Emperor Explorer, The Maldive Islands: Undercurrent 07/2025

Emperor Explorer, The Maldive Islands

sharks, sharks, sharks, and great coral reefs

from the July, 2025 issue of Undercurrent

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Dear Fellow Diver,

Magical. A baby shark nursery. Colorful, half-closed anemone nests with a dozen clownfish atop. Circling adolescent white tips. Schools of big-eyes, triggerfish, anthias, and squirrelfish around the pinnacle. Three parading stonefish. A free-swimming octopus. All the colors of the rainbow. No current, decent visibility, and 82°F water -- the best dive of my trip, on a pinnacle to the north, on the next-to-last day.

MY Emperor Explorer The 10-day adventure didn't start out so well. For the checkout dive, the guides left two divers on the Maldives Explorer's dhoni (a smaller boat dedicated to diving) and had to return to get them. The dive guide apologized, but failing to take a diver count for the checkout dive, in my opinion, was pretty unprofessional.

We were not far from Male, on a dead reef (why do they do that for a first dive?), and were required to practice deploying our SMBs -- a wise thing to do with the Maldives' currents. I was on a late January "Sharktastic" itinerary, which visited South Male Atoll, Vaavu Atoll, South Ari Atoll, and Meemu Atoll. On our second dive, in a ripping current, we hooked up twice, but I only saw an eagle ray, a blacktip, and a couple of eels. I got nauseous back on the boat, so I skipped the next dive. I was certain better dives were ahead.

Of course, I had done my research beforehand. I didn't want to travel 30 hours from Seattle to Male and burn up mileage points for a business-class flatbed for two weeks just for bad diving. I arrived a day early, insurance against a flight delay that would cause me to miss my departure.

The Emperor Explorer is a spacious, modern craft, as magnificent-looking as an oligarch's yacht, and could become one since it has no dive deck, no camera room, nothing to suggest it's a dive boat. In fact, it isn't. In the Maldives, a second boat, a dhoni, accompanies the main vessel and serves as the dive boat. Posh as the Explorer was, it had a few deficiencies to pair with its amenities, such as my cramped upper deck double cabin, which had a small closet but no storage space for our luggage and a chairless built-in desk. As if to compensate, the shower/ bathroom was twice the size needed -- for whom did they design that? (Lower cabins had much more room and storage space.) However, I spent little time there, preferring to kick back in the shade on the cushy couches and chairs on two decks. The old jacuzzi lay in disrepair....

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