At the end of the walk, we took a rest and enjoyed very nice coca cola, then we had to walk back to the boat on those floating big hollow plastic, made specially for the walkway. We squeezed everybody in the dingy, couldn’t wait to get off the island and got down to the water because of the very very hot weather. We reached the big boat, and after some rest we prepared for the first dive.
We visited Pantai Merah again for the first dive, the frog fish had moved, we saw a lot of nudibranch and of course, a lot of fish.

The temperature dropped down to 23 degree underwater. I couldn’t take it anymore, and switched to my 3mm suit. 23 might sound easy on the land, but underwater it was no joke!

After the first dive, we started moving to Padar Island, second dive was done there, with Pillarsteen as the dive point. The dive was special, although the sun was shining strong on the surface, below there was dark, murky and spooky and mysterious. It felt almost surreal. Although the darkness and limited visibility made us enjoy less, it gave the feeling like we were doing dusk dive or dawn dive.

This was also the dive while I encountered some nasty experience with the current. We were enjoying the wall when suddenly I felt some current started to push me up. It begun with slow but soon built up to faster pace, I saw myself being drifted up from my group, the current swept harder and my mask was filled with water. I wasn’t able to see and I knew the current kept trying to push me to the surface and to the rock. I only could think of few possibilities, I could be carried up to the surface and risked decompression sickness and embolism to my lung, or carried to another swell or current and hit something dangerous; animal, rock or boat.
It was only slightly more than five meters away from the surface, so I grabbed hard on whatever I could to prevent me shooting up to the surface. It was hard, the current was ripping, lucky, I managed to find a good grip and positioned myself as close as possible to the wall to minimize the effect of the current, then with another hand to make sure my regulator and mask was in place, and then tried to clear away the water from the mask. When I was able to see, the vertical up current was not as strong, I let go the grip and finned head down to the deeper and caught up with my friends, who were also holding on something from the additional horizontal current.

The current subsidized after few minutes, so I was able to clear up my whole mask and thanked the one upstairs to let me got away from the danger. It was really a challenging dive.
It’s spooky but somehow, there was something unexplainable that made me like the dive, minus the crazy current incident.
From the deep, Cynthia pointed to above and we saw shadow of big fish around, including one mysterious very huge fish, floating slowly above us. It was spooky and scary, later on I identified it as Giant Grouper, the ugly and territorial big fish.
We were secretly grateful that it was swimming quite a distance from us. I saw school of Humphead Parrotfish ahead, Made saw that also, he turned and banged the tank to let the rest know, but when he made the tank sound, the Humpheads were surprised and all of them swam away with lighting speed. When Made turned back, he was confused, especially when the other three were looking and waiting for him to show the big thing.
The rest of the dive we also faced swinging current. Swing to the right, swing to the left, again, and again, together with those fish around us.

The story still continues for this dive. We were crowding around one rock where we found a dozen yellow spiky nudibranch. We were excited, because it’s quite difficult to find so many nudibranch gather naturally in one spot. We took pictures, and when we looked around, we realized, the whole slope, the whole landscape was full of the same type of nudibranch. Each of them was only few centimeters apart. It was amazing nudibranch rain, something we had never seen. We passed by tons and tons of them, and when the dive was coming to the end, we did our safety stop in the blue.

During our surface interval, we often saw Komodo dragons cruising on the beach and monkeys also. Some sailing boat were parked nearby purposely to send their tourists when they saw the dragons. We saw few tourists walking on the beach where there were two small dragons. When one of the dragon approached them, all of them jumped back to the boat. Ha ha chicken.. Magnus and Silvia our German couple asked our dingy to carry them to the island too.

