Another Special Flores-Alor Trip
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September 2006
It's always a pleasure to get back on this route. Every time I take this trip I get more and more excited about coming back, this is my all time favourite trip for critters, reefs and local people. The variety on this trip is fantastic, our first check dive for this trip was an easy wall dive with enough good critters to keep everyone happy before our overnight to our secret spot on the north of Lembata island. This has been a huge favourite big fish dive, I call it Muricella's Garden for one area has lots of the muricella sea fans. This is probably one of the best places I have dived in Indonesia (other than Halmahera) for regular shark sightings. Our first dive on this site didn't let us down either, dropping down over the reef crest we descend past gorgeous white anemone covered corals, down a crevice pocked wall to a shelf at 30-35m, here we waited and watched as a big hammerhead shark cruised close by, the couple who saw it with me had just come back from Galapagos and were not as excited as me about seeing this gorgeous animal swim by. We went straight from the biggest to the smallest with the gorgeous yellow Bargibants pigmy sea horses. During this dive we saw a few large white tip sharks cruising amongst the gorgeous reef, grey reef sharks cruised by off reef and I noticed one black tip shark. Just after we boarded Seahorse from the dive a huge killer whale came round the boat, so close too, we tried to get close to it in the tender however it must have been spooked as we never saw it again!
Dwi had spotted a large solar powered sea slug towards the end of the first dive, so for our next dive we went straight down to see this sun powered slug charging up feeding on the leather coral before heading over to see more of this fantastic coral packed wall.
Next up we went into a bay for some black sand critter diving and our night dive. Down at the black coral bush we came across 3 juvenile ornate ghost pipefish, all together we came across 6 different ghost pipefish, in 3 different species, we had sawblade shrimps galore in the black coral bush, there was a bobbit worm, a pearlfish, pegasus sea moth, flying gurnard and a few unusual red coloured calamari, we had seen these the year before so it very surprising to see them here again.
I had planned a tour to visit to visit the ancient ceremonial village however there was no transport around, this was no big deal as everyone absolutely loved walking round the village and taking photo's of the locals. I had arranged for a traditional local dance with the village leader and the cameras didn't spot clicking till the end of the performance. Grateful that we visited the village chief handed handed one of their traditional woven ikats.
Next up was Alor and a site called Babylon, this is one of my favourite walls, great for it is one of a few here with none or very little current to affect divers. Passing across gorgeous slope first, we came to the wall and found a giant Commerson's frogfish, neatly perched amongst a sponge. So good we dived this site again, after going straight down to the giant frogfish again we spent more time in the shallows and found blue ribbon eels, dragonets and one of the most gorgeous easy to dive reef tops in all of Alor. Over lunch we headed into the bay of Kalabahi and a site I came across a few years ago, I named it The Goodies as it is always packed with lots of goodies for photographers, actually it is also after my favourite kids show I used to watch when I was about 6 years old.. The guests said it should be Grahams Goodies, call it as you may! Best thing was dropping straight down onto a Wonderpuss that displayed for ages with no care about the crowd of divers clicking away on their cameras, we found pairs of zebra crabs and Coleman shrimps in the fire urchins, 2 ornate ghost pipefish, a bizarre ribbon worm and a lots of flasher wrasse in full display. Next up was our night dive on the same site, lots of bizarre sea slugs including lots of the vacuum cleaner like melibe sea slugs, lots of bobtail squids and a none stop this that and the other of great photogenic critters.
In the morning we dived The Goodies again as a few divers missed out on seeing the fire urchin critters, then we headed off to dive the fantastic Clown Valley otherwise known as Valley of the Clowns, here the reef is never ending anemones, making this one of the most unique dives in the world. Another highlight of this dive are the locals who come out to check out divers below, they will often swim down to pose for photographers. After this we headed over to dive my all time favourite wall The Great Wall of Pantar, I had checked the previous day and worked out it should be slack at around 1.30, it was very slack, perfect conditions, I set up the dive and just as I was doing the briefing I looked out, the channel between the islands here started to rip, current had changed so fast we had to opt for another dive, no major issue, we went to the Boardroom for great reef with thousands of small flittering above, funnily enough we came across lots of Mandarin fish even at 2 in the in the afternoon there were plenty of these lovely fish around. Next up was a full on Mandarin fish dive, they were all over the reef we managed to see plenty they mated and mated a lot, though they were not so accommodating to photographers as they only really came up a few inches to mate. The best for me here was spotting what could be a new species of dragonet, very different colours and a pattern much more like a species only know from west Australia yet different in markings and colouration, maybe a new species? In-between our dives we made a visit to the village here to see the old anchor the locals are so proud of. One of the local guys I had met the year before, asked me if it was OK to pose without a t-shirt, we had a few jokes and he ended up taking my t-shirt and I traded this with a bag of fresh tamarind. I really love these local villages and even if the guests don't go on land, I still go ashore now to report in and say hello.
Next morning we made a dive on the reef here, giant sponges have plenty of hairy squat lobsters, there was great scenery, perfect water clarity though not so much macro today! We headed back in to the bay of Kalabahi to dive the Mini Wall, here we had lots of dendronepthya crabs, thorny sea horses, lots of juvenile batfish, a few very colourful nudi's and a giant reef octopus out in full display. As we were diving the Mini Wall for our night dive we opted to dive a different area here, a great start with Mary Jane finding the largest pair of robust ghost pipefish I have ever seen, a few more thorny seahorses, juvenile Spanish Dancer and other cool nudi's. Our night dive on the Mini wall was not as rich as usual for the classic rare and unusual critter but still produced plenty of great photographic subjects.
