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meanderful · 2 years

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Dragons and Mantas and Sharks, Oh My!

Adventure Ahoy!

Though sad to be leaving Bali, we felt a real sense of excitement to be moving on. Through some form of magic (otherwise known as excellent organisational skills), Sam sorted us a 6-day/5-night liveaboard trip into Komodo National Park on a boat that usually takes four guests but, because it was the final week of the season, he bagged the trip for just the two of us for no extra cost. Sidenote for non-divers: a “liveaboard” is a boat with an air compressor, thus allowing for tank refills without the need to return to shore. This cuts out journey time so that you can do several dives per day while journeying through often remote regions that would otherwise be pretty inaccessible for diving. This was the first time Sam and I had ever been on a liveaboard trip.

This is all to say, within a few hours of arriving in the port town of Labuan Bajo on the island of Flores, 700km east of Bali, we somehow ended up on our very own private charter!

A dinghy took us out to where the Busy Girl, our home for the next six days, was moored. She is a compact former-fishing boat, hence the unusually small capacity of just four customers. We were introduced to the crew for the trip—Yunus, our dive guide; Suhar, el capitan; Herman, the engineer; Yoris, the cook; Fian, the dinghy driver; and Grace, a 17-year-old student doing an internship as part of the tourism course she’s studying). And to point out the potentially obvious, a ratio of six crew to two customers is extremely luxurious!

Photos Above: arriving at the Busy Girl for the first time; setting sail from Labuan Bajo's port

We left Labuan Bajo port midway through the afternoon and chugged straight for our first dive site, heading west into the national park. The surroundings were immediately stunning, the water punctuated with green islands here and there. They didn’t look tropical at all, more like very steep, dry moorland peppered with the occasional tree.

The biggest disappointment of the trip was the fact that Sam still couldn’t dive—he joined Yunus and myself for one dive partway through, but it wasn’t at all comfortable for his ears and he could tell they hadn’t healed fully, and so had to sit the rest of our dives out and instead often snorkelled the same sites.

Nonetheless, we quickly settled into life on the boat and ended up having a fantastic time. Given that I was doing three dives a day, the schedule felt pretty jampacked, with most of the time between 6.30a.m.–4.30p.m. each day spent prepping for diving, diving itself, and eating our freshly cooked meals in between. That said, living on a boat was hardly a tough life as we didn’t even have to sort out our own dive gear or cook our own food. So there was plenty of time for napping, drafting up my diving diary, digging deep into the reef fish and creatures identifications books on board, and relaxing on the deck as we glided through the beautiful national park. It was quickly apparent that Yoris was an excellent chef, serving up dishes such as crisp chilli tempe, tofu and caramelised onions in a sweet bean sauce, fresh green beans and beansprouts, various noodle creations, and battered aubergine pieces, to name just a few of his creations. And given that scuba diving is pretty heavy cardiovascular exercise and I was doing three hours’ worth in a day, I devoured Yoris’ creations with great keenness.

Photos Above: Busy Girl in all her glory; her dive setup area and front deck; the kitchen; me studiously working away with the reef identification books at the back seating area; our cabin; fresh juice in the mornings!

Over the course of the six days, we zigzagged our way around the north and central sections of the national park. We were incredibly lucky with the timing and weather. As it was the right at the end of the season, we saw very few other boats (usually, it’s roughly 15 boats moving around together), and I only saw other divers at 3 out of the 15 dive sites. We also only had a couple of hours of rain during the daytime in the entire six days, despite the fact that it’s the rainy season and it apparently rained heavily the previous week. What luck!

Photo Above: one of our mooring spots on day 2, amid the beautiful scenery

Though I kept a (far too fulsome) diary of every dive, as well as notes on other exciting events that happened on the trip, I suspect that reading a detailed account of fifteen individual dives might not make for the most fascinating read. So with this in mind, I’ve put together a condensed “Best Of” for you all below!

