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Komodo Dancer goes aground

Started by chinacat46 , Sep 11 2005 01:53 AM

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37 replies to this topic

#16 chinacat46

I spend too much time on line

Member
3,147 posts

Location:Lafayette, CO
Gender:Male
Cert Level:OWSI
Logged Dives:1527(8 in fresh water)

Posted 14 September 2005 - 07:31 AM

blue ribbon eel.

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#17 annasea

I spend too much time on line

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Location:Vancouver, Canada
Gender:Female

Posted 14 September 2005 - 08:03 AM

Great pics, Chuck! :birthday:

Especially the hot pink leaf scorpion fish.... amazing colour!!

Thx for posting! :birthday:

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#18 Terri

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Location:Curacao
Gender:Female
Cert Level:Rescue
Logged Dives:100+

Posted 14 September 2005 - 08:05 AM

Another great trip report and pics Chuck!!! :birthday:

'I'd rather die while I'm living than live while I'm dead'...JB

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#19 chinacat46

I spend too much time on line

Member
3,147 posts

Location:Lafayette, CO
Gender:Male
Cert Level:OWSI
Logged Dives:1527(8 in fresh water)

Posted 14 September 2005 - 08:20 AM

Thanks, more pics to come. Here is some more about the trip:

The boat is a sail boat of length 125 feet but we never had the sails up the whole trip. All food and booze is included in the trip and they allow you to have one beer at lunch and continue to dive. They normally offered 4 dives(60 minute limit) a day. Two before lunch and two after lunch with the last dive at aprox 6:30 after the sun had set. So essentially 3 day dives and a night dive. The night diving was just as good or better then the day dives. The food was only so so in my opinion compared to the many liveaboards I've been on but they did offer quite a variety of styles. The Indonesian stuff was good but could have been a bit more spicy to satisfy me. The dives themselves were varied from beautiful reefs to muck diving in black sand to ripping drift dives with some wild currents and up and down drafts. Not for the timid. The variety and weirdness of stuff you see in Indonesia is one of it's greatest selling points. Besides most of the usual fish you see in the Indo/Pacific there was a wide variety of critters for the macro lover and sharks and rays as well. Some of the critters we saw: many types and sizes of nudibranchs(including spanish dancers), frog fish(different size and colors), cuttle fish and octopus, mantis shrimp(spearers and smashers), many types of eels(including both blue and black ribbon eels), numerous types of scorpion fish(including leaf scorpion and the very ugly demon stinger), stone fish, harlquien shrimp, different cleaner shrimp, anemone crabs as well as regular sized crabs(decorator, boxer, and others), seahorses(pygmy, common, thorny), pipefish(ornate, robust, mushroom, ringed, orange-banded, and others), sea apples, beautiful hard and soft corals, huge gorgonian fans, rays(mantas, eagle, stingrays, blue spotted and others), sharks(black tips, white tips, nurse, greys, mako, great hammerhead and others), many types of anemone fish(including clown fish and clarkes as well as many others), and much much more. It was definitely my 2nd or 3rd favorite place I've ever dived. My favorite being Wakatobi another spot in Indonesia. After diving Indonesia twice now the variety and amount of critters is just amazing and every diver should visit Indonesia at least once in their diving career. I know I plan to visit again maybe to the Lembeh Strait. This would be a great trip for Singledivers.com since there is some great land based diving as well as liveaboards. On one of our dives at Manta Alley we got blown out. They misjudged the strength and dirrection of the current and after trying to swim into a very strong current for 7-8 minutes we decided to turn into a drift dive and go the other way. Well the group got seperated really quickly and my buddy had disappeared as well as Curts and also Sabine and Henier. I signaled to Onnoe to go up and he agreed. We got Curt and Richards attention and the four of us ascended. We did see a Manta on the way up but only for a few seconds. Upon getting to the surface we located the other four people in our group all spread out and with their sausages already sticking up. The tenders were no where to be seen and I started blasting my dive alert. Seems they expected us to be down for 60 mins and had gone back to the boat. They soon heard the dive alert and then saw our sausages and we were picked up before drifting out to never-never land. Another dive after lunch turned out to be quite a show for me. Myself and four others ate something which gave us all a good case of the runs. Unfortunately I was the only one who couldn't make it back to the boat. Upon surfacing and removing my BC and weights I had my buddy zip down my wet suit. I then had a major explosion which luckily for me was not caught on video. I caught lots of grief for that but it was an emergency and they really wouldn't have wanted me to do it in the tender.

Edited by chinacat46, 14 September 2005 - 08:21 AM.