Day 6: Penemu

The first dive was at Melissa’s Garden, which was our first site in northern Raja Ampat.  It’s a large area with very healthy hard coral – mostly staghorn and cabbage – and a lot of fish. It’s one of those sites that makes you understand the phrase “coral garden” where the coral goes on and on.

We saw two pygmy seahorses on a single fan, which was nice.  

There were also quite a few other divers around, which was noticeable given how spread out the site is.  I have to say that this was a bit annoying.  Up until today, we had been in the Misool area.  One nice thing about Misool (or not nice, depending on how you look at it) is that the Misool Eco Resort schedules all of the dive boats onto the sites in the area (by agreement between the various dive operators).  So on the negative side, it means you might not get to go to the site you want at the exact time that you want.  But on the positive side, when you go to a site, you have that site.  There are a crazy number of liveaboards in Raja Ampat, but this makes it so that no site is crowded.  It’s a very nice system.  So on this, our first dive outside of Misool, you could definitely see the difference.

I skipped the second dive here, as I was coming down with a cold (that had been going around the boat), and thought it would be better to rest.

The third dive was at Batu Rufus. It’s a sloping reef that ends at a small arch in about 10 feet of water.  I didn’t think this site was especially interesting overall. Other divers seemed to be really into the arch, and it was a nice arch, but… it was just an arch.  It wasn’t bad, just not particularly memorable compared to some of the others.

One of the other divers (Ben) did find a mushroom coral pipefish near the end of the dive, which was probably the highlight.

In the afternoon, we did a hike up to an overlook that is apparently the overlook where the canonical pictures of Raja Ampat are shot from… this is how it was described to me, and I think I know the shots they were talking about!  The hike was just enough steps to make me want to die, but not enough to make me actually die.  Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration.  It was supposedly 300-400 steps, which by my calculation makes it like 4 to 5 times as many steps as the walk up from Carmel beach to the road.  This is how I convinced myself it would not actually kill me, and also how I passed the time on the walk up – by doing step math.

Afterward, we went for a little boat ride where we zoomed around between the little islands, and eventually we popped out within sight of the boat, in a completely different spot than where we had come in.