myself discovering lots of small things that I usually didn’t notice before without someone pointing them out to me.

We took a few days off of diving to enjoy full days at the resort, but couldn’t pass up a night dive. We braved the rough sees and were well rewarded. Among the highlights were: