Ten nights, two overnight crossings, channels that do not forgive a casual buoyancy check, and nine hours from a chamber.
The southern trip is the one the crew look forward to all year and the one we turn most people away from.
Ten nights running from Laamu through Thaa and into Huvadhoo, with the two long crossings done overnight while everybody sleeps. Four dives a day when the tides allow. Channels a kilometre wide with current that arrives all at once rather than building.
The diving is better than the central atolls in every respect but one: there is no easy version of it. There is no shallow reef to drop onto when the channel turns out to be running harder than the briefing said. The plan is the plan and you have to be able to execute it.
So we ask for fifty logged dives and recent experience in current, and we read the logbook rather than glance at it. A guest once told us fifty and meant twelve, and we put him on a flight home from Kooddoo. That was an expensive morning for everybody and it was still the right call.
The other fact is geography. There is one recompression chamber in this country. From the middle of the southern itinerary we are around nine hours from it in good weather. That is why our maximum depths are ours rather than yours, why nitrox is strongly recommended on this trip, and why the last day has no dive on it at all.
If that reads as discouraging, book the central atolls trip, come back with thirty more dives, and then book the south. Several of our regulars did exactly that.