Day 15 - Diving in The Conch and the Earls of Shaftesbury Shipwrecks in Hikkaduwa

Yep, These are the two shipwreck diving sites near hikkaduwa which i always wanted to dive.
As usual, i had a huge bad luck with the visibility.

Conch

First we dived in Conch,
The Conch is a Huge shipwreck laying on a 21 meters deep rocky bottom. ~30mins boat.
Basically the debris of conch can be seen in 3 main areas.

• Main Propeller and some oil tanks it has been carrying
• Main deck side
• Fore-deck side

in Main desk side, there's a hole which can be dived through it.

Overall, its a nice diving site and i hope to dive here again.

Dive through hole

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Earls of Shaftesbury


And here is the Earls of Shaftesbury. laying on a 15 meters deep, sandy bottom, not very far away from the Conch.
Again the visibility was pretty bad.

Good thing is that it took away my virginity on seeing rays. We spotted a ray, resting on the sandy bottom.
Size and the shape was very similar to a sting ray, But im not 100% sure.

Can you see a ray here? ;-)
This is my first ray on camera

Day 14 - Scuba Diving in Thunatta gala - Hikkaduwa

"Thunatta Gala" is a... well.. that is just some rocks spread out in a large landscape. To be honest i wasn't a big fan of thunatta gala.

But to give you some information,

Its located near Hikkaduwa, 20min boat, 17m deep.

Day 11,12,13 - Open water diver course in Hikkaduwa

Phew!! Had to push ourselves beyond the limits to undergo 3 painful consecutive days of totally exhaustive rigorous underwater training towards the PADI certification and we totally nailed it in the end!

One thing we learnt is that It was not just about testing our diving skills but involves a great deal of patience, concentration and endurance in harsh environments under pressure.
Opened up a whole new world of wonderful & exciting adventures and really excited to get hold of our license and plan our next dive destinations here and around the world with my dive buddy Chula.

Our PADI instructor's name is Feroz. He works at Blue Deep diving center in Hikkaduwa ( and in Trincomalee too )

 

Day 10 - Diving in Hikkaduwa gala

My 3rd dive! But this time the visibility was even worse than my previous dive. My diving guide dumindu warned me about that before the dive, so i left my still camera in the boat. Here i'm sharing only the video footage. This was actually a team outing with my project( Cake - GuestManager ) buddies, so my product manager ben and my tech lead jeff also joined us for this dive.

Diving site is Hikkaduwa gala. "Gala" means rock in native sinhala language. So it was basically a huge rock with beautiful vertical surfaces inhabited by schools of fish.

I'll surely dive here again in a better day.

Day 09 - Diving in Trincomalee ( Nilaveli )

Oh well!! this is my second scuba dive! Lot of things to learn to be a good diver... However we dived in a shipwreck not really more than 10 meters deep. Unidentified large ship that they call it "The Irrakandy Ship wreck" which no one exactly knows how long ago did it sink. It wasn't at the perfect visibility level, But wasn't too bad either.

Again we dived with the same diving center the "blue-deep". Which gave us a very good price, and also the staff was awesome. Dumindu ( "Duma" ) was the guy who lead us and one of the best guys around there who's doing tourism in his own fashion. These guys are originally from hikkaduwa... so i cant wait to do more dives with them in the next hikka season!

Preparing for the dive, in blue deep diving center

Ruins of the propeller of the irrakandy shipwreck

Awesome people.. in blue deep diving center

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Watch this video in high res.

Day 08 - Snorkeling in Pigeon Island

Finally! After long working months i got an escape back to my snorkeling and diving world. And This time in trincomalee, the North-east coast of Sri lanka. "Pigeon Island" is located 1.5Kms off from the coast of Nilaveli. Beautiful with its high contrasting colors of the sandy beach. Snorkeling is really good here from May to August. However it was partially cloudy when we did the snorkeling.. So some of the photos had no enough light. I went there with the blue-deep diving center. These guys were awesome and i highly recommend them. They were very pro-active, especially "Chamakla" the guys who helped me to take photos.

Chamalka and us.. on the way to the pigeon island

Corals in Pigeon Island

I like this photo

Black tip reef shark in pigeon island

Chamalka and myself

Watch this in high res mode.