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 [...]
2 - 12 November 2009 The hour we arrived in Wanci, we immediately had a meeting with WWF Indonesia Wakatobi Project Leader Veda Santiadji in their Wangi Wangi office. He offered us different travel scenarios and we got really excited when the first option was to do initial diving on 2 snapper Spawning Aggregation Sites (Spags) then proceed to [...]
24 October 2009 We spent a most interesting day with Simone Gerritsen and her kids from her school Kehidupan Anda or "Your Life." The goal of Project “Kehidupan Anda” is to improve the education of the children in the village Tongkeina and the surrounding villages. Three year old school Kehidupan Anda's colorful facade We visited [...]
20 - 24 October 2009 Off we went with the tireless Simone Gerritsen of Thalassa Dive Center in Manado to explore Bunaken and the surrounding islands as well as the under-appreciated mainland Manado. We knew to expect the steep wall dives of Bunaken National Park and the beautiful coral cover of Bunaken's shallow reefs. Manado Tua beside [...]
18 October 2009 About 15 years ago, Yogi dove and dove and dove for two straight months with Murex Dive Resort and Liveaboard in North Sulawesi. During this period, he contracted dengue fever and got a special visit from Murex's very owner, the gentle, soft-spoken Dr. Batuna. His verdict was, "You'll live." So when Yogi indeed survived [...]
15 - 17 October 2009 A relatively unknown dive destination not far from Lembeh is slowly getting its share of the limelight. Buyat Bay is about five hours from Manado located south of Lembeh. It used to be a gold mining operation that shut down recently. Now the mining facility's skeleton staff are seeing a [...]
23 September – 4 October 2009 As much as we appreciate the diversity of creatures crawling about Lembeh Strait, we appreciated more our guides who led us to them. Ronald giving a dive brief. All guides ended each brief with "thank you for your attention, enjoy your dive!" And we did! Every dive! [...]
23 September - 4 October 2009 An insanely fantastic artist friend of ours by the name of Robert Strachan has, for years, barked out an order everytime we went on a dive journey. "Will you photograph fish faces for me? Not side view. Not quarter view. I want full frontal in-your-face fish faces!" Robert speaks in either bold or [...]
23 September - 4 October 2009 What the heck is muck? We have been diving in the Lembeh muck for the past 12 days and finding it so interesting we could hardly tear ourselves away from it. We must be mad, you'd think. How can diving silt and sand be interesting? Well, it is interesting because in seemingly [...]
