Motherf****r, Frantic Sex and LOTS of underwater pictures..
Discussion
Yes folks, it’s that time of year again. I’ve been bobbing along at the bottom of the beautiful briny sea again.
This time I went back to Indonesia, but a different area to the one I went to 18 months ago. I took a journalist friend of mine along, who is going to be writing an article about the trip in one of the dive magazines. We first flew from London to Slingaw
e on one of Singair’s nice new Airbus A380, and then connected to Manado in North Sulawesi, where we spent 2 nights. On the full day we did a tour and saw a volcano, a bubbly lake full of turquoise water and this rather interesting window sticker in a taxi in the rather scruffy port of Bitung:
I can only assume they don’t know what it means.
After 2 days in Manado we then flew to Sorong in West Papua Province (used to be called Irian Jaya), Indonesia’s half of New Guineas Island. We flew Wings Air, a local Indonesian carrier, and they kindly supplied us with an “Invocation Card” that allowed us in either English or Indonesian, to invoke a little prayer to our preferred imaginery friend wishing us a safe and pleasant flight.
There we boarded a liveaboard dive boat called Seahorse for a 12 day adventure into the fabled Raja Ampat region, which has the richest and most diverse reefs in the world. You can find a bit of info on Raja Ampat here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raja_Ampat_Islands
Seahorse, at the end of the cruise, looking slightly like a Chinese laundry
Raja Ampat is probably THE most important marine ecosystem in the world. It’s influence on species diversification, dispersal and renewal is unprecedented, and while it has been not as badly affected by overfishing as many parts of Indonesia, it is under threat.
Raja Ampat is dominated by stunning limestone islands that are undercut by the sea and have few beaches. This is one of the reasons the area is under populated compared with other parts of Indonesia. Some of the islands surround beautiful hidden lagoons of calm waters dotted with coral and sand. If you’ve seen The Beach, this is a whole lot better!
One of many hidden lagoons:
And another:
We set out from Sorong and headed west to Batanta Island and then south to Misool Island before heading north again to Cape Kri and then back to Sorong. Not sure exactly how far we travelled, but I suspect it was in the region of 600-700 nautical miles.
Anyway, piccies. I’ve sort of done them in 3 sections. Firstly, itty bitty cirtters, then some clownfish, cos I love them, and then some general reef shots. I’ve captioned them for you in case you don’t know what you’re looking at! They’re all pretty low res scans shrunk with PIXresizer. If anyone wants to see a larger higher res version then I’d be delighted to assist. All the piccies were taken on a Nikon D70 in a Sea & Sea DX-D70 housing with 2 Sea & Sea strobes. Macro shots were taken with a 60mm, the rest were either taken with a 12-24mm and a few with a 16mm fisheye.
A pygmy seahorse, Hippocampus denise, the yellow variety, that only lives on one particular fan coral all it’s life. It’s about the size of a pea.
The red version of the above pygmy seahorse
The “original” pygmy seahorse, Hippocampus bargibanti. It’s a wee bit bigger than denise, say a pea and an alf.
A whip coral goby that lives its entire life out on a whip coral.
These cup corals are growing on a dead whip coral. It wasn’t until I looked at the picture on the computer that I saw the goby lurking underneath.
A coral crab on a seafan.
This little crab lives inside a feather star. Feather stars come in a myriad different colours, and the crabs perfectly blend into the colours of their host featherstar.
This feather star is home to a shlimp and two little fishies.
A close up of feeding coral polyps on a stand of whip corals
A goby that lives all its life on whip corals. Here the corals are closed up and not feeding.
A decorator crab. This one has picked up little jewel anemones and plonked them on his back as camouflage. It may fool some animals, but it didn’t fool me! Ha!
A squid. Not a giant one, this one was about 6 inches long. I was doing a night dive with this French chap on the boat and he had very powerful video lights. At one point I looked rounmd and saw him way off the reef and went out to investigate. He was videoing this squid that was very friendly and very interested in the lights. After he had finished with it I took some pictures. I looked around after about 5 minutes to see Monsieur Diver had disappeared around a corner and I could make out the feint glow of his lights. I was 90ft below the surface, there was 600ft of water below me and it was time to get back to the reef!!!!
A school of cute little golden sweepers under a coral overhang
A goby on soft coral. You can see his backbone and innards.
Mr and Mrs Cuttlefish getting all randy....
A juvenile Barramundi Cod
2 rather gorgeous nudibranchs making woopee... dirty buggers, they’re hermaphrodites, so they can do themselves if they want!
Anuvver nudibranch.
And anuvver.
This one’s eaten too much.
More amorous nudis.
A pygmy lionfish about 4 inches long.
A big one...
Twin spot gobies. They have “eyes” at the back and middle of their dorsal fins to confuse predators.
