Another Friday, another Jaya departure, and we’re off for 6 days out in the Komodo National
Park for 11 new guests, with Captain Ahmad at the helm. The weather’s been fantastic the
last few days, so it’s looking like it will be a great trip! First dive at a new dive site we’ve
found off Sabayor, beautiful soft coral reef all along a channel, great drift dive, with a big
school of batfish and loads of sweetlips and snappers hanging around, and then a lovely sunset once we surfaced at the end of the dive, then back on the boat for hot chocolate and a few games of rummikub to get everyone acquainted!
Our plan was to start the trip at Batu Bolong, a steep pinnacle in the middle of the strait
through the park, but a current check showed that the current was too strong to be able to
dive the site, so we moved across west to Karang Makassar. Since these next 3 days are one
of our Manta Education trips, our aim was to visit the dive sites where we’re most likely to
see manta rays, and 3 dives and 30 or so mantas later at Makassar, we considered our aim
fulfilled! After informative briefings on how mantas behave, and the best ways to identify
them, we were really lucky to be able to spend such a decent amount of time with these
beautiful and curious animals.
In between our manta dives, we headed up to the North of the National Park, to explore theinfamous divesites of Castle Rock and Crystal Bommie – plenty of sharks and huge fusilier
bait balls awaited us, and marine creatures large and small, from immense napoleon wrasse
and giant sweetlips, to squat lobsters and pandalid shrimps. A dive around the Witch’s Hat
(a smaller pinnacle just West of Gili Lawa Darat, and a favourite of ours because it’s so un-
dived by everyone else, yay for gorgeous divesites all to ourselves!) finished off our time up
north, and 2 baby hawksbill turtles and a little black manta circled the top of the pinnacle for
the photographers. Another day, another totally different but still very beautiful sunset, this
time from ‘Sunset Rock’ on the west coast of Gili Lawa Darat. A lovely peaceful hour to
chill out after our full day of diving. Evenings are no less exciting on the Jaya, just because
there’s no diving, there’s always plenty of fun! Bananagrams was a trip favourite (think speed
group scrabble), and we introduced everyone to SpUno (Speed Uno) as well! More leisurely
pasttimes included some interesting documentaries on manta rays and the macro life to be
found in Indonesia.
Back to diving, and we made our final dive for the first half of the trip at Makassar Reef
(because there’s just no getting bored of diving with mantas!), and then it was back in to
Labuan Bajo where we said goodbye to Eric and Niklas, and with the remaining 9 guests we
sailed across to Pungu Island to climb up the hill and watch another gorgeous sunset across
the mangroves.
Jill and Rob were completing their Deep and Drift Specialty courses over the next 3 days,so they got to explore 40 metres under the watchful eye of Vintty down and off the reef
outside the Cauldron, whilst the rest of us drifted through, watching a manta fly around the
bowl-shaped topography of the dive site, and enjoying the colourful soft coral walls and the
swirling vortex of fish in the aptly named ‘fishbowl’.
Down to the centre of the park for a late afternoon dive once the currents had eased off at
Batu Bolong was very fishy! Fusiliers, trevallies and anthias everywhere, and a big friendly
green turtle sat munching away on the coral and didn’t take a bit of notice of us all hovering
around watching.
A pretty reef dive next, slightly more chilled out after a couple of strong current dives, and
after a lot of searching in many sea fans, we found pygmy seahorses at the Lighthouse, along
with an eagle ray, and another manta!
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Divemasters in training Calle & Erik were along for the 6 days to assist with leading divers
and giving dive site briefings – throughout their course they accompany our staff on the Jaya,
and gain valuable experience watching how liveaboards run, as well as getting a lot of hands-
on experience in the skills involved in divemastering. Liveaboards in Komodo, daytrips, and much much more are part of our Komodo Divemaster program
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For our final dives, we headed to 2 sites very different to those we usually frequent. Tengah
is a somewhat cold and dark dive site, reminiscent of the topography and characteristics of
the Southern Komodo dive sites, but the life there because of the cold, plankton-rich waters
is very diverse! Loads of funky nudibranchs, sponge snails, xenon crabs, a big school of
humphead parrotfish and some of the nicest staghorn coral reefs we can find in the national
park.
Wainilu is just nearby, and whilst the visibility here is also not great, it matters not because
it was a veritable treasure trove this trip: cowfish, miamira nudibranchs, frogfish, mandarin
fish, pictured dragonets, mantis shrimps, pipefish and all kinds of scorpionfish – several of
the guests brought cameras so there was plenty of good pictures to be had after the dives at
Wainilu!
We finished the 6 days off with a trek in the sunshine onto the island of Rinca to search for
Komodo Dragons, our luck just kept going with 10 dragon sightings (including a baby – they
look just like dinosaurs!) and a water buffalo. Great times on the Jaya!
-Wicked Diving Komodo
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