We did Sunset Dive in Cannibal Rock for the third dive, when we did back roll, I felt something was wrong, my mask was gone. Apparantely bubble trapped inside my hood and flopped, the mask went out and sunk to the deep. We tried to retrieve but we couldn’t see much below. So Cynthia, Froggie and Made descended, while me and Hubby waited for the dingy to come back with our spare mask. When he came back, we were told to climb up to the boat as we had been drifted away from the original location. We followed the bubble trace, and jumped down. I could see three bubble rows at first, so we descended. When we were descending, we no longer saw bubbles, what we saw was a dark volume of water and eyes, thousands of eyes surround us. We were in the middle of very big school of big eyes trevally. It was spooky; we tried to look once more, to adjust our eyes to the darkness, no bubbles. We communicated underwater and decided to surface, when we looked at the computer, we were on eighteen-meter depth. It was surprising because we were only descending a bit from the surface when we looked for the bubble. Seemed like there was a slight down current pushing us down too. We surfaced and the dingy was still around. He informed us that our friends were not in the same point anymore. We climbed back to the boat and decided to abort. When we were traveling to the big boat, we saw Made waving my mask, he was in the surface, Cynthia and Froggie were below. He told us we could still continue, so we wore the fins and jumped down again. Bad me, I felt guilty for postponing the whole thing. Fortunately, the dive went well, we missed the Pigmy and the Frogfish seen by other group though, but we slipper lobster, big colorful crabs, nudibranch and two dancing decorator crabs. The decorator crabs was lifting the fists high in the air, eh, water, face to face and made movement like dancing. I suspected they were mating. At first, I thought it was a funny looking coral, decorator crab always disguise themselves by attaching corals, rocks or anemones to their body, until I saw the two crab fists and figured out their shapes.

At this dive, we were introduced to the sea apples. The bright red creature with yellow spiky tentacles. It was everywhere, sized of human head. Sea apples can be found in not many water, but in Flores water, it’s abundant and everywhere. Sea apples then became our joke for every dive.

Enough for the day, no night dive tonight. After dinner, we started the card game, something I learned in the past, not sure what’s the name, I heard it’s called Chinese Poker. It was a strategy card game and fun to be played by four. We made a lot of noise until Ferdinand and Magnus came down to check on us. Before today, we were like two groups apart. The Caucasian would take sundeck upstairs as their place of free time, while we habituated the board site with staircase to nowhere or the front of the boat and the dining area.

Ferdinand was interested and soon, he mastered the game very well and became an expert. Sebastian and Made also came to check on us. Magnus looked a bit clueless even though he observed all the way. After many rounds, the other guy, Wilfred, also came to join the party. I pity him all the way, he has two meter height and all the while he had to bend down his head to adjust to the boat low ceiling, cabin size and also the bed size. What a back pain he would have!


16-17th October 2006

After first day, I couldn’t be gladder to have my own camera. I could take whatever I want, and my goal is to make a fish encyclopedia of my own. So instead of crowding around some special creature, I liked to take a lucky shot of them.
One day, I would like to specialize also, but I really enjoyed my waiting time when others were concentrating in taking difficult macro, I played around and snapped on my own pleasure. It was not easy to take picture of fish, they dashed around and played hide and seek. I think I became half crazy; I laughed when I was able to get a good shot, or half cursing the fish when they ran from me. I took all type of creature coming my way, even Made, our new DM, was confused when I spent few shots on very common fish. It’s not very common everywhere, but we saw it almost on every dive here. At that time, I was following a boomerang triggerfish, one type of harmless triggerfish who has boomerang pattern behind the eyes. It was also a very fun thing for me to be able to identify the fish between or after the dives.
So far in my history of diving, I haven’t had the experience of being narced aka lost orientation underwater in the depth. But laughing around and talking to fish, Ha ha ha, I know what species are you, might be considered some sort of narced? : )

First dive, we went back to cannibal rock to look for the pigmy and frogfish. The pigmy seahorse here were damn fat and big compared to the tiny one in Bali. Some were 2 cm in length and it was very easy to spot them (after the DM pointed to me of course! But in Bali, even when the DM had pointed, I was almost always still clueless), this time, it was different. We saw three fat pigmies in one seafan, it looked purple because it was quite deep. Not far from that, there was a grey big frogfish posing for picture, and a light grey one in the beginning of the dive.

Hubby managed to get very nice pictures of the tiny flangblenny, it was almost exactly like the ones we saw in the magazines. Very difficult to take, because of the size and the fish is active. It was still okay in the camera, but when we downloaded it to the hard disk, the memory card was error and two folders were failed to be recorded, including the blenny pictures, we are very upset!