Razorfish. They swim vertically and hide amongst whip corals for safety.
A clownfish in a bubble anemone.
Anuvver clownfish in anuvver anemone.
And anuvver. Not in a bubble anemone, though.
Two bicoloured clownfish in a rather luxurious white anemone.
Give us a kiss!
A beautiful blue anemone.
And again. (I like clownfish and anemones!)
We’re onto more wide-angle stuff now.
A lionfish by a seafan.
Diver and seafans.
More seafans.
Red and orange whip corals.
Red whip corals.
Seafans growing on a wall.
A masked butterflyfish on a reef. You can see here just how prolific life is on these reefs. Not a single space is wasted!
Diver and giant pufferfish.
Diver and barrel sponge.
School of yellow-tailed fusiliers in a cave entrance. (Plus small Frenchman with video camera.)
2 striped sweetlips on the reef.
Orange seafan and red soft corals.
Diver and hibiscus plate corals.
Soft corals and seafans.
Barrycudas.
Batfish lurking in a seafan.
Sweetlips in a coral crevice festooned with soft corals and other invertebrates.
Imperial angelfish.
Sweetlips on a cleaning station. See the little blue and yellow fish in the foreground? It’s a cleaner wrasse. They have cleaning stations on the reef, and larger fish come to have parasites removed from their skin and gills by the wrasse.
Diver and seafans and whip corals.
2 coral trout by a seafan.
Leather coral on the reef top.
Seafans of various colours.
More sweetlips.
Yellow snapper.
Whitetip reef shark on his rounds.
3 whitetips resting under a plate coral.
A wobbegong or carpet shark. These chaps can grow to about 6 or 7ft and are perfectly camouflaged to lay in waiut for a tasty morsel to pass by. They’re quite common in Raja Ampat, but fairly elusive elsewhere. I think I saw 5 or 6 on this trip.
Snapper school above plate coral.
A diver swims through a errr... swimthrough.
Soft corals and feather stars sprouting around a plate coral.
Soft corals and feather stars growing on a coral outcrop.
Diver and seafan.
Featherstar perched on soft coral.
Hawksbill turtle.
Bluewater mangroves. Now, some of you may know trhat mangrove swamps are usually associated with swampy dirty water. Well, in Raja Ampat there are a few areas where mangroves grow in alongside coral reefs and so are flushed by lovely clear water twice a day. Here you can see a fan coral, nice clear water and the branches of the mangroves hanging down from above.
Soft coral below. Mangroves above. Trust me, that IS weird.
Mangroves above, itty bitty fish below.
In about 3ft of water, I took this piccie of a starfish sitting on a lump of coral, with the reflection of the lumps of coral behind on the underside of the water surface above. It’s art, Jim, but not as we know it...
You can’t finish off without a cheesy sunset shot.
So, we’ve done the Motherf****r and underwater pictures... what about the frantic sex, you ask?
Well, the Cruise Director on the boat (who liaised betwixt crew and guests and made sure things ran smoothly) was a really sweet Indonesian girl called Cici. There was a nice American couple on the boat and one day they were “missing” (ie in their cabin) at one point and she asked where they were. John, my journo mate, said “They’re probably in their cabin having frantic sex.” So, about half an hour later they appeared, and young Cici pipes up, in the saloon, in front of everyone else: “So, have you two been having frantic sex?” Poor thing didn’t know what it meant and when she was told she looked like she wanted to curl up and die. Of course none of us laughed, oh no. And the look on the American couple’s faces. (They were in their late 60s, so if they were indulging in sex, it would hardly have been frantic!)
We got off the boat and flew back to the UK in one hit. Sorong - Manado – Singapore – London. 32 hours of travel. But there’s always a lighter side to travel... a quick foto off my phone of an English girl’s attire for the flight back to London from Singapore. You can’t beat a nice pair of pink Hunter wellies when it comes to combating DVT, I am sure...
And the best bit of the trip? Touching down at Heathrow and seeing my gorgeous girlfriend for the first time in 17 days!
Anyway, that’s all folks. Hope you enjoyed the show.
This time I went back to Indonesia, but a different area to the one I went to 18 months ago. I took a journalist friend of mine along, who is going to be writing an article about the trip in one of the dive magazines. We first flew from London to Slingaw
e on one of Singair’s nice new Airbus A380, and then connected to Manado in North Sulawesi, where we spent 2 nights. On the full day we did a tour and saw a volcano, a bubbly lake full of turquoise water and this rather interesting window sticker in a taxi in the rather scruffy port of Bitung: I can only assume they don’t know what it means.
After 2 days in Manado we then flew to Sorong in West Papua Province (used to be called Irian Jaya), Indonesia’s half of New Guineas Island. We flew Wings Air, a local Indonesian carrier, and they kindly supplied us with an “Invocation Card” that allowed us in either English or Indonesian, to invoke a little prayer to our preferred imaginery friend wishing us a safe and pleasant flight.