Day 1

Dive #1: Sebayur Kecil

We entered the water doing a front stride entry from the Busy Girl. Sam wasn’t able to descend with us, his ears not clearing properly so he almost immediately resurfaced, and Yunus and I continued. I was immediately struck by how different the reef was compared to all my recent dives around Nusa Lembongan and its sister islands, with a completely different variety of corals and colours. Alongside generally marvelling at all the fish life, we saw two Green Turtles and a Blacktip Shark also cruised by a couple of times. We were picked up afterward by the dinghy with Yunus instructing me to unclip my dive gear and pass it up first and then jump up into the dinghy “like a dolphin”. I think I may have quite a way to go before any dolphin will be accepting me into their pod.

Photo Above: front-stride entry into the water from the Busy Girl

Day 2

Dive #2: Tatawa Besar

We were in the water by 7a.m. As a perpetually hungry person, I wondered what diving before breakfast would be like—turns out it’s a delight. Nothing quite like an hour in the tropical 29 degrees water, floating amid the coral and fish life to work up an appetite. And what a dive it was! The first third of the dive was hard work, with a strong downcurrent meaning that we had to constantly kick upwards. The reef was mostly made up of purple-grey sponges and green and yellow soft coral. The current began to ease and we zigzagged back and forth for the rest of the dive slowly getting shallower with each zig and zag. We saw several Green and Hawksbill turtles, foraging, resting, and going up for air. We also saw a huge cuttlefish, maybe half a metre long, flashing like a disco ball—they rapidly change colour both as a camouflage technique and to warn off potential predators so I wonder what we registered as. And then Yunus suddenly excitedly pointed upwards towards the shallow edge of the reef and there was a Reef Manta Ray gliding by! For the rest of the dive, two individuals glided back and forth around us—at one point Yunus turned toward me and his eyes widened in surprise as one of the mantas glided over my head with me completely unaware until the last moment. As we did our five-metre safety stop for three minutes (standard practice for every single recreational dive), the two mantas were feeding at the surface, circling right by us even as we also surfaced.

Dive #4: Golden Passage

This was the first dive that we didn’t enter the water straight from the Busy Girl—Fian took us out on the dinghy to the passage between Gili Lawa Darat and Komodo, where the narrow strait creates a strong current and acts as a sort of funnel for marine life in the area. I noted while underwater that this dive felt a bit like an orchestral overture, with distinctly different movements, changes in pace, and definite flourishes as the topography, coral, and marine life changes throughout the dive. It began with an intense crescendo when Yunus spotted a school of mobula ray fly past only a few minutes after descending (I counted eleven altogether!). Then things were legato for a while as a very light current gently drifted us across a sandy bottom peppered with corals and sponges here and there. As we followed the curve of the seabed around a corner, things began to get even more exciting when the current seriously picked up exactly as another school of mobulae swam by, so that we both hooked a finger into rocks on the seabed so that we could watch them swim by. Shortly afterwards, the seabed dropped away into the blue as the passage between the islands became much deeper and we followed the sloping reef for the rest of the dive. The reef was now intensely colourful, with purple, red, yellowy-green, and blue branching corals amid fan and mushroom corals (I sound as though I know what I’m talking about but I’m pretty sure I’ve made up the names of some of these types of corals). Schools of tiny silvery fish, the size of the circle of my finger and thumb together, floated above the reef like shimmering, buoyant confetti. Just as we did our safety stop, we spotted Sam snorkelling above us. He told me that he had been hanging out with a juvenile cuttlefish for ages, which apparently seemed wholly unfussed about his large presence near it.

