Pemba Island by Ilan

Pemba Island, 1999
Author: Ilan

This Dive reports start at Monday in Mombassa Kenya airport where we were picked up and headed to Shimoni almost at the Tanzanian border. After 3 hours of driving in what stated as a paved road and ended as 15 kms of swamp we arrived at the Boat (the m.s Kisiwani) for a six days liveaboard in Pemba Island.

Some words about the boat it is a 21m luxuriously furnished & air conditioned motor yacht, has a crew of 3 and the skipper Van is also the divemaster, the ship is very clean and the food is excellent, the dives are made from a zodiac that takes you to the dive sites and peaks you up at the end of the dive. the boat can carry up to 10 divers and we were 6, the dives are made at Pemba Island and the boat right now is the only diving boat in the area.

Tuesday early in the morning we sailed towards Pemba island for our first dive at Njao gap when we headed for the Zodiac rain started falling and we got wet before the dive, the dive itself was good the reef here is very reach with life the visibility can be medium due to a large amount of plankton. second dive in Anemone city and like the name lots of anemones and of reef fish all the reef is alive with thousands of colorful fish.

Wednesday we head to Mesali Island with the green landscape of Pemba and a couple of bottlenose dolphins swimming with us first dive in the Mesali wall the reef here is beautiful and here there are even more fish, the second dive turns out to be one of the best dives I did it starts with a big turtle swimming with us continues with three huge Napoleon wrasses every one around my size one giant grouper a shoal of small tunas and the big bonus at 10m me and my partner start ascending towards our safety stop when behind her I see a wall of barracudas I point at them and it takes her several seconds to realize what she is seeing we just float at 10m in the blue water and the barracudas starts circling us we are surrounded from every direction by barracudas when all of a sudden they break there formation and disappear into the sea when we gets out of the water all we can say is WOW. the third dive is in another are of the reef that has some very strange sponge formation that I have never seen.

Thursday we head south to the ocean side of Pemba in rough sea to a place called metangani to do some Shark diving the place is known with a resident shoal of hammerhead sharks, Van is leading and he carries a bell so he will be able to alert us to the presence of the sharks, we head for our first dive in the Zodiac in rough sea and starts our dive in open sea around 10 to 20 meters from the reef the bell soon rings and we see 3 big hammerhead sharks that looks at us curiously with there big hammer head I estimate that there size was between 2 to 3 meter we continue the dive to encounter 2 more groups of 3 hammerheads that swam very close to us. Second dive was in the same profile but we saw only open sea No sharks.

Friday we dress up and head for the dive same profile this time one curious hammerhead swam around us giving us excellent view of its sharkish body we also saw one giant barracuda, second dive starts when in the way to the reef I notice a humpback whale jumping out of the water around a hundred meters from us the zodiac of course change course and we are seeing two humpback whales that don't like our presence we try to snorkel with them but we only manage to see there tail before they swim away from us so we proceed with the dive witch starts as a blue water dive and the bell rings and a shoal of hammer heads appears I starts counting but I;m loosing count at 25 I think that there were at least 30 of them swimming between us and the reef WOW after several minute we encounter a white teep reef shark but we ignore it how can you compare, in the third dive we encounter 2 large dog toughed tunas but no hammerheads in conclusion we saw sharks in 3 out of 5 dives and I can tell you that 1 shark is much scarier than 30.

Saturday early morning in rough sea we return to Mesali island for two more relaxed reef dives with plenty of fish and for desert we decide to do a night dive witch turns to be an excellent dive with lots of strange plankton squids crabs and lots of life.

Sunday sadly we finish this story and we are getting back and ending the excellent time we had.