Bunaken, Day 1

Under The Sea

So we slept 10ish hours and woke up around 6:45am. The weather here is warm, but not as hot as we expected. It is, however, EXTREMELY humid….so much so that everything feels slightly damp. We do have a nice fan in our room… which comes in handy when the bath towels feel wet before we used them.  We just stand in front of the fan until we are dry. So after breakfast at 7am, we got our wetsuits, and dive equipment and waded through a mangrove forest to get to our boat (it was low tide so the boat couldn’t come any closer to shore).
                                                                                        THE ISLAND OF BUNAKEN



Our first and second dives were on two separate cliff reefs. Diving here is like all incredible things in nature….try as I might words just cannot begin to convey the majesty! We saw all kinds of coral: fire red, electric blue, lime green, pink, purple, black, completely transparent…some of it was spiny and branch-like, some of it was soft like a flower. We saw so many tubular corals; it was like a freaky science experiment gone haywire! The fish were so diverse…big strange fish, and tiny fish with

ONE OF THE MANY TRIGGER FISH WE SAW

 impossibly complex patterns. We saw polka dots, vertical stripes, zigzag lines, camouflage, half purple-half orange, and everything in between! Between the corals and the fish, we were overwhelmed! To name some specifics, we saw: clown fish, box fish, blow fish, barracuda, trigger fish of all sizes and colors, trumpet fish, batfish, sweep lips, lionfish, anemone crabs and shrimp, clams as big as a backpack, blue spotted sting rays, several kinds of starfish, nudi branchs, and so much more.

After our first two dives, we came back to the “resort” and had lunch. Then there was this intense rain that sounded awesome against our tin roof….so we took a nap (diving isn’t a passive sport remember!) We set our alarm and woke up in time to squeeze in an extra dive (we have signed up for 2 a day). This dive left a 5pm, and was called the “mandarin dive.” Mandarin are this crazy fish, approximately two inches, that only comes out at dusk. They have the most incredible skin! Bright blue and orange in this
       JUST FINISHED OUR 1ST DIVE
 intricate design… although we only saw 3 of them, we felt really lucky to have a sighting….but that was only the beginning of our dive. We saw a scorpion fish, which are those totally bizarre fish that is so camouflage and looks so much like a rock that 9 out of 10 times you would likely swim right by it…..if you didn’t have a brilliant Indonesian man pointing it out to you! We saw a sea turtle, a frogfish, and 15 angelfish. It was really neat getting to see the

MANDARIN FISH

 change of day to night underwater. We ended our dive using flashlights to see! Jeremy sums up his first day of indo diving as “mind-boggling and ridiculously amazing”. 

                                               

We just showered from our Mandarin dive and are heading to dinner. Tomorrow agenda looks like 2 more morning dives, an Indonesia massage for me in the afternoon while Jeremy takes photos, snorkeling off the front of the resort on the “house reef” (if we are up for it) and then a night dive. Hope you are all well!




                                                                                                                                                                        CAN SPOT THE SCORPION FISH?

PS. These are all from our silly underwater camera....so far we are super impressed!