Marc's Public Blog - Diving

π 2016-04-26 01:01 in Diving

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: