This is a collection of my blog entries and experiences with diving.
You can find all the pictures I've taken here, and read below for recountings of my more recent trips:
All the pictures below are geotagged, so you can click on them to see where they were taken
This was our 3rd trip with Waow, this time we boarded in Maumere and the boat took us to some dive spots on the way until we arrived in Komodo where we dived for a week, including South Komodo (with colder water) to see the Manta Rays, and boy did we get lucky with those dives, we saw plenty of huge mantas. Sadly, I have to mention that some motherfucker in Maumere Airport managed to steal my travel pouch with my wallet, passport, international drivers license and all my travel documents while I was waiting for my luggage. Worse, the low life son of a bitch didn't even have the decency to ditch my papers somewhere that lost and found would find them. Not counting the money lost, losing almost all my credit cards, passport, and more, sucked big time. Bali is a fine place to visit (pretty safe, people genuinely nice, great food). The rest of Indonesia not as much as far as I'm concerned.
Anyway back to diving, we really lucked out. 10 days, 34 dives, and many were between great an epic. The amount of things we saw in those dives was only equalled by a prior Waow trip, gems of alone through the banda sea.
The water was unseasonably warm, usually around 30C, and it went as high as 33C (!), although that's actually bad for coral which can bleach and die when it gets too hot, and we saw some traces of that in one dive site.
We did a few land excursions during the trip, the main one of course was to go to an Island to see Komodo Dragons:
Komodos will eat monkeys if they can get their hands on one
Another day, we happened to spot them on a beach when we were on the boat, so we took a dinghy to go see them:
And a few days later, we went on an Island to climb its peak and have some snacks and drinks on the beach as the sun set:
We lucked out this time, the boat was not very busy, and we got upgraded to the master cabin, which was ridiculously roomy :)
But anyway, we were there for diving, so let's focus on that. A few pictures of us:
We saw many scorpionfish:
A fair amount of octopuses, more than I had seen in a single trip, including 2 big ones not shy to be out during the day and making nice colors and shapes for us:
This octopus is worth watching. First it made some displays for us and tried to stand tall to look impressive, and then it went hunting:
And we got so lucky with cuttlefish, from babies to pygmy to 9 full size ones that got together dazlle one another with colors and mate:
this little guy was learning to hunt. It wasn't very good, but a lot of fun to watch
it changed to yellow before going to pounce on little fish
it tries to dazzle them
While this video of the little guy is a full 5 minutes, it's so much fun to watch to see what it does, that I recommend it:
Then, we got the incredible chance to stumble on 9 cuttlefish that clearly were in the same place because they meant business of some kind :)
And more mantis shrimp than I had ever seen:
A few sharks:
A few turtles:
Plenty of triggerfish and clown triggerfish:
A few nice Napoleon and Humphead wrasse:
A few crabs of varying sizes:
orang outang crab
Moray Eels;
Most of the night dives were incredible:
hairy frogfish, awesome
we saw a pygmy seahorse
and one big one
nice colorful crab
this cuttlefish kept running into my camera and was trying to slide under it
I chased a squid to take pictures, it wasn't happy :)
a somewhat rare cat shark
On the 6th day, we went south of Komodo to Manta Alley. Water was a comfortable enough 24-25C when it can drop to 19-20C, and we got super lucky with many mantas, some came to swim around me to check me out when I surfaced. They came close enough that I could have touched the tip of their wing, but they skillfully bent it just enough so that it was slightly out of reach :)
we got some huge black mantas
Not counting Mantas, some other rays:
a single eagle ray
A rare torpedo ray?
nice spotted ray
By the 9th day, we had left Komodo and started sailing towards Bali. We stopped by a volcanic island and had two dives there. On one, we could see the methane coming out of the ground:
Lots of nice shrimp:
pretty sea urchin with 2 small shrimp
nice cleaning shrimp
Gobi and digging shrimp
I always like sea snakes, fun to watch when they go around hunting while totally ignoring you :)
Other misc:
one of our dive guides :)
a few fish :)
batfish are often quite tame and curious, they kept swimming around us
on one of our 2 manta dives we were also rewarded with huge humphead parrotfish
Pictures from the boat:
Our last day, we had a nice BBQ, and the crew celebrated their upcoming month off after 5 months of work:
π
2016-04-21 01:01
in Aquariums, Diving, Singapore2016
We had never gotten the opportunity to dive a nice aquarium so far, and while in Singapore, I figured we should give it a try, so we did.
After heading to Sentosa Island, we went directly to the SEA Aquarium's neighbour location, Adventure Water Park, and entered the aquarium's main tank from there. We had a photographer/dive guide with us, and sadly they would not allow me to take my gopro during the dive, even after paying a fee and dipping it in a bucket of bleach to sanitize it. The other unfortunate part was that I was told we couldn't use/bring our masks, and turned out we could. Sadly, their masks sucked and fogged up constantly, despite my having tried to treat mine before the dive, that made the dive much less enjoyable than it could have been.
Nonetheless, it was a cool experience to be on the other side of the glass window :)
