Beside different factors like colder water (we were entering the rainy season), one of the biggest factor was, we didn’t have a macro dive master. The Indonesian dive masters especially in Menado and Bali are extremely talented in finding small stuffs, they know where they hide, how to locate the habitat and how to find the creatures. We learned from them a lot but unfortunately we are yet as good as them. So this was the big factor that we missed the most during the two weeks. Anyway, Thomas’s style was completely different with local dive master. He sort of dive companion, you are basically on your own. With so many people, could be up to 1:10 so we certainly couldn’t count on him for anything. (For scuba diving practice in Indonesia, ideally the proportion would be 1:4, can be less can be more. The most was 6 and that was rare occurrence although it also depends on location, difficulty level and skills). Thomas just showed you the way, and you take care of yourself. That’s why we prefer local guide. Haha…
However, I am not complaining. He was actually do the correct practice, and always tried to accommodate us the best he could. He never said no when we probably the only two who requested for three dives a day, he certainly understand when we told him we liked to dive slowly and long. He basically let us did what we wanted as long as we were responsible. In fact, I felt like we were being spoilt. We almost always dived longer than other guests. Beside the German divers, for the last three days we had other companions, just one or two guys. Around 50 minutes, he would signal them to go up while we were free to play ourselves as long as we wished. It could be because of air consumption too. It felt like they were the step guests and we were not.. haha.. I think one of the guy was a little bit jealous and was peeking at us from the surface. He would later go down again to snorkel around until we surfaced.
We found macro critters too in non-muck diving dive sites, we found Frogfish in a dive site called No Man’s land, a lot of nudibranch in Shark’s Galore and there was a dive site where we could find mandarin fish on day dives. I forgot to write it down but I think it’s in School’s Out? This dive site has field of staghorns and thousands of turquoise colored tiny fish. It’s sparkling as far as you could see. Staghorn is favorite hide out for mandarinfish. Too bad that day the current was medium strong that we couldn’t stay still to wait for them. They are such shy and picky creatures that we had to wait silently, motionless until they decided to come out. We could see them hidden there and playing peek-a-boo. Once they appear, slowly lift the camera (or stand by looking through viewfinder) or use the split seconds to snap, because they will mostly hide again. I feel that it’s easier to get their pictures while still using compact camera because the working distance is further. Now, it’s very very difficult, especially on the dusk dive when they normally come out. Back then in Derawan, we could use 45 minutes waiting on the same spot every night just to try to get their pictures.
So, with current, we could only see them hiding here and there, but it was quite a surprise that they were as active as night time.
Other macro dive site like mini wall, was a nice small wall with colorful critters, we found mushroom coral pipe fish, the white color pipefish we didn’t get chance to see, but it’s abundant in Alor. Pink Forest, where they have pink coral that shaped like mini tree, that’s where the name from. Too bad the lens couldn’t capture the overall corals. Pink forest is also the place where we found very active seasnake hunting. Normally when we saw sea snakes, they would be kind of shy or didn’t move so much. But the one we saw in Alor was oblivious to us, didn’t give any attention. In Comet Bay, I also found a bloody long sea snake hunting. I was following and trying to take video or pictures of it for a good fifteen minutes. It went in and out holes, probably looking for moray eels, its preferred prey. The macro lens focus point was so near I needed to get close to get the sharp video, it was difficult because it kept moving and I was hovering. There was one point that it went up directly to the camera after retracting its head from the hole in the coral below me before slid to another piece of coral under my face. I have to admit that my heart dropped for a split second. Eventhough they are not aggressive with divers and this one totally ignored me, they still have the cool reputation of being the most venomous snake, ten times more venomous than deadliest land snake, taipan. Few milligrams of its venom are enough to kill probably 1000 adults.
I knew it was a big snake when I followed it that day, but when I was watching my video (unworthy to post..sob…sob..) it was actually much longer than I thought. I captured it went inside a hole under the coral, my camera stayed still there while meters and meters of its body went in. Before I even saw the tail, I move the camera to the other hole where it came out, and there was the snake, in many2 folding of its length (I don’t know if my way of description makes sense) before finally found its head. Wow.. I guess it is at least three meters if that’s possible.
