Lembeh Straits

Ok, so have been really lazy recently and not been able to keep up to date with everything that’s been happening.
After what felt like an absolute age, we finally made it to the end of Semester One (no mean feat as it’s the longer of the two with less holidays). It’s been a pretty uneventful year of teaching so far, apart from having to watch one inept member of staff repeatedly perform unprecedented acts of ignorance and stupidity. Not even going to go there as he’s been ranted about more than enough. Anyway, after sitting around twiddling our thumbs for a week after the kids were allowed to go on holiday, we were finally released.

(If you’re not a fish person read no further…..!!)

Nick and I had decided to treat ourselves to a slightly more expensive dive trip as we had less time than usual for our hols. In the diving world (especially out here) you hear about Lembeh Straits a lot; it’s supposed to be the place to be for ‘muck’ diving. Now the idea of swimming around in poor visibility picking through trash and looking for things that hide in dark places, has never quite taken my fancy before. After a year of intensive wall and coral diving with 20-30m vis in Roatan we were up for something a little bit different.

We stayed in a small resort on the island of Lembeh which is off the north-east side of Sulawesi in Indonesia. The area is incredibly volcanic, with one of the nearby volcanoes having only erupted 2 months ago. 90% of the diving is done over black volcanic sand. The visibility is poor, although we were quite lucky, getting 5-10m. The water at 27 degrees, felt arctic to me. I know that I am setting myself up to be totally ridiculed for that but hey, I get cold, and my wetsuit is ancient, squished to about 1.5 mil and patchy. The worst part of it was that the dives were long and as most people know cold water creates the need to pee, as I refuse to ‘go’ in my wetsuit, it got to be quite painful at times.

Surprisingly though, although the dives were long and most of the time we were just swimming over flat expanses of dirty black sand, interspersed evenly with coral and trash, it never really got boring. Every day we’d see something new in the book and ask our guide to find it. He’d then choose the best dive site for it and would search up and down until he found it. He’d often lose us as we’d have our head in the sand but would be able to find us again then lead us back to whatever it was we were looking for without the aid of any bottom markers or compass. It makes me realize that I’ve never really needed to learn proper navigational skills for anywhere else I’ve been, you take it for granted when you have reef to follow.

While we were there, we ticked off most of our wish list. We got to see most things twice and more nudibranchs than I could have hoped for. Some of the best bits were (in photo order); a small Wonderpus trying to eat a big Wonderpus (either that or something rude), Pygmy seahorses, Mandarin fish, Ornate Ghost Pipefish, giant frogfish, Hairy frogfish, 10-15 inch nudis, mantis shrimp, flamboyant cuttlefish and Paddle-flap Scorpionfish . The best way I can describe the diving here, is that it’s like going out into the woods and turning over stones to see all the creepy crawlies underneath. Quite a lot of the time I didn’t like the way the guides interacted with the fish; moving them to be seen and shaking out hessian sacking and brambles so stuff comes out. However, I kind of understand that this is the way that they do it out there, and that they are used to having to push things out in the open long enough for everybody to get their photos. Our guide was good though and soon realized that we didn’t approve.

The diving part of the holiday went well beyond expectations, the place we stayed was beautiful; the food great, the staff accommodating. We were really lucky to be given our own guide and put on the boat with less people and smaller groups each time. They took us wherever we wanted, whenever we wanted and would do a night dive for one person without complaint even when they had already done 3 dives that day.

I would love to take credit for all these pics, but sadly my housing has died. All these photos were taken by Nick, I've never mastered the patience required anyway!!