Day 8: Mansuar

There was a morning birding outing planned, to go see the Red Bird of Paradise.  While the birds looked awesome, the idea of getting up at 5AM on vacation did not seem awesome, so I decided not to go.  In the end, the outing was canceled due to rain.  So I guess I made the right decision, because I got to sleep in and didn’t miss anything.

The original morning dive site had too much current, so we tried to go back to Mayhem, but there was a thunderstorm and that dive was also canceled.  The thunderstorm was sort of insane and scary.  It was like we were in reasonably calm waters and weather and then it was armageddon, and then it was back to normal not that much later.

So the first actual dive of the day ended up being at Manta Sandy.

This was a (potential) cleaning station, where there was a line of rocks that we were all supposed to hunker down behind.  It probably would have been good to add a couple more pounds of weight to my rig to make the laying-in-the-sand position more comfortable.  We saw a single manta go by probably three times. The looks were pretty good, but it was a bit far off for good photo or video.

There was also a sea moth (or dragonfish) in the sand, and a mantis shrimp hanging out basically right in front of where I was sitting to watch for mantas, which was a good distraction.  While we waited for a manta to show up and there was no action, I just watched the mantis shrimp popping out of his hole, scurrying around, and then scurrying back into the hole.

Toward the end of the dive, after we had mostly given up on mantas, we found a fairly large wobbegong out in the open.  Woot.

The second and third dives were at a jetty (Sawandarek). During the day dive, there were very large turtles and another large wobbegong.  The turtles were crazy big, like the biggest turtles I’ve ever seen.  There were also some less crazy-big turtles, including one that I managed to get some good footage of on the move in blue water.  Under the jetty, there were lots of fish, including various snappers and sweetlips.  There was one giant fish that looked like a sweetlips, which was apparently called a giant sweetlips.

The night dive was also at the jetty. There were various macro critters—nothing especially standout, but enough to keep things interesting.  There were a couple of nudibranchs, I think one of which was maybe the best nudi find of the trip – though I couldn’t really appreciate it at the time, since it was so tiny.  But Rob got a great picture of it that allowed me to declare it the best nudi find of the trip.