Marine Life Encounters Blog

Paradise diving in Raja Ampat, Pearls and Spawning Crinoids

March 30 – Having arrived on different days and subsequently scattered around North Sulawesi at various dive resorts and hotels, our group of 18 finally gathers together at the Manado airport at precisely 8:30 a.m., as directed by our travel-savvy leader, Paul. A two-hour flight will carry us to Sorong, an easily forgotten port city on the Bird’s Head Peninsula in the distant reaches of eastern Indonesia, where we will board the Paradise Dancer a.k.a., the Dewi Nusantara (Goddess of the Archipelago). Ned, Paul and I and several friends in our group have been making regular visits to the fish-rich waters that bathe the offshore islands making up Raja Ampat (The Four Kings) since 2004, about the time the area caught the attention of the popular diving press. Our 600-mile voyage will first take us through Raja Ampat then on west to the little-dived waters of Halmahera before ending 12 days later at Lembeh Strait in North Sulawesi.

The Halmahera leg of our journey will be exploratory. The Dancer’s dive team acquired a few random GPS numbers for area dive sites, but for the most part, we will be feeling our way as we go. Several in our group including Janet Eyre, Heather George and Lillian Kenney, are advanced fish surveyors from REEF (Reef Environmental Education Foundation.) The group will be recording fish species sighting data along the way – quite a challenge on reefs purported to hold more than 3,000 species.

Liberty Tukunang, veteran dive guide from Kungkungan Bay Resort in Lembeh Strait, on special assignment, will be joining us on the voyage to help with our last push at gathering photographs of new invertebrate species for Reef Creature Identification, Tropical Pacific. This is Liberty’s first airplane flight and our group, sharing in his excitement, makes certain he sits in a prime window seat in order for him to see Lembeh Strait as we fly east. “Police Pier,” he calls out after recognizing one of the familiar Lembeh sites he has been regularly diving for the past 12 years. 

Our friend, the celebrated underwater photographer Geri Murphy, who dived with us at Kungkungan Bay Resort last week will also be put to work helping supply photos for this report.

March 31 – Guido Brink, designer and owner of the Dewi Nusantara, is also joining us on the trip. At 57 meters and 750 tons, this is definitely the largest liveaboard we’ve ever set foot on as well as one of the most luxurious. After prowling around the beautifully appointed salon, spacious sun deck and camera room the impressed passengers somehow end up inside the sumptuous master stateroom booked by David and Joyce Kay, who generously offer to host a party if anyone is willing to take off time from diving.

April 1 - Our first stop is Alyui Island where we spend our surface interval visiting the Atlas South Sea Pearl farm. Armed with my faithful American Express card, my plan of acquiring pearls is foiled, when the ever-vigilant Ned sensing something foul afoot, hops aboard the tender at the last moment, dashing my hopes for an après-dive spending spree. However, I did, for 60 seconds, have in my possession an exquisite strand - price tag $63,000.

 

 

 

 

Kevin Smith, manager of the remote facility, gives us a most interesting tour of the operation. He begins by explaining how the hatchling pearl oysters used at the facility are raised and shipped from Bali. It is heartening to hear how nothing in the process is wasted, from shells to meat. Once the oysters no longer produce gem-quality pearls, some of the shells are even ground for use in make-up and car paint, which explains the up-charge on the Oyster Pearl finish I selected for the car we purchased last year.

The vessel’s Cruise Director, Wendy Brown, a keen fish watcher in her own right, shows us a photo of an unidentified frogfish that a previous guest had taken near a local dock. To our delight, it is a Lophiocharon trisignatus, a species we sighted for the first time on a previous Raja Ampat trip. The fist-sized oddities have the unique behavior of incubating fertilized eggs on their sides. An egg-laden parent sporadically waves its dorsal and tailfins to aerate the developing embryos. The individual we photographed in 2007 with a well-developed clutch attached will be featured in an upcoming issue of Scuba Diver Austral Asia in our regular Search Image column. Everybody aboard has heard about our famous frogfish find, and are pumped to the gills about a chance to see the exotic animal for themselves.

After backrolling out of the dingy the group moves en masse toward the dock where the phantom frogfish was last detected. On the way, I am waylaid by a swarm of Convict Fish streaming into their burrow. The massive cloud of 3/4-inch black and white fish continued to pour into their burrow opening for 25 minutes. Every now and again a grouper, strategically hidden nearby would rocket up into the mass to snag a late afternoon snack.

