By now, with a few days of SriLankan diving behind me, it did not come as a surprise to meet a lionfish patrolling the shoulder of the reef. For some reason the local lionfish like this sort of exposed position on the reef, though I cant fathom why. Anyway, it does make them easily accessible with a camera, so who's complaining. The coastline on the west of Sri Lanka is flat and shallow. At Bentota a sandy seabed stretches offshore for many miles, with a clutch of granite reefs 6 or 7 miles offshore, rising from 25 or 30 metres to just a few metres below the surface.
Visibility is highly variable.
Rivers to the north and south of the dive sites flush silty water out to sea, and currents along the coast bend the bands of silty water either towards or away from particular dive sites. If the visibility at a site was looking too low, the solution was simple, the boat just moved on to another site a mile or so away and we enjoyed better visibility there. There were a few catches, like murky surface layers following a night of rain, but even then visibility in deeper water was good.