We had a dive site called Pertamina Pier, it’s shallow and had abundant of macro life. But who knew that day the current decided to visit that very area, it’s ripping and we needed to hang on the pier’s structures that weren’t overgrown by corals. We saw devil scorpionfish, pipefish, a lot of blennies but combined with cold water and strong current, we really couldn’t explore much. Half an hour into the dives, our dive companions were all disappeared because the visibility was limited. We explored the are further on the right side of the pier but finally gave in to the cold water just before the bottom time strike sixty minutes.
The Japan Wreck I dive site, the wreck was already unrecognizable and overgrown with corals. It’s also murky that upon descending, Thomas etc couldn’t be found already. We had not even reached the wreck. We stayed at 4-5 meter mark (the depth where the wreck should be) and kept looking out for either wreck or them. But everywhere was so shallow we hardly escaped 2 meter. I popped up my head to the surface and saw Pier’s fins and bubble. Went down again, we quickly swam to the direction and they were there, so were the wreck. The tide was so low I think the wreck merely rested in 2-3 meter. In part and pieces of the wreck, I had never seen that many Picasso Triggerfish before, this gorgeous colorful fish are unfortunately a far cry from their aggressive cousins, Titan and Yellowmargin triggerfish. They were shy and hid from us before we even approached them. Since it’s broken wrecks, some corals, there were many places to hide. They would dart inside the holes, and wedged their dorsal fins so they can’t be removed by predator. It’s super funny to see their back side poking out if the hiding place was not deep enough, or part of their moncong (snout). I admit I was being bad, I couldn’t resist when I found a medium sized Picasso hiding, too bad it was thinking like an ostrich. Only the head was hidden but half of its body was outside. Yah, I tickled it. Kuchi kuchi kuchi.. it must had played dead. So I waited there and watched. When it thought it was safe, slowly it pulled his head out, looked around, saw me, surprised, darted and ran (eh..swim) like lightning. The cutest one were the babies, like this one inside the rock below, thinking that we couldn’t see it. Awwwww…
I am miniature sucker, so tiny animals are cutest for me. Connecting to that, we saw a pair of crab eyed gobies busy playing with sand. I don’t know whether they are playing, eating or building nest, they always like to gulp mouthful of sands and disposed it through their gills. They also jumped comically while pretending to be a pair of crabs. We always found them in pair. As usual, if we are motionless, crab eyes gobies don’t mind if you come near. As a nice surprise, our eye caught another very very tiny crab eye goby nearby, it was soooo cute.
Another good macro dive site was Ampera, visited by only two of us, Thomas and Pier (told you he never sat out a dive), we found an orange warty frog fish and yellow giant frog fish. Today hubby didn’t bring his camera, after the fright in the morning that the camera couldn’t wake up, some water in the casing, we spent the morning boat journey suntanning the camera in the front of the boat. Luckily it was okay, but he left the casing in the room. I passed the camera to him to take the frog fish. I love this fish so much that we should get good pictures of them, and it’s better that he took it for the two of us. Good decision.
I also found a very weird looking scorpion fish, it was totally white (not unusual) but it was laying side way on the overhanging of an coral, defying gravity. It’s weird in every way.
The Germans were not very familiar in macro diving with the exception of Andreas, who was the only German who brought camera (in impressive set-up though). However, he also not really familiar in finding critters. All the while, we were almost diving separately from them, because it’s a big group, we always far apart from each other, so we hardly showed each other any critters that we found. Until their last diving day.
It was the day when we saw mola2, when we turned direction to Comet Bay. Since we had been there before, I basically remembered the terrain and remembered the abundance of nudibranch especially Halgerda Batangas, a species of pink spiky nudibrach. I wanted to search back the pink robust ghost pipe but couldn’t remember the exact depth last time. Instead, I found another beautiful pair of Halgerda Batangas and Andreas happened to be behind me. I showed it to him, then I found a very gorgeous (I had never seen too!) Sulawesi Glossodoris and showed it to and him. then Chromodoris Kuniei, Dusky Nembrotha and Tambja Morossa. When we surface, he was very happy,”so you are nudibranch finders, are you?”
P.S: Sorry that the pictures are very messily arranged (read: wasn't arranged). I love blogspot and all, but the picture loading and arranging function needs to be improved badly.