There we boarded a liveaboard dive boat called Seahorse for a 12 day adventure into the fabled Raja Ampat region, which has the richest and most diverse reefs in the world. You can find a bit of info on Raja Ampat here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raja_Ampat_Islands
Seahorse, at the end of the cruise, looking slightly like a Chinese laundry
Raja Ampat is probably THE most important marine ecosystem in the world. It’s influence on species diversification, dispersal and renewal is unprecedented, and while it has been not as badly affected by overfishing as many parts of Indonesia, it is under threat.
Raja Ampat is dominated by stunning limestone islands that are undercut by the sea and have few beaches. This is one of the reasons the area is under populated compared with other parts of Indonesia. Some of the islands surround beautiful hidden lagoons of calm waters dotted with coral and sand. If you’ve seen The Beach, this is a whole lot better!
One of many hidden lagoons:
And another:
We set out from Sorong and headed west to Batanta Island and then south to Misool Island before heading north again to Cape Kri and then back to Sorong. Not sure exactly how far we travelled, but I suspect it was in the region of 600-700 nautical miles.
Anyway, piccies. I’ve sort of done them in 3 sections. Firstly, itty bitty cirtters, then some clownfish, cos I love them, and then some general reef shots. I’ve captioned them for you in case you don’t know what you’re looking at! They’re all pretty low res scans shrunk with PIXresizer. If anyone wants to see a larger higher res version then I’d be delighted to assist. All the piccies were taken on a Nikon D70 in a Sea & Sea DX-D70 housing with 2 Sea & Sea strobes. Macro shots were taken with a 60mm, the rest were either taken with a 12-24mm and a few with a 16mm fisheye.
A pygmy seahorse, Hippocampus denise, the yellow variety, that only lives on one particular fan coral all it’s life. It’s about the size of a pea.
The red version of the above pygmy seahorse
The “original” pygmy seahorse, Hippocampus bargibanti. It’s a wee bit bigger than denise, say a pea and an alf.
A whip coral goby that lives its entire life out on a whip coral.
These cup corals are growing on a dead whip coral. It wasn’t until I looked at the picture on the computer that I saw the goby lurking underneath.
A coral crab on a seafan.
This little crab lives inside a feather star. Feather stars come in a myriad different colours, and the crabs perfectly blend into the colours of their host featherstar.
This feather star is home to a shlimp and two little fishies.
A close up of feeding coral polyps on a stand of whip corals
A goby that lives all its life on whip corals. Here the corals are closed up and not feeding.
A decorator crab. This one has picked up little jewel anemones and plonked them on his back as camouflage. It may fool some animals, but it didn’t fool me! Ha!
A squid. Not a giant one, this one was about 6 inches long. I was doing a night dive with this French chap on the boat and he had very powerful video lights. At one point I looked rounmd and saw him way off the reef and went out to investigate. He was videoing this squid that was very friendly and very interested in the lights. After he had finished with it I took some pictures. I looked around after about 5 minutes to see Monsieur Diver had disappeared around a corner and I could make out the feint glow of his lights. I was 90ft below the surface, there was 600ft of water below me and it was time to get back to the reef!!!!
A school of cute little golden sweepers under a coral overhang
A goby on soft coral. You can see his backbone and innards.
Mr and Mrs Cuttlefish getting all randy....
A juvenile Barramundi Cod
2 rather gorgeous nudibranchs making woopee... dirty buggers, they’re hermaphrodites, so they can do themselves if they want!
Anuvver nudibranch.
And anuvver.
This one’s eaten too much.
More amorous nudis.
A pygmy lionfish about 4 inches long.
A big one...
Twin spot gobies. They have “eyes” at the back and middle of their dorsal fins to confuse predators.
Razorfish. They swim vertically and hide amongst whip corals for safety.
A clownfish in a bubble anemone.
Anuvver clownfish in anuvver anemone.
And anuvver. Not in a bubble anemone, though.
Two bicoloured clownfish in a rather luxurious white anemone.
Give us a kiss!
A beautiful blue anemone.
And again. (I like clownfish and anemones!)
We’re onto more wide-angle stuff now.
A lionfish by a seafan.
Diver and seafans.
More seafans.
Red and orange whip corals.
Red whip corals.
Seafans growing on a wall.
A masked butterflyfish on a reef. You can see here just how prolific life is on these reefs. Not a single space is wasted!
Diver and giant pufferfish.
Diver and barrel sponge.
School of yellow-tailed fusiliers in a cave entrance. (Plus small Frenchman with video camera.)
2 striped sweetlips on the reef.
Orange seafan and red soft corals.
Diver and hibiscus plate corals.