Whales!:

We’re just back on the boat after an incredibly exciting hour. Just after showering after the final dive of the day, two national park staff pulled up to Busy Girl to check our paperwork. They let Yunus know that blue whales had been spotted very close to where we surfaced after our last dive just over an hour ago and that they were still around. We immediately pulled on swimsuits, jumped into the dinghy with Fian and Yunus, and headed out into the bay. Within minutes, the whales surfaced, and we could see their backs curved through the water and sprays of water shoot into the air as the exhaled through their blowholes—I’ll admit I was very close to tearing up with happiness. My first blue whales! We spent a full hour following them in a large loop around the bay—with not one single other boat around—and realised that there were three individuals, one of them likely a calf I would guess, based on its smaller size. They surfaced time and time again to breathe, gliding so gracefully that their tail flukes arced through the air behind them. A few times, we tried to jump into the water with our snorkels a short distance in front of where they last surfaced, but every time they were far too fast for us to keep up. Nonetheless, it was an exhilarating, beautiful experience. As we headed back towards the tiny bay where the Busy Girl was moored, the sun was setting behind the islands in front of us, a beautiful, final moment to round the experience off.

Video Above: video credit to Fian, who managed to drive the dinghy at speed at the same time as capturing this video, as we all realised that there were in fact THREE blue whales surfacing less than 50m away from us

Day 3

Dive #5: Castle Rock

That was a crazy dive! Yunus briefed me beforehand about the site and its conditions. As it’s a huge pinnacle rising up out of the seabed until very close to the surface and often has strong currents, the dive had certain technical challenges. Usually, you enter the water with your buoyancy control jacket (BCD) inflated so that you can bob at the surface checking everyone is okay and then all descend together. But for sites with strong currents, it’s safer to do negative entry, rolling backwards off the boat with your BCD deflated so that you drop straight down, ensuring that the current doesn’t zoom you away. As soon as we had done so, battling our way down against the current until we were at about 20m, Yunus then hooked me in with a reef hook (my first time using one), a metal claw that you hook into the rock, connected to a coiling spring that you clip to your BCD, to help keep you in place in areas with high current.

Once we were both hooked into the rock, facing outward into the current and away from the pinnacle, we spent the majority of the dive hanging out in that exact same spot, skydiving through the current streaming at us and watching the seascape in front of us. It was a exhilarating feeling! There were vast schools of Bluestreak Fusilier flashing silver and iridescent violet-blue, and Sergeants striped yellow and black, and gliding among them I spotted a grand total of eleven Whitetip Sharks, several of which were pregnant—including one female that had an almost incongruously huge belly (she was obviously my favourite).

Dive #7: Cauldron (aka Shotgun)

This was one of those dives that really felt like we’d gone on quite the journey. The dive site was in the passage between two islands and is also known as “shotgun” because of the strong current right in the middle of the passage. We dropped down quite close to one of the islands and slowly swam over the sandy bottom, past two Whitetip Sharks chilling at the bottom (they lie on the seabed facing into the current so that they can breathe as the water passes through their gills) until we came to the reef. Yunus spotted FOUR pygmy seahorses amazingly camouflaged as the exact same colour and texture as the little polyps on the purple coral fan that they had made their home. They were absolutely miniscule, about the size of a fingernail, and clung onto the fan with the little curl of their tails.

As we continued to swim, the current picked up and almost like a light switch it became incredibly strong. Yunus hooked me into a large rock on the sandy bottom with the reef hook and I lasted about 30 seconds before the entire rock actually flipped in the strength of the current and we decided to take that as a sign and that rather than hanging out there for a bit we should just enjoy the ride. So we sped along in the current until Yunus signalled for us to swim out of it to the nearby reef, where we zigzagged back and forth for the rest of the dive over the reef.

Sam snorkelled along a very similar route as us and managed to see not only two passing mobula ray but also two separate manta rays that swam close by as they passed him!

Photos Above: a damselfish hiding in branching coral; spot the stonefish!; Sam snaps one of the manta rays as it does a flyby

Day 4

Komodo Trekking:

Good news: we got a lie in until 7a.m.; bad news, the boat needed to start moving at 5a.m. to get us to our first stop on time, so of course by half 5 I was up on deck watching us glide along in the morning light.