To see more picture, go to my photobucket, link included on top of this blog
It’s always fun to introduce fellow divers to macro world, for those who are interested, we are more than happy to do so. It’s a very rewarding feeling to see how others appreciate the unusual beauty and bizarre underwater life, like Carlos our dive master in Philippine who was not familiar with macro and grew very curious to it. Maybe that’s how Prass felt last time. Prass is our guru who introduced us to macro diving and we had never looked back since. But there are still a lot to learn, we had yet found our own Mount Rushmore of the macros; Harlequin shrimp, Boxer Crabs, Blue Ring Octopus and Pygmy Seadragon. The rest we had had some success. We did found Harlequin Shrimps and Blue Ring Octopus by ourselves, but I don’t count it, because the Harlequin Shrimps was found in Seraya where they basically almost everywhere when we were there on 2008 (good old days, right season), we found Blue Ring Octopus because we dived on the same spot every night for almost two weeks in Derawan, and they were always there although it’s freaking difficult to recognize them when they don’t show their colors. They look like just another octopus and another lump of corals.
Another impressive dive site was in Mutiara. It was an abandoned Pearl farm structure I guess. Thomas said there were many concrete frames down there, amongst and on the concrete, was where the critters hid. There were only three diver guests on the boat and the other guys was not going down for the third dive, so it was only two of us. He said he would go down with us, and stayed probably half an hour, after that we could continue and explore ourselves. The depth was merely eight meters and for some, the air could last two hours, then he looked at us and think for a moment, “but don’t stay until two hour” and grinned. We had average ninety minutes dives for macro on much deeper sites and he might have realized it’s not wise to put the idea into our heads because we might do so. Indeed, Mutiara was gorgeous and it would need hours to explore. We had seen some concrete frames in Seraya if I’m not wrong, as structure for artificial reefs. So I thought it would look like that, quite bare. We were pleasantly surprised when we were down there. The frames were scattered on the sea bed, so many of them that after ninety minutes of diving, we still didn’t get to the end of it. It was very rich and overgrown in corals, on the frames, in between, inside the frames. There were hundreds of them, no wonder it’s Thomas favorite dive site according to Oliver. It would be gorgeous to do night dive here. We found pipefish, moray eels, many scorpionfish including shortfins, many nudibranch including the bizarre Briareum Phyllodesmium. Too bad the water was quite cold for us to stay longer.
Like Pink Forest, there were also a good number of jawfish. This fish is ugly but cute, had unfriendly face but funny attitude. They would poke their head out of their nest, then look around, left, right, turn 360 degrees. Repeat.
For other macro dives, there was one great day when we had the whole boat to ourselves. When our companions had gone home and there was no other divers. On that day we requested that we just dived in the bay, all three muck diving. Thomas asked us to choose where we wanted to dive but we left it to him. He brought us to a dive site called Bus Station. He said there used to be a bus there. Before I asked how the bus got there (I’m not sure I really want to ask though, if it was a tragic story I might feel eery, but I think it’s not) he told us the bus had gone, It had been recovered and sold as scrapped metal. It could be quite cool to dive inside bus wreck, maybe sitting there and look at the window or tried being bus diver once in awhile. Upon descending, the visibility looked okay. Okay for macro site yah, not great but not bad. We moved along the seabed and granted with gorgeous Okinawa Halgerda sight which was a species of nudibranch that I have yet seen. Soon we got busy with shrimp, crab, another gigantic Okinawa and yet another Halgerda that looked very similar to Okinawa but different pattern (Apingpingaa Halgerda? Halgerda Alor?). It looked shallow, we felt shallow, but we were actually at 24 meter which is deep for macro dives, which is deep for us. We passed the time when depth excited us (come to think of it, it never did unless for special targeted dive like finding big stuffs or wrecks). For general dive and specifically macro, the best depth for us is 10-16/18 meter. This is where good stuff normally hang around, it’s not too deep that you have to watch out for the deco time constantly, it’s not too shallow that you have to worry for passing boat, surface current, jellyfish that I found occurs more in the shallow, imbalance tank, and weird eardrum sensation that I sometime experience in shallow water, and of course, shallow water normally means your dive is ending, and I don’t prefer that.