Soft corals and seafans.
Barrycudas.
Batfish lurking in a seafan.
Sweetlips in a coral crevice festooned with soft corals and other invertebrates.
Imperial angelfish.
Sweetlips on a cleaning station. See the little blue and yellow fish in the foreground? It’s a cleaner wrasse. They have cleaning stations on the reef, and larger fish come to have parasites removed from their skin and gills by the wrasse.
Diver and seafans and whip corals.
2 coral trout by a seafan.
Leather coral on the reef top.
Seafans of various colours.
More sweetlips.
Yellow snapper.
Whitetip reef shark on his rounds.
3 whitetips resting under a plate coral.
A wobbegong or carpet shark. These chaps can grow to about 6 or 7ft and are perfectly camouflaged to lay in waiut for a tasty morsel to pass by. They’re quite common in Raja Ampat, but fairly elusive elsewhere. I think I saw 5 or 6 on this trip.
Snapper school above plate coral.
A diver swims through a errr... swimthrough.
Soft corals and feather stars sprouting around a plate coral.
Soft corals and feather stars growing on a coral outcrop.
Diver and seafan.
Featherstar perched on soft coral.
Hawksbill turtle.
Bluewater mangroves. Now, some of you may know trhat mangrove swamps are usually associated with swampy dirty water. Well, in Raja Ampat there are a few areas where mangroves grow in alongside coral reefs and so are flushed by lovely clear water twice a day. Here you can see a fan coral, nice clear water and the branches of the mangroves hanging down from above.
Soft coral below. Mangroves above. Trust me, that IS weird.
Mangroves above, itty bitty fish below.
In about 3ft of water, I took this piccie of a starfish sitting on a lump of coral, with the reflection of the lumps of coral behind on the underside of the water surface above. It’s art, Jim, but not as we know it...
You can’t finish off without a cheesy sunset shot.
So, we’ve done the Motherf****r and underwater pictures... what about the frantic sex, you ask?
Well, the Cruise Director on the boat (who liaised betwixt crew and guests and made sure things ran smoothly) was a really sweet Indonesian girl called Cici. There was a nice American couple on the boat and one day they were “missing” (ie in their cabin) at one point and she asked where they were. John, my journo mate, said “They’re probably in their cabin having frantic sex.” So, about half an hour later they appeared, and young Cici pipes up, in the saloon, in front of everyone else: “So, have you two been having frantic sex?” Poor thing didn’t know what it meant and when she was told she looked like she wanted to curl up and die. Of course none of us laughed, oh no. And the look on the American couple’s faces. (They were in their late 60s, so if they were indulging in sex, it would hardly have been frantic!)
We got off the boat and flew back to the UK in one hit. Sorong - Manado – Singapore – London. 32 hours of travel. But there’s always a lighter side to travel... a quick foto off my phone of an English girl’s attire for the flight back to London from Singapore. You can’t beat a nice pair of pink Hunter wellies when it comes to combating DVT, I am sure...
And the best bit of the trip? Touching down at Heathrow and seeing my gorgeous girlfriend for the first time in 17 days!
Anyway, that’s all folks. Hope you enjoyed the show.
Edited by Fezant Pluckah on Monday 18th January 17:18
fantastic pics though 
Thank you for your kind words girls and boys.
And well done Stiggy, very clever...
Simpo - D70 behaved well as did the 60 macro. I also purchased a Sigma 18-55 macro and Sea & Sea kindly supplied me with a zoom gear for a Canon housing, so I did not manage to use it, which is exceedingly annoying.
The sad news for the D70 is that I shall in the not too distant future be upgrading to a D300 plus housing, so the D70 shall become a spare camera from now on. I'm also buying a Tokina 10-17 as my mate had one and it is a fab lens for what we do. So the 12-24 will also become redundant, but I shall be keeping it as it's a useful land lens for landscapes and stuff. I reckon I'd be abloe to do 95% of my stuiff with the Tokina and Sigma lens, and keep the 60 for night dives.
And well done Stiggy, very clever...
Simpo - D70 behaved well as did the 60 macro. I also purchased a Sigma 18-55 macro and Sea & Sea kindly supplied me with a zoom gear for a Canon housing, so I did not manage to use it, which is exceedingly annoying.
The sad news for the D70 is that I shall in the not too distant future be upgrading to a D300 plus housing, so the D70 shall become a spare camera from now on. I'm also buying a Tokina 10-17 as my mate had one and it is a fab lens for what we do. So the 12-24 will also become redundant, but I shall be keeping it as it's a useful land lens for landscapes and stuff. I reckon I'd be abloe to do 95% of my stuiff with the Tokina and Sigma lens, and keep the 60 for night dives.
Edited by Fezant Pluckah on Tuesday 19th January 10:10
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