What to expect from snorkeling the Daymaniyat Islands
Assuming you’re doing a public rather than private trip, most follow the same itinerary (if you go private you can customize, but it is much more expensive). The most popular trips are the half day tours that leave once in the morning and once in the afternoon.
We were told that morning trips offer the best chance to see Whale sharks and also generally have the calmest weather, so the morning departures are the most popular.
The afternoon departures are quieter and offer the chance to see sunset from the boat, so if you’re not visiting during Whale shark season and you don’t mind so much about the weather, that could also be a good time to go.
Depending on the boat you take, the journey time is around 30 – 45 minutes each way and more if you’re looking for Whale sharks. The boat ride for us wasn’t choppy at all and even though I usually get very seasick I was fine on this one.
Generally speaking, the majority of tours visit the same three spots: the turtle snorkel spot, the shark snorkel spot and one of the Daymaniyat Islands. If you visit between May and October you can’t set foot on the islands themselves as it is turtle nesting habitat, but you can view the islands from the boat. Outside these months you can land on the islands and we’ll go into more detail on that later in the post.
The trips vary in duration, generally between 3 and 5 hours – but having said that, we booked the 3 hour trip and it lasted 5, so maybe they are all closer to 5 despite what they say!
We were told we would get 30 minutes at the shark spot, 1 hour at the turtle spot and 20 minutes on the island. However, we definitely got longer than this as we were out for 5 hours (and less than 2 of those were the boat journey, despite the fact we spent a long time looking for Whale sharks).
