Lembeh Straits, North Sulawesi - Indonesia
After having said Sandy farewell on her way back to Holland Dad was in for his first Indonesian diving experience! Happy to be able to share this with him we took a plane from KL to Makkassar on Sulawesi, spend one night in Makassar and flew the next morning to Manado on the North-east tip of Sulawesi to travel to Lembeh Straits, the critter capital of the world!
Having experienced Muck diving in Alor I was excited to see some more of that and some favorites were put high on the list already. The hairy frogfish, Pontohi's seahorse, mimic octopus and so on.. And yes we found them, but the taking pictures of them proved to be damn difficult with our 60mm lens..
For dad, being this his first muckdive ever nothing was really on his list (yet, but about to change) and he was in for a big surprise.. During the first dives we saw the most wicked animals already like the hairy frogfish almost always present at the divesite Jahir.
The weirdest animals were the crabs which were carrying all kinds of (living) things on their backs for camouflage. Although it should not be a big surprise considering the amount of octopuses and other crab eating predators in these waters, we still had the impression of being in another world!
Slowly we got adjusted to finding the critters ourselves as well although the guide Opo proved us again and again that he was the absolute master in finding the smallest animals between the rubble.
At the end of our (first) stay in Lembeh we were sad to leave Lembeh for the stay was so nice and the dives of such outstanding quality that we had a feeling we should return to the spot for some more of that! The diveoperators told us that nealry everybody would return for more since 5 days was not enough to be able to see all of the critters. I doubted whether two weeks would be enough, since so many animals were eluding from our have-seen list...
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Source: jcp-intotheblue.blogspot.com
