Trip 17 of the season got off to a lovely sunny start as we headed out to Sabolan for a late afternoon check dive. Big schools of fusiliers and trevallies all over, black tip reef sharks in the shallows, and we were on the lookout for the elusive Pygmy seahorses!
This trip was one of our Manta Education liveaboards, so we had some briefings on manta biology, behaviour, and how to identify individual manta rays. We picked dive sites known for their manta sightings in order to maximize the chances of seeing these beautiful creatures, and we were very lucky, with mantas at Batu Bolong, Karang Makassar, the Witches Hat and the Cauldron - lots of very happy divers, but more importantly, lots of knowledge gained & put to use.
We explained about the importance of good buoyancy and keeping a respectful distance from the mantas, as well as not using flash photography when taking ID shots. The mantas put on a good display for us, not only a fantastic sight, but good to get some photos of their undersides for identification to send through to www.mantmatcher.org to help keep the global database updated.
Castle Rock and Crystal Bommie lived up to their hype with grey reef and white tip sharks aplenty, and a couple of very lucky groups saw a hunting dolphin, successful dive! Huge Napoleon wrasse, schooling giant trevallies and an abundance of marine life at both these sites enabled all our photographer divers to get some good shots! The current was just right at Batu Bolong to allow us to circle the pinnacle, something we're not often able to do due to potential down currents at the edges of the rock, so to be able to explore the smaller pinnacles and dive between massive cliffs was an impressive sight.
Luck was again on our side when we dived Karang Makassar, as the rest of us watched a baby manta barrel rolling, Scott's group were treated to a pair of bottlenose dolphins playing in the current! Ellen & Wilhelm were eagle eyed as they spotted a painted frogfish, and Brad found a different type of slipper lobster on the night dive at Karang Bintang, and then we saw more sharks and another manta at the Cauldron, along with the biggest giant trevally you've ever seen.
Sophie and Brad have just finished 6 days on the Jaya so we were treated to a special briefing from them (with a map that put our usual ones to shame!) for Karang Makassar, one last dive here to finish the trip and see if there were any more mantas hanging around.
This group of guests were born under a lucky star - not only manta rays, but an eagle ray, octopus, orang utan crabs, sharks and loads of peacock mantis shrimps as well - a fab dive to end an absolutely incredible 3 days of diving!
Sadly it's Aldo's last trip in Komodo with us for the time being, he's heading back to our Khao Lak office to oversee the upcoming season preparations - it's been awesome having him down here on the Jaya, come back soon Aldo!
-Diving Komodo
No comments:
Post a Comment