Anyho, we slowly grazed to the shallower area and found many more things to see. Second and third dive that day was also fruitful with school of cuttlefish, nudibranch, coral crabs, shrimps, shortfin lionfish, harlequin ghost pipefish, on the site that we strongly suspected has the presence of rhinopias. It has the type of corals and terrain where these guys usually hang out but we didn’t have chance to explore it enough when we stumbled to that terrain on our own at almost the end of the dive. Thomas had gone up because he gave us the freedom to dive ourselves.
He would brief us, went down with us, showed us around and then half an hour later he would tell us to explore ourselves and surfaced. Everything was briefed beforehand. It looked like he had good times when only us were around, he brought his own camera, looked for stuff and showed us too. It reminds me of when we were diving with Carlos in Philippine back then, when he literally let us do some exploration on our own, even for new dive site.
A little story, before we went down for the third dive, we actually tried to dive a new site. The area is known as Teluk Buaya he never dived before. Two three days ago, Sukono had asked us if we dared to dive with saltwater crocodiles. I told him I should be able to, think for a moment and then asked him whether it’s okay. (I mean, don’t anyhow throw us in crocodile nest without knowing it’s safe or not). He said it should be fineeee (you know those kind of dragging the end of the word like we are self-guessing ourselves about whether we believe 100% of what we said). I told him I read that crocodiles actually refrain from attacking something that are bigger than themselves, and I thought saltwater crocodiles are quite small (excuse my limited knowledge). He said haha.. the sizes are ten-footers or 3 meters. There are three types; black, white and red saltwater crocodiles and apparently there was a crazy dude who dived just for the purpose of diving with the crocodiles. Just one crazy dude so far though. I was still keen and curious; it would be new experience for us. So we told him we didn’t mind if they think it could be done safely. He said he would discuss it to Thomas and told us he didn’t anyhow bring it up actually. It’s just that he thought from his observation we are capable and never trouble them in anyway, means creating problem with irresponsible behaviors etc, which followed by his story about irresponsible divers in the past, who like to take matters in their own hands without realizing the risk. We’ve seen many of those. Jump to the water in the current without waiting or getting the clear of boat movement or other divers, racing to dive as deep as they could on single tank set-up and just common compressed air, tried to ride turtle, chasing big fish to depth out of safety range, forgetting to count air consumption, ditching buddy, poking heads inside coral crevices or holes, it’s endless.
So we didn’t actually know how it came out, whether he did talk to Thomas or whatever, we thought it’s not gonna happen, especially with other divers around. Until that only day when there were only two of us, on second dive we were told the area is called Teluk Buaya just before we went down and we also didn’t realize the ‘Buaya’ word actually mean literally buaya (crocodile). We thought it was just another name, anyway they have quite a lot of cool names for the dive sites, and this dive point was still nameless, it’s just that the land area around this place was called Teluk Buaya. Don’t worry we didn’t see any, and even if some passed by next to us, we never know. From the surface the visibility looked okay but when we descended, Thomas and hubby sunk down slightly faster than me and I couldn’t see them instantly, but the bubbles were around. The visibility was really really bad, probably half a meter to one meter. I couldn’t see the ground or even them, when I looked up, I couldn’t see the surface, just slightly brighter murky water. So I slowly sunk, following the bubbles, caught glimpse of their tanks once in a while, and suddenly I saw them already near the seabed. I joined them, looked around but the visibility was so bad, I could only see their faces when I got near. Thomas suggested thumbs up or surfaced, and both of us said okay.
Upon climbing up to the boat, we then learned that this place is one of the places we can find crocodile underwater. Sukono even went as far as to say it ‘markas buaya’ or crocodile center, or how I put it? Let’s just say it’s the base camp where the crocodile like to hang around, chit chat, drink coffee or something like that. We don’t know whether we should laugh or should drop our jaws. And isn’t it.. (again, I read before but not sure how reliable) isn’t murky water is crocodile favorite place where they are more likely to be found? Or is it only applicable for fresh water crocodile? I just can’t picture enough how would our reaction would be, when we were oblivious that we might encounter crocodile and then we actually saw them passing by our noses. We both played this scenario, and most likely we would freeze, wide eyes, and bite our regulator in trembling motion or probably nyembur nasi. Ha…
