In the summer of 1996 Shirley and I learnt to dive, taking a PADI Open Water course with Sunset Divers. We did our open water sessions at Dost Hill near Tamworth, which was a bit yucky to say the least. A week later we were off to the Maldives for a week for a spot of warm water diving.

In the Maldives there are two monsoon seasons; from about May until December the wind is southwesterly, whilst for the rest of the year it is northeasterly. The change of wind brings worse weather, and the NE wind is generally drier and less strong; apparently April is the time for best viz and conditions, but when we went in July it didn't seem at all bad, with viz 20-25m and water temperature 27-30C. A 3mm wetsuit is plenty warm enough.

We stayed at Villivaru, a small island in the South Male atoll about 17 miles south of the airport. It took about an hour and a half to get there via speedboat. There's only about 60 rooms on the island, which is small enough to walk around in 5 minutes. As you can see from the photo, the house reef gets very close to shore in places; the shallower water is about 1-2m deep and then 20-30m from the shore there is the dropoff down to maybe 50m at the floor of the atoll. The local dive centre is called Nautico and is German run; when we were there there was also Rebecca a French divemaster and Keiko a Japanese one, who were both great fun.

They insist on a checkout dive before they let you out on the boats, and so we had to do the usual mask clearing and regulator recovery exercises, followed by an escorted dive on the house reef . Once that was over you could book a place on a hardboat (called a Dhoni) for morning and/or afternoon dives. The dive sites are usually around 15-30 minutes away, with most of the best dives were on the outer atoll walls where viz was usually better and there was more chance of seeing manta rays, sharks and turtles. You could also shore dive up till 8PM.

We only took mask/snorkel/fins with us, so we rented everything else from the dive centre. The kit quality wasn't all that good but it worked, apart from once when Shirley's BCD inflator didn't and I resorted to manually adding air at 30m. They like you to to use a dive computer, if you don't have one they can normally rent you one. As the diving is multilevel it's a good idea anyway. All dives were done as drift dives - get into the water, free descent to the wall, then drift with the current until you hit 100bar, where you ascend in buddy pairs, do a 6m stop for 3m and then surface. The sea was so calm you don't need a SMB for the boat to locate you; in fact they were usually within a few hundred metres when you surfaced. Snorkelling from the shore was excellent; there was plenty of fish and coral in the shallow lagoon with a couple of small (1m) nurse sharks often on patrol.

The acommodation was fine - rooms with a veranda about 10m from the water, with air conditioning. There was only unheated water, but this was plenty warm enough to shower in! There was also a minibar in the room for keeping (bottled) drinking water in. The island only had one restaurant, which did reasonable-ish food; fish curry seemed to be one of the menu choices every day. For breakfast the Maldivian chef would cook you a reasonable omlette if asked. The prices at the bar were a bit steep, though, so no-one drank very much. There wasn't a lot to do in the evenings, though once or twice a week there was a disco on neighbouring island Biyadoo, which was about twice the size of Villivaru.

About 70% of the people there were German, then a few Brits, French, Italians etc. No Americans at all. On our last day a large contingent of Japanese arrived. Quite a few people go there on honeymoon, and not many of the divers seemed very experienced (including ourselves at the time). All in all it was a good week's holiday. I wouldn't recommend going to the Maldives unless you are into diving or just like sunbathing, as there is little else to do there. But it's not too expensive and can provide excellent diving.