At 8a.m. we moored up in a bay and the dinghy took us to the pier. On land (very weird to be on solid ground after a few days on the boat), we met a national park guide who took us on a mini trek to see the Komodo Dragons. As it was early morning, he suggested we start by the beach as they like to go sun themselves early. And sure enough, we immediately saw a huge male sitting amid a few logs on the sand (by which I mean Sam and our guide saw it immediately, whereas I only avoided stepping right on it thanks to the panicked cries of our guide…). Apparently the guide could tell it was male as it was a rusty red/brown colour (the females are more yellowy) and larger than females typically are—this one was easily 2m long. Komodo Dragons have quite the reputation—they can smell blood up to 7km away and kill their prey by biting and then allowing the fatal bacteria in their saliva to kill the animal slowly but surely. This is to say, they are exceedingly patient. They eat any meat, both carrion and prey, and as the island has buffalo, wild boar, and deer, there is plenty in supply—and though they eat about 80kg per sitting, they only need to eat once a month.

Photos Above: an excellent shot by our guide with the first adult male we encountered; the same adult male; going for a wander; another adult male splayed out on the sand; warming up; with our pet dinosaur; the agile juvenile

We continued walking along the beach and saw a grand total of four adult males (highly unusual apparently, as oftentimes visitors may see no dragons at all). We did a mini loop through the forest where we saw no further dragons but did acquire a cloud of mosquitos, and then just as we re-emerged back on the beach we spotted a much smaller (maybe 1m long?) juvenile darting about.

Dive #9: Manta Point

WHAT a dive! We left Sam on the surface snorkelling and descended down to the rubbly seabed. Despite the sand particulate floating around, reducing the visibility to about 15m, within a few minutes we saw our first manta ray—amid the rubble, there were small rocks here and there covered in coral and home to enough fish life as to create cleaning stations for the mantas. This one rocked up and hovered over the cleaning station for a few minutes while fish cleaned its underside, looking for all the world as though it were gracefully flying on the spot. It’s best practice to stay as close to the seabed as possible when diving with mantas (and it also gives you a much better chance of them choosing to swim close to you) so we made sure to stay down and hold onto the small rubbly rocks to help stay in one spot in the current. After a few minutes, we let the current drift us away and for the next more than hour, every time we spotted a manta we would descend to the seabed (in some instants flattening ourselves completely if a manta chose to drift closer to us) and watch it closely for several minutes until either it moved on or we were ready to do so. We definitely saw a few individuals twice—one was entirely black (melanistic) including its cephalic lobes except for a white star on its belly; another was missing one cephalic lobe entirely. I also noticed several individuals appearing to be in the early stages of pregnancy, with tiny bumps. An absolute highlight was watching three manta rays come to the same cleaning station and then slowly drift off in different directions, including one of them swimming over me a mere couple of metres above me (I was utterly flattened to the bottom to become one with the seabed at this point), genuinely blotting out the light for a brief moment. We must have seen at least ten individuals, though likely closer to fifteen. When we surfaced after nearly 70 minutes underwater, we went to pick Sam up. He had helped Grace to snorkel for the very first time, linking arms with her in the water to help guide her as she saw her first ever manta rays. Then, for at least half an hour he had followed one individual on the surface, watching it stop at a cleaning station, glide a few metres beneath him to feed, and generally going about its business totally accepting of the mere human delightedly following it about.

Photos Above: on day 4, we moored up on a nearby island and hiked up the hill for ten minutes to get this beautiful sunset view; returning to the Busy Girl in the fading light

Day 5

Dive #12: Batu Bolong South

Another knock-out dive. We did negative entry and dropped down the wall of the reef. The current was so mild here that we didn’t hook in and instead just put a finger and thumb onto the wall for support and watched the beautiful fluid movement of the sharks. This first half of the dive had particularly spectacular topography, with the huge wall disappearing deep into the blue below us and rising above us to the surface like vast mountain peaks, with canyons and ravines sweeping into the rock—vast formations like this always have the effect of making me feel small and humbled.

