Komandoo 2004

Holiday Dates : 29 August - 11 September 2004

The Island

Komandoo is a Maldivian island in the Lhaviyani Atoll. It is a small island which will take about 15 - 20 minutes to walk around at slow walking place. The accommodation consisted comfortable wooden, simply furnished, detached beach bungalows. There are about 25 rooms on the sunrise (North East) and 25 rooms on the sunset (South West) side of the island. The vegetation is grown around the rooms to give the feeling of seclusion. Each room has a CD player, four poster bed and safe deposit box. Because this island opened only a few years ago, the rooms and their furnishings are still in good condition.

The diving

Average water temperature: 28 Celsius

Wetsuit used: 5mm full wetsuit

Diving in the Maldives has been superb at every island we have been to. Komandoo is located in an area where the diving varies from Thila's, Giri's, in and outer reef and channel dives. The dive school is operated by Prodivers who we found to be very friendly and professional. Although we have our own kit, all of the schools hire equipment appears to be of a high standard. One big plus is the dive school provided Nitrox at no extra cost. Unfortunately while we were there the visibility was not very good averaging between 15 - 20 meters so the opportunity for sighting of larger animals was limited. However, the day before we left and were unable to dive, the dive group on the boat snorkeled and dived with 20 manta rays.

Most of the boat dives we did were reef walls and channels. There was an interesting diversity of underwater creatures with the best assortment of moray eels that we have come across. Zebra sharks are known to frequent some of the dive sites and we were lucky enough to see two. With the expert eye of the instructors it is also possible to see leaf fish and ribbon eels. There are a couple of wrecks nearby although we did not dive them. If you wanted to dive the house reef tanks were available day and night. The dive sites mentioned below were probably our favorites of this visit.

Kuredo Express

Due to poor viz we only saw a few gray reef sharks, but friends who have also stayed on Komandoo saw around sixty at this site. We saw large stingrays congregating under an overhang and a large spotted eagle ray which hung effortlessly in the water, making a mockery of us in the current.

Abdulla Thila

Darren, our dive guide called this 'small, nasty and ugly', which described it pretty well. The thila itself is very small and you can navigate around it several times during the dive. It is absolutely covered in silversides and other small fish which are constantly ambushed by the jacks and trevally, and you are often caught in the middle of the action. If you are lucky you can find one of the resident stone fish, plus it is worth looking in all the nooks and crannies for mantis shrimps,cleaner shrimps, morays and octopus. The large Lion fish at the top of the thila hang around menacingly making good photographic subjects.

Food and entertainment

The package was all-inclusive, but like many Maldivian resorts there were some exceptions. For example water provided at your restaurant table was free of charge but if obtained by the bottle to take away there was a charge. Whilst most drinks at the bar were included in the all inclusive package, cocktails were excluded.

All meals were served as a buffet with a good selection to choose from. Most evenings were theme based, for example it could be a barbecue, Italian, or traditional Maldivian. There was a selection of starters, main meals and sweets. You could also arrange room service for a special meal. If the weather is fine it is especially pleasant to sit outside the restaurant on the decked area which overlooks the sea where you can see the baby black tip reef sharks patrolling the shallow water. The restaurant was very informal with shorts, tee shirts and bare feet the norm.

The bar was a small covered area with a sand base with a TV in one corner, which was tuned mainly to sport when it was on. Entertainment was not generally laid on while we were there. The bar tended to be fairly quiet which is not surprising when you consider the small number of guests even when the island is full.

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Travel

The holiday was booked through Maldives Scuba Tours. The outward flight was early afternoon from Heathrow on Emirates and flew to the Maldives via Dubai. The Heathrow flight landed in Dubai around midnight and the onward flight to Male took off around 3:00 am, so the three hours waiting for the connection was quite tiring. The return flight was at lunchtime on Emirates and required connecting to a London bound plane at Dubai . This meant around half an hour in Dubai airport duty free, far better than Maldivian equivalent.

As the airport at Male is an island, any transfer travel was either by boat or seaplane. We have found the boat is fine if transfers are less than 45 minutes to 1 hour and can be spectacular if the sea is calm and there is little wind or rain. However, Komandoo is about 4 hour by speedboat so we made the transfer by seaplane which took 40 minutes.

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