Next up was the highlight area within this region. I can't go into too much detail as it would go on and on. Just to say that the critter action was just nutty, I kept an ongoing count of what we saw, it came to 15 different frogfish, 17 different ghost pipefish, with 8 of these being on one algae covered rock all together, this made for very interesting wide angle photography, we found the Holy Grail of critters the Rhinopias frondosa, a small juvenile, as usual there were mantis shrimps galore, lots of different snake eels, dwarf pipe horses, a bright yellow seahorse, a few different white V octopus, inimicus, plenty of cool nudi's, flying gurnards, lots of cowry shells in soft corals and if there wasn't a top critter in direct view we could simply look into any soft coral or sea pen as nearly all of them were covered in shrimps, crabs, squat lobsters, all with gorgeous negative space backgrounds... Just for Great Aunt Pam who didn't want critters all day we dived one reef and Dwi took Pam to my favourite reef here, they saw giant bumphead parrot fish, great schooling fish life, tons of small anthias and damsels buzzing round the reef and all round fantastic reef scenery, Great Aunt Pam loved it!
We planned to visit the whaling village of Lamalera, however the sea gods were not with us and a very low tide and choppy conditions didn't quite allow us to go ashore safely, we opted to move on to a site further west. Absolutely gorgeous reef scenery with plenty of small and mid size fishes, quite a few reef sharks cruising around and a couple of big Napoleon wrasse made this a fantastic dive once more. As usual I made a few exploratory dives, the first on one the islands on the south western corner of Solor island, reef scenery and invertebrate life was stunning, the whole area is packed with small fans, coloufrul feather stars and talk about nudibranchs, one of the most colourful Nembrothas the purple lined was here en mass - moving around, feeding, mating and perched atop sea squirts for perfect photography, a mini wall section was completely covered in brilliant coloured sponges, sea squirts with no place what so ever without full colour coral cover. We were a little late getting to our night dive spot on west Flores, the visibility on the first area I check was like chocolate, I opted for the Konga island which started off very slow with very little, then we started to see more and more bobtail squids, the most I had ever seen on one dive, then a few bubble coral shrimps, a big Spanish dancer nudibranch, a big stonefish, giant sponge carrier crab and Felipe came upon a big adult winged pipefish, in all another very good night dive.
We arrived early in a spot where we saw a pair of Rhinopias frondosa last year, hoping they would still be around we spent a day in this area and sadly never found them again. We did manage to find plenty of other cool photographic subjects including mushroom coral pipefish, lots of different mantis shrimps, blue ribbon eels, Mary Jane hit the hot spot for Saron shrimps, 3 different species in one old broken up coral head. Under another coral bommie close by where a lot of Moyer's dragonets, we went to these at dusk to see them mating... hot stuff!
Our next anchorage was on the north of Flores, a calm and generally sheltered bay. With great variety, in the past there has been plenty of different pigmy sea horses, this time none on the usual site, though with a little exploratory we found another spot with 3 H. denise (Plucked Chicken Pigmy's) at only 9m depth. On the usual site the soft corals were all out in full bloom, the school of resident longfin bannerfish were swimming on the reef corner along with a couple of white tip and one black tip shark that was seen here. For our one exploratory dive, I had chosen a wall that looked very interesting from a quick snorkel, sure enough we had hit a great spot, with the pigmy's, fantastic reef scenery in places, orang-utan crabs a few different colourful nudibranchs, Jan done his usual trick and went the other way to find, as he called a Magic Rock, going from 25m to 40m with pristine coral cover making for great wide angle photography. The night dive was packed with skeleton shrimps, cowry shells in soft corals, sea fans and crustaceans galore in amongst gorgeous coral backgrounds.
We arrived back where we had started in the Bay of Maumere. This area was hit by tsunami back in December 1992 that wiped out and destroyed a lot of reef here. Now many of the reefs here are back to their former glory. I even noticed that a huge portion of a great wall that two years ago was totally void of coral life now has amazing soft coral growth, some of the soft corals hanging down over a meter long. The site was good everyone wanted to dive this again, they were all certainly happy we dived this again, a few more than others... Apart from the black tip sharks, big tuna and great small fish life, we had a school of 9 eagle rays come in for a close fly by! Then in the channel we had a pair of lovely leaf scorpion fish and a few other critters, Dwi found her pigmy sea horses again too. After our great wall dives, we headed into critter central for Maumere and the Ankermi House Reef, on our day dive we had 8 different ghost pipefish, many in pairs, one huge and one small, we saw plenty of big emperor shrimps on the sea cucumbers and a few cool nudibranchs. Our night dive was even better, a clown frogfish, lots of great nudibranchs including a not so commonly seen Cyerce, the one we found was as usual not in any of our ID books.
For our last day we dived Pulau Raja and since we had had the best ever critters already, I opted for the fantastic reef dive. So good, we dived it twice, both dives the soft corals were in full bloom, the first dive not so many fish, though the second was more like it, with plenty of fish throughout and a school of jacks, the hard coral in the shallows here seem to be getting better each year. As we rose form the final dive Seahorse was waiting for us in full glory with her sails opened up in the mild breeze, off we sailed into the sunset on our way to Labuan Bajo!
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