The tiny fish are still pouring into the opening when Yann, one of our dive guides, swims up excitedly, giving the hand signal for frogfish. Luck is running, the divers have not only found one but three of the goofy little curiosities – a very gravid female waddling across the bottom closely hound-dogged by two smaller hot-to-trot males. Even with the frogfish peepshow still underway a few of the divers disappear down the slope to catch a glimpse of a Blue-ringed Octopus Liberty discovered at 30 feet. Unfortunately, low air forces us to the surface before the frogfish spawn, which typically occurs shortly after sunset.

A gold rush of spawning activities continues on the night dive. Together we watch sea cucumbers, brittle stars, urchins, clams, pillow stars and, something I have been hoping to observe for years, spawning crinoids.

Before the evening is up, we add a huge wobbegong, an epaulet shark and the rarely sighted Banded Toadfish, Halophyme diemensis, (its distinctive croak giving away its hiding place under a log) to our rapidly growing list of wonders.

A mangrove dive, a hitchhiker and 472 species of fish

Mangroves and Soft Coral

 

 

April 2 –We spent the day in the mangroves of Gam Island. I have long ranked mangroves high on my list of favorite alternate habitats to explore. Most mangrove forests are washed by turbid coastal water, limiting sightseeing, but not on Gam, where clear water invades the tangled growth right up to shore.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What a feast for the imagination to glide over a carpeting of corals and anemones overhung with a leaf-filled tropical sky, and neighbored by prop roots garlanded with sponge and soft coral. As tropical fishes dance about below, Archer Fish and Ballyhoo patrol above, mirroring their images off the calm surface. 

The Archer Fishes’ (a patient observer can maneuver to within a few feet) unique talent of dislodging insects from overhanging branches with a jet of water shot from pointed mouths, allow them to hit stride at high tide when the odds rise in their favor.

The mangrove forest coupled with an adjacent coral ridge showcasing a parade of colorful fishes, cuttlefishes, octopuses and nudibranchs, keeps everyone happy for four dives, including a night excursion, where Liberty finds a knock-your-socks-off hydroid decorator crab and Acho proudly shows off a pair of Robust Ghost Pipefish. Ned related later, with a mischievous hint of amusement in his voice, that he watched the huge Bumphead parrotfish, startled by dive lights, blindly kamikaze toward me at collision speed and, only after my last second lifesaving spin, ricochet off my tank (instead of my face).

We return to the boat to find that Guido, on the prowl in the skiff for fresh fish, instead purchased a parrot from a passing boat of boar hunters. Assuming it a recent captive, he has every intention of releasing the bird the following day. That is until Lillian, an avid birder, identifies it as a male Eclectic parrot, endemic to the area. She also notes how tame the bird appears even accepting hand-fed papaya from Hendrak, the chief steward. Guido’s plan for a quick release will have to be put on hold.

Two days aboard the boat and we are already conditioned to expect after-dive treats from Hendrak. He’s also wrested back control of the breakfast toaster from Mary and Park whose “Croissants al Carbon” prove that toasters and tourists don’t mix.

 

April 3, 4 & 5 – Our next three days are spent in the southern area of Raja Ampat. The fish surveyors are in top form exploring one of the fishiest dive sites on Earth, Melissa’s Garden. The hard coral shelf and its surrounding sand skirt encircling three rocky islets, is a potent fish attractor. All the fishwatchers are coming in with high counts and adding new species to their life lists.

 

The afternoon dives in southeast Misool are gorgeous and fishy producing three different kinds of pygmy seahorses. Bruce August from Miami, an ol’ hand at Caribbean diving, on his first venture out into the far flung reaches of the Pacific, danced a jig after being shown his first pygmy seahorse. Another clear example confirming Ned’s timeworn adage, “Move slow, learn to think small, and you will never have a boring dive.” 

 

I am enjoying the opportunity to shoot wide-angle video footage, which is sorely lacking in my library after years of concentrating my attention on identification and behavior video.

 

Our final dive in Raja Ampat is off Wayilbatan. Our own Jim Dalle Pazze while on our first trip here with Larry Smith in 2005, named the site, Neptune’s FanSea. The current running between two islands flies us effortlessly though a narrow quarter-mile passage buttressed by a towering garden wall of soft corals and oversized sea fans. We travel one way before breakfast and back the other way before lunch.