We went Yellow Wall for the next dive, it had the same name with our cabin. Indeed we saw the wall full of yellow spiky nudibranch again, although since Pillarsteen, there were abundant number of them every dive. Except came in yellow color, there were white, black, red and green, more rare versions.
I can’t remember the details much for this dive and few one after, because I skipped the longing due to my laziness!
Cannibal Rock, Yellow Wall, Terpedo, Crinoid Wall were done around Rinca Island, one of the few islands we passed by. We saw many things, although I wouldn’t be able to mention them all, but what was fresh in my mind was on one of the dives, there were noises from our DM’s tank bangers. We happened to meet other group underwater, so we were one big herd of thirteen divers. Our DMs collaborated together to find us great things. When we look to the direction, the visibility was not very good but we saw the shape of Ghost Manta. We finned slightly away from the reef to catch a better glimpse, and the Manta changed direction and headed towards me. I could see the mouth, the belly, the bright white and clean color. I was busy, shouting to myself, excited, one moment I looked at the manta and enjoyed the beauty, other moment I was fiddling with my camera. Macro, wide angle, how does this thing work, I was completely lost. It was rather difficult to scream at the Manta, then look at the camera, scream again, adjust the camera again. Managed to get few shots under limited visibility.

After the Ghost Manta went away, we continued with the dive, and once again, our DM spotted something special from the blue. We dashed to the blue and lucky enough, I was able to see the Eagle Ray passed around. It disappeared for a while, and then came back quite close and disappeared again. The water was being murky on the wrong day lah!

We had very nice night dives also. In Cannibal Rock, we found four Spanish Dancer, no wonder I saw quite a lot of Egg Ribbon of the Spanish Dancer in the day! We also saw sleeping turtle, sleeping rabbit fish, Electric Crab, shaded batfish juvenile, who mimic the flatworm, the very very huge lobster who never moved a muscle when we took picture of it and many kind of fish.

That night, we were hanging around the boat front when we saw a squid. The small octopus was swimming by. We picked up our torch to look at the funny shaped octopus. It went down below the boat, then came out to another side. While we were following it with torch light, suddenly the boat crew jerked our torch to shine into something, turned out to be a giant barracuda. When we saw the giant shade, it was creepy; especially it was moving slow but steady towards the octopus. The octopus dived down, and the barracuda took it in one gulp.

Amazing daytime catch was when Hubby found a Flores dragonet juvenile, something rare. We also saw many white tip sharks sleeping under the table rock daytime, three or four of them at one rock. Some bigger sized ones were sleeping solitary under the rock, or in the open, like one huge nurseshark.
I found one of my favorite blenny taking a walk in the open, it didn’t even know we took picture of it. Many of them were hiding in the hole, we also saw jawfish with eggs but it refused to come out again to pose. Goby sharing nests with shrimp, various type of anemone fish and porcelain crab, crinoid, many many funny types of coral and from ugly Egg Cowry to very ugly and flabby nudibranch, until the funny shape nudibranch. We could see so many variant of nudibranch many dives, more than ten species of them in one dive we hardly seen anywhere else.

After Rinca Island, we passed by Padar Island and visited Three Sister. It’s a dive sites with three big sea mountain, each lay with different depth and had slightly different shallow area. I changed back to 0.5 as the water temperature went back to 25/26/27 degree, I couldn’t bear all the endurance wearing the 3mm. Difficult to wear, difficult to take out. First dive with it, I felt like I wanted to pass out before I touched water, I couldn’t breath! But it did feel very comfy inside cold water. Then we continued to dive along Komodo Island again in special dive site called Karang Makasar. It was a shallow, very shallow dive where we logged only 5,8meter! It was known as a location for manta to pass by. Sebastian just saw school of them in his previous dive there, but we were not lucky, no manta, although we saw a lot of macro things and many schools of snapper, scary-faced snappers, actually midnight snapper, red bass and black snapper. We saw many type of wrasse and surgeonfish too.
Night dive was done in Gili Rawa Barat Bay. It was the warmest night dive ever, very comfortable and fun.