Daedalus was never part of the plan, but from my perspective it was a welcome addition.
I had been told to expect sheer drop offs, mediocre reefs (compared to what we'd seen the previous day in Fury Shoals) and hammerheads.
Hammerheads capture the imagination of most divers. I'm not sure why, but I think its that they can occasionally be seen schooling and that when viewed from below they present one of the most distinguished silhouettes in the ocean.
When we woke up to the view of the Daedalus reef there were several liveaboards there sending out boat loads of divers to eastern side of the reef. Our briefing differed, we were going to be doing a drift dive down the opposite side.
As it transpired once again our guides had misread the current and we all spent an hour finning furiously headlong into a current. It wasn't the hammerhead experience I'd hoped for.
Our second dive was doing the dive all the other boats had done in the first instance. This time, on the leeward side of the island, we bobbed along keeping our eyes peeled. We were half way through the dive when it happened. It was just a shadow at first, when the distinctive head was visible. Once again photography wise I failed to keep my cool. I didn't care I was swimming with one of the most famous residents of the ocean. It was the stuff misplaced nightmares a it glided past 4 times.
We swam back to the boat - the last few moments against the current, only to be told that something else was lurking nearby, unseen by most of us - carcharhinus longimanus, the oceanic white tip.
We never saw longimanus on the third dive despite the presence of a silky shark and a couple of it's grey reef cousins. Despite that Daedalus had delivered.
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| Hammerhead shark |
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| Barracuda |
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| Humphead wrasse |
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| Daudalus |
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