On a beautiful sunny Friday 27th January 2012, my husband and I went diving as usual in Musandam where we had not been in a couple of months. Although visibility was quite good for once (approx. 15m.) the underwater life was almost absent and spookily silent. Yet our scuba diving day became even more sombre by our return to Dibba port, where we always go check out the so-called ‘fish’ market… but what a horror show: not a single fish was displayed, literally only rows of sharks, guitar-sharks, white and black-tip sharks, grey sharks and worst of all baby sharks, that we have never seen during our three years of weekly diving in Musandam… The divemaster with whom we dived also informed us that the day before, fishermen had proudly caught a whaleshark and cut it into piece to sell on the market… Ironically, the only time we encountered whalesharks in Oman/UAE was at Lima Rock two years ago and since, they are no where to be seen… no wonder we never see sharks and less and less animal life underwater in the region – everything is laid out on market stalls…

It seems that to top it all and adding to the unreasonable fishing going on in Oman/UAE, pollution and destruction of corals are also two other escalating factors which are quickly leading to the dramatic extinction of the underwater eco-system in the region - I sadly witnessed it with my very own eyes last weekend (23rd-24th March 2012) in no other place than the legendary Damaniyat Islands in Oman. We went sailing on a stunning catamaran with a group of friends and both my husband and I were very excited to go back to the Damaniyat Islands as we had not been since three years. We remembered the crystal clear water and putting our heads underwater to admire a buzzing underwater life crowded with reef sharks, turtles, a very wide range of reef fish and some of the most beautiful and colourful corals we had ever seen at the time. However, three years later, it is a whole different scenery… despite the many hours of snorkeling around most of the islands over two days, we only saw a small terrified turtle, two giant lobsters and a few fish and moray eels. Yet it was tragic to see how the Damaniyat Islands, once a sanctuary for sea-life and supposedly a nature reserve off the Omani coast, is becoming a cemetery of corals where in some areas corals have been flung upside down, or scattered in a million pieces frighteningly reminding us of the dynamite fishing scenes we had seen in Zanzibar. We saw a motor-boat with some snorkelers exploring the Damaniyat and instead of mooring to a buoy as we were, the captain’s mate violently threw the heavy anchor without even looking what was underneath in the shallow water, and unavoidably destroyed some more corals… Even the sandy white beaches, so characteristic of the Damaniyat, are patched with trash and abandoned items which we will most probably find underwater, suffocating a coral or a turtle, next time we go to the Damaniyat. On the way to the Damaniyat, despite the dense presence of plankton, we didn’t even see a dolphin, nor a whaleshark, just a lonely dark ocean being more and more deprived from its inhabitants. The Damaniyat ‘lost’ paradise will definitively be lost forever if no action is taken right now to at least protect that small precious area of the ocean and preserve its state of ‘natural reserve’. If so much has changed in only three years, what will the Damaniyat look like next year if nothing is done ?