December 26 Four out of six outrigger boats already in the fishing grounds when we arrived The crew on our ship went fishing by 9:30am. As in all of them! We just got here! They tethered our boat to the rakit and the other smaller outrigger pump boats already in the area tied [...]
December 25 Gorontalo Harbour Stella & Yogi in Kuala Lumpur's KLCC, the six level shopping mall of Petronas Twin Towers! We're soaking in a CITY!!! What?! Working on Christmas? Sadly, yes. But we had our fill of pre-Christmas in the 3 days we spent with friends in Kuala Lumpur for our visa run. [...]
Edi Frommenwiler Movie "Wild Eye of Raja Ampat" on YouTube 15 years ago, when Yogi quit his office job as industrial photographer of MTU in Munich and became a fulltime freelance photojournalist, he embarked on a one-year self-funded expedition to Christmas Island and the Coral Triangle - Indonesia, Sabah & the Philippines. He spent a [...]
15 December - Tuesday Jef Fam Woke up at 5am to look if our Panda flag was still flying on the mast of the Pindito. Yup, still there. It did a long night trip through from the south to the north. Hope there are no holes by now . . . First dive was in Batu [...]
12 December Boo Windows The Pindito steamed all of last night till 10am this morning to Misool. The first dive site at 11am was in Boo. The landscape of limestone islands and outcrops is similar to Coron and El Nido, Palawan in the Philippines. Beautiful! This is finally my introduction to Raja Ambat as Yogi has been [...]
10 December Banda Islands is historically known as part of the Spice Islands of the Moluccas. It belongs to a string of islands south east of Ambon. It has an old Dutch fort and there is a volcano here called Gunung Api (mountain of fire) which erupted in 1988. The lava flow from topside is [...]
9 December 2009 I woke up to a nice porthole view of a small islet called Suanggi. Red Pindito dingy takes off for Suanggi Islet diving The birds were all over the islet - brown boobies, red footed boobies, frigate birds . . . Yogi wondered if there were tropic birds but didn’t [...]
8 December 2009 We finally got on board the lovely Pindito and an old friend of Yogi's Edi Frommenwiler, Pindito owner and Raja Ampat pioneer made it to be with us with his brand new RED camera and Gates housing. Our first and second dives were in Ambon in what is famously known as Twilight Zone. It [...]
21 November 2009 - Saturday Today we were extremely happy in the morning and extremely sad by the afternoon. We had a slow start leaving the house at 7am. For 2 long hours, we saw nothing. Eki was in fact close to cursing mode when we saw our first leatherback turtle at 9am. For the next 3 [...]
20 November 2009 Second day we were asked to wake up at 5:30am! By after breakfast and 6:15am we were off. The seas were glass flat and calm as. The early morning sun made really brilliant reflections on the water but after 2 hours of searching, we still didn’t see any leatherback turtles. Yogi spotted [...]
