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Indonesia's Dive Resorts | Live-aboards | Resorts | Bali Land Based Divings

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Further a field is one of Larry's favorite places. Gunung Api, 'sea snake island'. I just wonder why this place has all the sea snakes of Indonesia? Its wild! They are everywhere and every size! Several different species of sea snake and they are curious about your fins. They swim right up to you, some people are not happy about it, but I loved it! Some parts of the wall is beautiful with hard and soft coral. Hot sulphur vents as this is a very active volcanic island, Larry could cook his eggs on parts of this wall. Frigate birds, boobies and terns are prolific on this wild island.

Wow nice to know there are still some sharks left in Indonesia, we were diving Wetar Island when all of a sudden as we descended strait down the wall….. We got sharked by 2 very assertive gray reef sharks, they came right up to us rather quickly several times and this was before Larry started on his plastic bottle to call in the sharks. This place was buzzing with 3 giant Dog tooth tunas (one we figured was 6 to 8 ft long), that were also cruising the wall back and forth with the sharks.

We ended our fabulous trek through the Banda sea with diving Larry's Twilight Zone on the island of Pantar in the Alor region! We stayed here for two days and got to dive 5 times one day! Fantastic place. This place is also volcanic sand slope, which invites all the wildest critters on the planet. There is a very cute village and the children are plentiful as they approach you in their home made dug out canoes. The dive sites are the entire length of the village and then some.
Here is what we saw: blue ribbon eel, 2 white pipe fish in mushroom coral, small green frog fish camouflaged in green sponge (how did Davey-o find this, he was sooo cute), coleman shrimp in fire urchin, orangutan shrimp in bubble coral, colorful red and blue sea apples , nudi's nudi's nudi's every kind and some we never saw before, coralamorph anemones eating a blue sea star, mating and flaring tricanodis sand fish in full display.

We witnessed a special event, 2 squids laying eggs in an abandoned fish net, we got to see how they make the guey white stuff that keeps them stuck together, it was everywhere! Those really ugly Gorlock mantis shrimps, I think that is what Larry calls them, they are scary and he got one to come out when he brought fish down, they have spears! Lots of those dead (but very colorful) looking snake eels, they play dead. Several varieties of shrimps and crabs on black and other beautiful coral. A great find were 3 cockatoo wasp fish. Pegasus sea moths, (man these things are odd looking, always in pairs, one a bit bigger than the other) only about 3 inches long or less. A very small hairy yellow frog fish about 2 inches big, also a very small white hairy frog fish. (this place reminds me of hairball in Lembeh strait). We saw a small humpback scorpion fish also.

Now for the last dive, 4 of us were a ways from the rest of the group. The news traveled from boat driver to our driver who jumped off the boat and snorkeled down to Joann and told her she had to come up. So she is a doctor and thought, yikes could be a medical emergency…. Well it was an emergency all right. We made a big swim following the zodiac a long way to where the other boat driver, Ali found a sargasm frog fish in a piece of soft coral in about 15 ft of water, he saw it from the surface! How on earth Ali finds things from the surface like that is beyond me, I could barely figure it out what it was when I was 2 inches from it! Unreal!! Ok so everyone is beside themselves looking at this 2" big gorgeous frog fish when out of the corner of Larry's eye, he sees 2 ROBUST GHOST PIPE FISH! Now I thought I have all the pipefish's of the world. These guys are BIG and GREEN and hairy! I would say one was at least 6 " long and the other half the size.

That is how we ended our diving on this most extraordinary trip from Raja Ampat in Sorong, through the Banda Sea ending the diving in Pantar, disembarking in Kupang, West Timor. Larry Smith is still as excited underwater as he has been for some 30 years now. He knows habitat and where to find these amazing creatures of our under water universe!

The boat, the crew, the diving and the company of my diving friends made for one of the finest dive trips I have done yet!
Thank you everyone!

Cindi

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Indonesia's Dive Resorts | Live-aboards | Resorts | Bali Land Based Divings