September 2012    Download the Entire Issue (PDF)

Vol. 27, No. 9   What's this?

Raja Ampat Dive Lodge, Indonesia

not all the great diving here is only by liveaboard

from the September, 2012 issue of Undercurrent  

Subscriber Content Preview
Only active subscribers can view the whole article

Dear Fellow Diver:

Ting ting! Rico Londam, my dive guide, rapped his steel pointer on his tank. Blacktip reef sharks were down the coral slope. Ting ting! Guide Jamie Lambaihang tapped his own tank. Bumphead parrotfish were grazing the top of the reef. Ting ting! A school of yellow-tail barracuda. Ting ting! Several hundred horse-eye trevally whirled in a slow silver vortex. Ting ting! Come look at this pygmy seahorse! Ting ting! Ting ting! My head was swiveling off my shoulders, and I was making no progress in our drift along Crossover Reef in the Dampier Strait of Raja Ampat. How could I possibly be expected to see the entire reef if we stopped every minute to see a new wonder, or in the case of schools of fish, thousands of wonders? This was my last dive of the 19 I made at Raja Ampat Dive Lodge, and there were four guides in the 83-degree water with me and my partner, the only two guests at the lodge that week in July (it was entirely booked for August).

Earlier that day, we started our first dive pulling ourselves by hand over the coral into the current at Cape Kri. The lodge brochure recommends bringing gloves but I didn't wear them until I sliced my thumb open hanging on at Chicken Reef. They also advise you to bring your own reef hook. My partner didn't have gloves (she accidentally left them in Singapore) or a hook, so one guide would precede her, hook the reef and pass the cord back to her. She would pull herself to the hook, where a second guide waited with the cord to his hook. In this leapfrog fashion, her "dive sherpas" got her through the initial rigorous minutes.

Many dives began into the current, the logic being that if we started the dive drifting with the two-knot current, we'd blow right past the reef well before we got to the end of our 60-minute dive time and end up in blue water. So we typically pushed into the wind until we went around a corner or ascended to the top of the reef where, likely as not, the current would change vectors for a gentle drift back in the direction we had come. We would take a five- to 15-minute safety stop on top, passing over luminous displays of purple, yellow, orange and ecru dendronephthya soft corals, dotted with bi-color crinoids and packed with juvenile fish. And fish is what you will see. My count: six species of triggerfish, five species of sweetlips, four kinds of trevallies, three of barracuda, two tunas, various batfish, turtles, more butterflies than I'd ever seen, barramundi cod and so on. Of sharks, there were just black- or white-tip reefs and the ornate wobbegong, but they were on every dive. If you get tired of the big stuff, the guides will find dozens of different nudibranchs, sea horses, pipefish, shrimp, eels, etc....