Nudi Retreat

The boat drops you over the shallow end, where a coral bowl sits in the first few metres and soft coral grows right up to 2 m depth. From there the bottom turns into a sandy slope with encrusted boulders scattered across it, and two mini walls run out to either side of the bowl. The maximum depth on the site is 28 m, so the usual pattern is to work the slope early and come back up into the bowl for the last stretch.

The boulders and the soft coral are what to search rather than open sand: dragon sea moths, boxer crabs and pygmy seahorses are the common finds, and the anemones growing on the walls hold their own anemonefish. Blue-ringed octopus and juvenile flamboyant cuttlefish are both recorded here as well, so what the guide is hunting for changes from day to day. The nudibranchs the site is named for are spread across the coral rather than gathered in one patch.

Conditions decide what kind of dive this is. With good visibility and enough current running to open the soft corals, the mini walls hold up as a wide-angle dive; without it the site falls back to close work on the boulders and the slope. Either way the shallow bowl is the easiest place to spend the end of the dive, since the growth there sits well inside safety-stop depth.