 

By the time we return for a bite, the parrot has been given a name, Moey, and has settled in to stay on a broom-handle perch overlooking the outdoor dinning area. That night, with the help of slides, Guido tells the tale of how the Dewi Nusantara, built of hand-tooled ironwood by Dayak craftsman on a muddy estuary in nearby Kalimantan, came into being. His captivating account immediately brings to mind the classic Werner Herzog movie Fitzcarraldo. In the 1984 film, an expat Scotsman attempts the improbable task of transporting a river cargo ship over a mountain peak in an attempt to gain sufficient wealth to fulfill his dream of building a world-class opera house on the banks of the Amazon. The marked difference: Where Fitzcarraldo experiences a triumphant failure, Guido Brink pulled off a triumphant success that now carries us in classic style and comfort across one of the world’s most exotic seas.  

Our final fish count for Raja Ampat is 472 species, including the rarely sighted, cave-dwelling Paddlefin cardinalfish. Janet alone has 468 fish on her list. She continues her hunt well after each dive, reviewing her survey slate and scanning digital photographs in order to track down the more difficult-to-identify species captured by her ever-ready, point-and-shoot camera.

 

 

A rare pipehorse trumped by a christmas tree worm spawning

April 6 – An overnight steam takes us to Pisang Island, a lone sentinel southeast of Halmahera. The impressive stands of giant hardwoods sheltering calling birds and edged by a white sand beach bode well for a shore excursion. The water here is as clear as any I’ve seen in years. Aggregations of orange and purple anthias fill the sea along the drop-off as far as the eye can see

Eduardo Martinez and I drift along the edge and follow a huge school of grazing bumphead parrotfish, while Ned and Liberty spend the first dive turning rocks in a rubbly, bombed-out section of the reef flat. For their troubles, they discover a tiny frogfish, an abalone, a couple of flatworms and a crab or two. Dave Inman declared the afternoon dive one of the most beautiful he’d ever experienced.

Guido, Joyce, Heather and I skip the afternoon dive to beach comb and conduct an informal flip-flop survey. For five years now, we’ve noticed that a beach’s collection of flotsam flip-flops tends to be either left-footed or all right-footed. Over the years this phenomena has led to much speculation, even to an imaginary spoof documentary entitled “Island of Left-footed People.” I stumbled upon a tidy little explanation last year while reading Skye Moody’s “Washed Up: The Curious Journeys of Flotsam and Jetsam.”  In 1990, five containers fell off a ship, releasing about 80,000 Nike athletic shoes into the North Pacific. Beachcombers and oceanographers collecting the shoes found that depending upon the location along the Pacific Northwest coast, shoes were predominately left-footed or right-footed. As the story goes, the slight curvature of the left and right-footed toes of the shoes caused them to tack in different directions with the prevailing currents and wind. Our flip-flop survey on Pisang showed a statistically significant count of 11 left-footed shoes to 22 rights.

The beach prize of the day is a germinated sea bean. I’ve collected hundreds of different tropical drift seeds but this is the first time I’ve ever found a seed that had actually completed its journey and carried out its purpose. After photos, we carefully replant the seedling. Check out www.seabean.com for more info about sea bean drifters.

Sea Bean Doing Its Thing

 

The clear waters of Pisang Island also provide plenty of action after dark. Acho shows us decorator crabs and nudis as fast as we can take them in. Twenty minutes before the end of the dive, a plankton cloud moves in bringing a swirl of bugs and worms that halo my video lights. But with the unnerving chaos comes a scattering of settling fishes, including surgeons, jacks and lionfish, tinier than my pinky nail. Their transparent and silver bodies – vestiges of a recent pelagic past – brand them as newbie’s. Within moments of settling, the vulnerable fry disappear under rocks or beneath the sand. In a few days they will reappear as full-fledged juveniles.

 Just before we surface after our prescribed 70-minute dive, the saron and hingebeak shrimp begin pouring out of the crevices. But, rules are rules, and we mustn’t keep the softie, non-night diving cocktail circuit back aboard waiting too long for dinner.

Actually, cocktail hour proves to be a useful time to share photos and knowledge and we return to find the Gordon’s school of underwater photography in session, conducted by David Kay with student Mary Ulrickson honing up macro skills on the bottle.

Pisang island has surely been visited by other dive operators passing this way; however infrequently enough that there are no known names for the sites in dive literature. Pisang means banana in Indonesian, so Wendy, Yann and Acho, christened the sites we explored: Pisang Goreng (a popular fried banana dessert), Pisang Susu (a tiny sweet yellow variety) and Gone Bananas. A delightful ending to a delicious day.