We drifted around a corner and out of the current and began slowly zigzagging up the slope of the reef, which was one of the most spectacular I’ve ever seen. It was multicoloured with so many different textures and there was SO much fish life, with the water around us absolutely full of schools of fish darting this way and that. With the iridescent flashing of the fish, the sunlight streaming in, the seagrass and soft corals swaying in the swell, and the brightness of the colours, it was dazzling. To top it all, we heard the sound of dolphins passing by somewhere out in the blue. For the last few minutes, we were accompanied above by Sam who was snorkelling on the surface. I noticed that he curiously kept looking under his armpits, and when we ascended he showed me two absolutely miniscule juvenile Sergeants (circular silver fish with vertical yellow and blue stripes on their body), each no bigger than 2cm, which had taken residence in the space under his armpits. He had fondly named them Doris and Deidre.

Dive #13: Mawan

WOW WOW WOW WOW, WHAT a dive!!! Easily one of our top life experiences.

Yunus and I dropped down to a fairly wide plateau at about 15m, swimming along it with the reef rising upwards several metres to our right and dropping down into the blue several metres to our left. As we swam along, four individual manta rays passed by us. Sam was snorkelling and spotted us below, tracking us for the rest of the dive. After a while the plateau curved around to the right and the bottom became sandier, with little reefy outcrops here and there, which were evidently a series of cleaning stations for the mantas. The next forty minutes were mind-blowingly special. The first really incredible experience came when one huge, (slightly) pregnant female swam in slow circles close to us as she was cleaned, coming so low over me as I flattened myself to the seabed that I could have touched her if I reached up—I definitely teared up into my mask. I looked up afterwards and saw that Sam had caught the whole thing on camera.

We swam a little further on and then things got really wild. Mantas started soaring from all directions and as we were so shallow (about 8m) that the sun lit everything up and on top of that, the visibility was decent, so the whole thing was spectacularly clear. At one point, Yunus and I excitedly counted seven manta rays around us at the same time. They were slowly circling above the various cleaning stations around us and I had somehow parked myself right next to one so as I lay flattened to the sandy bottom, remaining as still as possible, several of them became curious and flew very low over me to experience the bubbles of my exhalations on their wing tips and bellies (though I didn't realise at the time and tried to lessen my exhalations for fear of startling them!). There was something absolutely magical about the experience—instead of being apart and observing the manta rays, it felt as though Yunus and I below and Sam above were all held within the moment, experiencing nature from within the phenomenon. Slowly the mantas started gliding off and when no new individuals swam into the stations, we surfaced after 70 minutes underwater, absolutely high from what we had just experienced.

Photos Above: a male passes by Yunus and myself (if you peer closely, you can see I'm the one with blue fins); a male and female circle together; two mantas right above me; a female about to pass over me

Dive #14: Wainilu

Forth dive of the day! And a night dive to boot. We dropped down to about 15m over a sandy, rubbly bottom with soft pink coral sprinkled here and there, and spent the dive slowly zigzagging our way up. We each took a torch and floated slowly along the bottom moving our beams about slowly. Turns out Yunus has amazing eyes for spotting small stuff at night, pointing out SO many fascinating creatures. There was: a bright orange Starry Night Octopus covered in white-blue spots with all its tentacles furled up beneath it; a long red Short-Tailed Pipefish (a bit like a seahorse only long and straight); lots of really brightly coloured nudibranches (a type of sea slug) including some that were even neon green and blue; a crab whose back was camouflaged to look like rubble; and best of all, an Ornate Ghost Pipefish, a tiny (maybe 7cm), frilly, black fish related to the seahorse. When it came time to do our safety stop, we turned off our torches and then waved our arms and legs about as though we were dancing in zero gravity, watching as bioluminescence sparked around our flailing limbs.

Day 6

Definitely sad to be leaving the Busy Girl after an amazing few days. We both had that wonderful feeling of being completely disconnected, having hardly seen a person besides the crew for a week and certainly not having seen anything verging on mass civilisation. And despite Sam’s distinct lack of diving, we had several wildlife encounters that we’ll remember forever—certainly a fantastic first liveaboard experience.

Photo Above: with the WONDERFUL Busy Girl crew, from left to right: Fian, Grace, Yunus, Suhar, and Herman!

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