Dive Review of
Kungkungan Bay Resort in
Indonesia/Lembeh Strait, Sulawesi

USVI, BVI, Saba, St. Lucia, Bonaire, Sea of Cortez, Micronesia, Red Sea,
Malaysia, Coco Island, Galapagos, Revillagigedos, PNG, Komodo

Dive Conditions

Told to keep above 130 ft (which I never got near). Best to stay with dive
guides, who found many critters for us.  

Camera room close to boat area was excellent. Capacity perhaps 12
photographers/videographers. Tables lined opposite sides of room. One side
was 110v, other 220v. Several rinse tanks outside. Cameras were handled
well by staff.  

Overall Rating

Kungkungan Bay Resort

This excellent resort and dive operation will fulfill the critter dreams of
most divers. The rooms are spacious and well-kept. The grounds are cared
for daily, the staff friendly and helpful. A short walk is all one needs to
get to the restaurant, main building or dive center. A beautiful pool
beckoned, but diving and photography occupied so much of my time that I
didn’t get to use it during my eight-night, nine-day visit. The food was
wonderful, with buffet service for both breakfast and lunch, while dinner
was an order-your-meal service with an ample menu. If you did a night dive,
someone met the boat to take your order so that the food would be ready
once you had taken care of all post-dive activities. The only problem that
occurred was due to our proximity to the jungle and something the resort
may not be able to avoid – for three days there was a small termite swarm
that invaded my room and left 2-foot-diameter rings of droppings and wings
in an area of my room, several times around my washroom sink. They
resembled circles of pepper grounds, and were only a nuisance.

The water temperature varied between 76-80 degrees, with visibility varying
between 20-60 feet. Since there was lots of stuff in the water, wide-angle
photography was limited, but macro photography opportunities were available
on each dive. In fact, Lembeh Strait is a macro heaven. If you want to see
something, it is probably there. The dive masters often ask what you want
to see and make a list that gets checked off as your visit progresses. I
did 24 dives and shot 105mm Macro on 22 of them. I saw a frogfish and
seahorses on most, if not each, dive. There were no sharks, angelfish,
large schools of fish or bigger creatures. However, I did see the
following: squid, cuttlefish, flamboyant cuttlefish and octopus; numerous
shrimp species  including several colorful peacock mantis shrimp, many
crinoid and anemone shrimp; tiny crinoid and pink fairy lobsters ; ornate
ghost pipefish and Halimeda ghost pipefish; over 30 nudibranch species;
numerous moray species; blue ribbon eels (with juveniles, which are black);
mandarinfish (a dusk dive to watch them mate); pink and yellow pygmy
seahorses; numerous crab species including large decorator crabs that look
like a pile of detritus moving across the seafloor, zebra, xeno, porcelain,
orangutan and spider; hairy, warty and other frogfish; thorny, smooth,
estuary and common seahorses, seaspider, seamoths, juvenile batfish;
scorpionfish and lionfish; waspfish; various flatworms. The dive guides
knew where many creatures live, so they were quite helpful finding most
everything we saw. Some creatures I wanted to see but didn’t are: mimic
octopus, wonderpus and stonefish. Of course, the afternoon dive I sat out
on my last full day there (as I would fly within 24 hours) yielded a mimic
octopus. One funny situation occurred when a crinoid lobster decided it
would rather live in a divemasters BC, so it swam from the crinoid into his
jacket. The DM opened his BC and it took me a short while to locate the
crinoid lobster and return it to the crinoid. We probably looked quite
comical.

Diving so far from my home in Philadelphia allowed me to meet people from
England, Scotland, Australia, Japan, and Taiwan (plus other US folks). The
dive center featured a room dedicated to photographers/videographers. It
had tables along opposite walls with one side 220-volt and the other
110-volt outlets. Outside of this room, cameras were kept in plastic bins
in several large fresh-water baths. The cameras were transported to and
from the boats in these bins. Dive groups numbered 3-6 per boat, with 1-2
divemasters each. The longest boat ride was no more than 15 minutes, with
most shorter. Dive depths maxed, for me, at 88 feet, with most shallower to
start and finished often in 10-15 feet. Most dives lasted an hour or more.
Being thin, my two layers of wetsuits – a fleecy 3mm vest with hood and a
fleecy full-body 3mm kept me warm enough for much of the dives but I did
get chilled by the end of each, so next time I’ll bring a thicker suit and
a thicker hood. Topside weather was quite pleasant, and rain was minimal,
although the week previous had rain each day, I was told.
 

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