April 7 – We start the day at the southern end of Mano Island. We’ve been asking for muck and we get it! What a fun site – we find five different species of pipefishes plus a beautiful black Ornate ghost pipefish. Flasher wrasses were flashing off in the middle of the day instead of waiting for their traditional late afternoon courtship period. I come over a rise and find David, Jim and Paul tightly gathered around a small coral head photographing a colony of diminutive coral hermit crabs. Instead of commandeering discarded gastropod shells like their larger brethren, coral hermits take up residence in abandoned wormholes in living coral. In most instances coral hermit colonies consist of fewer than a dozen individuals. However this coral mount contains hundreds of the cute little characters busily waving their feeding antennae in the current.

 

It is the ship’s policy when exploring new territory, to always request permission from nearby villages before entering the water. Today’s appeal received a rare rebuff. It is upsetting until we learn that the local powers have a good reason for their decision. Tomorrow is national election day and the village doesn’t want any distraction in their declared “Quiet Week”. In such isolated communities the presence of two dingy-loads of Darth Vaders in neoprene, tumbling backwards in unison and remaining submerged for hours always attracts considerable attention. What appears to be a bit of bad luck sets the stage for afternoon prosperity.

With no more GPS numbers to try in the area the dive team decides to explore a silty channel before steaming on. It takes a bit of searching along the mucky grass slope, but before long we begin to find gold. First to appear are pairs of endlessly cute Signal Gobies, busily digging their honeymoon suites in the soft sediment. In deeper water we find dense aggregations of flasher wrasse displaying in all their glory at the height of a late afternoon love fest. I’m stalking an unfamiliar lizardfish when several wildly swinging lights catch my attention. When I arrive at the scene four of our group surround Yann, who is clearly excited. Straining to see what he is closely following with his finger, it takes what seems like forever to see the two threadlike forms he is tracking – oh my, two Rumengani pipehorses! Underwater naturalists around the globe have been abuzz about these tiny creatures that were recently discovered by Singaporean photographer William Tan’s dive guide, Noldy Rumengan. Shortly after the pair was discovered in North Sulawesi and subsequently scientifically described (Kyonemichthys rumengani) a second pair of the same species was rediscovered hundreds of miles south in South Sulawesi. This leads one to believe that with the right search image in place we might find that these splendid little fellows are more common than first imagined.

While maneuvering to keep our eyes on the tiny pipehorses without stirring up silt, Yann points to a Halimeda Ghost Pipefish not six inches away. In the excitement I had to force myself to slow down. We’re at 60 feet on the third dive of the day; this is no time to be swept away in a frenzy of goby fever! Back on board the tender, I tell Ned, who with Liberty had been occupied in the shallows photographing a Hairy squat lobster, about the new pipehorse, but the significance of my words don’t register until I show him my video. “Why didn’t you insist that I go back down to shoot them?” he barks. “I told you it was the new pipehorse” I reply. “But you didn’t say it was Noldy’s pipehorse…”   Uh-Oh.

April 8 – Our fortunes continue to run, as Wendy and company put us on an oceanic reef that Paul later declares to be one of the most beautiful he has ever dived. (That is a significant declaration coming from a 40-year dive-travel veteran.) Thick, healthy coral reef framed with hundred-foot-plus-plus vis extends in every direction. Here biodiversity meets biomass. Fishes large and small saturate the sea, filling every cranny while shoals of open water species laze in the reef’s lee or repeatedly explode in starbursts of colors off the point.

Even with so many wonderful things buzzing about, a number of the group spend a chunk of their bottom time laying flat on the 60-foot seafloor watching jawfishes pop high out of their holes to nab passing plankton.

Liberty as usual dutifully goes about the business of finding critters for the book. His dedication pays dividends when he extracts a 5-inch sea cucumber from a crevice. Under closer examination, the strange little cucumber turns out to be a segmented worm!

We hate to leave this reef after just two dives, but we still have a lot of territory to cover. Our afternoon dive is another winner with more sharks, dartfishes, glassfish and the biggest moray I have ever seen anywhere. Toward the end of the dive Liberty’s eye catches a wispy swirl emerging from a Christmas Tree Worm. Ned, realizing that the animal is spawning, immediately goes into action.  

Now, it’s my turn to be heartsick for missing a rare sight. I have been fixated for some years now with finding spawning Christmas Tree Worms, to the point that I have contacted the few divers I know who have witnessed the behavior to match their sighting times and dates to moon phases and coordinates in the hope of improving my chances. Liberty’s discovery occurred at 3 pm on the day before the full moon – both peculiar times and dates indeed for the spawning of anything. For minutes, the reddish brown strands spiral up the corkscrew core of the worms’ gill structures before tailing off in the current. Later I tell Ned that I would happily trade him my Rumengani pipehorses for his sighting. Still smarting from missing the pipehorse the evening before, he readily agrees to the imaginary trade.