BUNAKEN & MENADO TUA (7-8 & 11th May 2006)
Bunaken and Menado Tua was one-hour boat ride away from our resort.
So, on Sunday, the beginning of our week, we dressed up and waited at the pier. That time, we were earlier than Botak and Gondrong, but..the boat was in the middle of the sea out there, and there were boatmen transferred tanks and walked through waist-high water. It seemed like that the water was too shallow for the boat to park beside the pier, so we turned back and walked through the land until the other side of the island. When we walked through the dried sea bottom, the very fine sandy part, we saw many red crabs walking around enjoying the sun. We approached them excitedly, but they hid inside the sand in the matter of seconds every time we were close, so we stayed quiet and took pictures. After that, we were half dipped and carried our belonging on the top of the head and jumped to the boat. Botak and Gondrong were late because they were preparing their special mixed Nitrox gas.
Along the way from and to Bunaken, usually we sat quietly and enjoying the beautiful sea. My favorite part was always standing in the front part of the boat, against the cool wind and wide wide horizon, freeing my thought of any trouble and just scanning the surface for things to see. There were few times we saw dolphins from a far, until one day, we saw big school of dolphins in close distance.
As special service, the boat moved to the dolphin area, everyone was excited and soon the front boat was full of everyone. We saw another dive boat which was also changing direction for the dolphins. We got few chances to get very close with dolphins swimming beside and in front of the boat. They jumped; they did some trick and posed for us. We were shouting, jumping like crazy, running from one side to another side of boat, mimicking the dolphin sound and took some videos of them (Maybe they were watching us too ‘
Hey! Monkeys on the boat!’). We thought of jumping, but from moving boat and open sea, it was not a wise thing to do and might trouble the boat who already did its best and turned direction everywhere for us to have the best encounters with the wild dolphins, then suddenly, Gondrong jumped from the upper deck of the boat and shouted excitedly that he could hear the dolphin very clear down there. Bule gile, hehehe…out of envy, we accused him of chasing the dolphins away. : )
We spent few more minutes until the amazing, more than thirty dolphins disappeared and appeared again further away. The show was over, but we were very happy.
Sometimes, there were few flying fish and birds fishing from the water, turtles and Leo saw a ray once. We had one or two rainy moments, but mostly, Menado Sea might be the calmest sea I’ve been diving in.
My other favorite moments were surface intervals, free times in between dives. Usually, the boat would park on the next dive point and we would jump after we cleared out the required surface interval. During that time, we liked to swim, played with water or just enjoyed the sun. We had this big unlimited swimming pool and the scenery of the coral down there was outstanding. We saw Napoleon wrasse during ordinary ‘bladder break swim out’. I have to say it was quite scary to see big fish not in proper scuba gear, although I thought it was a harmless, gentle, even endangered species, I was still nervous when it swam to my direction, so I was chickened out and climbed back to the boat. Anyway, I have a history that I am afraid of fish!
Some time we would have our swimming pool outside in the blue, so we saw nothing around us but the blue, sometimes a few small ellipse-shaped transparent jellyfish far away. We would happily do our stunts, jumping from the boat, giant stride, back roll, and friend pushing. Botak and Gondrong were easy going type and they enjoyed themselves as much as us. Botak always swam during every surface interval, and Gondrong had a hobby to jump from the upper deck. There was one crazy day that every one of us was so energetic and while all of us were in water, Botak suddenly shouted, “Don’t be silly! Don’t be silly!” We saw a big shadow and Gondrong landed from upper deck to beside him, sending all of us wet, when we were already wet. While Botak and Gondrong were around our ages, there were two older German Mat Soleh who preferred to sit on the boat and had this ‘What a childish group’ look, but six of us knew better what the real fun was.
Other activities during surface interval, there were few traditional boat jukung with lady villager saleswoman, they sold everything, from T-shirt, shorts, sarong, handmade necklace, wooden boat and lobster decoration, wooden masks, key chains, fans and few other things. Except Leo, we didn’t purchase anything as I lost my sense of shopping in the sea.
We ate snack, banana, biscuits and lunch during interval too, there was one person who would make us hot tea and coffee. I must say we were always run out of snack as we got hungry all the time. When there was a sound of biscuit tin being dropped, somebody must had been caught red-handed stealing biscuit.
One thing very special about diving in Menado, we were pampered. They packed the gear for us, prepared it for every dive, washed it at night and even pulled them out of water so we could climb the ladder free of heavy tank. They did everything for us; all we needed was wearing the gear, jumped and dived.
Now, about the dives.
Bunaken and Menado Tua mainly consist of wall dives. It is popular for its amazing wall dives and abundant colorful fish. Wall dives are well known for its big fish, pelagic and beautiful scenery. The walls slope to sixty seventy meters and sometimes deeper than visual and imagination. I always remember the stylish briefing when I was in Sipadan, “So we will go up to 40/30 meters, if we see something big, we go deeper.”
My favorite wall dives were the ones with light drift. So what we needed to do was stayed still, maintained the constant depth and let the light current carried us while we enjoyed the scenery without doing anything else. The real enjoyment was when we flew passing through colorful fish that packed in the blue or colorful corals quietly and motionless. Sometimes we lied on our back and looked up to enjoy the silhouette of fish and the warm sparking water under the sun, or looked to the wall to find nudibranch, reef octopus, spiny lobsters, fish, anemones, sea whips, mini caves and small critters, or looked down when big things passed by, such as tuna, mackerel, big-eyed trevally and school of various fish.
Bunaken and Menado Tua wall were full of yellow white angelfish look alike, red-tooth triggerfish, grey surgeonfish, colorful anthias and sometimes basslet, blue and black silver fish, decorative parrotfish, bumphead parrotfish, sweetlips, lipstick Tang, sometimes yellowtail Tang, butterflyfish, different species of angelfish, trumpetfish, various blennies and gobies, colorful crinoid or star feather, undulate triggerfish, friendly batfish who like to follow divers, titan triggerfish, lizardfish, snappers, groupers, moray eels, hawkfish, damselfish, pickerel were only a few fish species that I could name.
On shallow area we also could find many species of clown fish, star puffer, many types of boxfish, masked puffer fish, porcupine, sea cucumbers, glassfish, domino damselfish, pipefish, starfish, brittle starfish, various crab and shrimps.
It’s common for us to see giant clams, as we could see it in West Malaysia and many other dive sites that we’ve been, but there was one special dive points when we saw giant clam in super giant size, six of them together. They were so big that half human torso can easily fit into one.
Bunaken has a very good and healthy coral formations too. Hard corals and soft corals in very large variation are abundant. We saw giant barrel sponge, lettuce coral, sun cup coral, Christmas tree worm, red sponge, acropora, elephant ear sponges, alcyonarians with gelatinous structure, raspberry coral, stony coral, tuft tube worm, organ pipe sponge, leather coral, chicken foot sponge, anemone, cylinder anemone, gorgonian, umbrella coral, staghorn coral, brain coral, and many more.
For wall dives, we had to be careful not to be carried away too deep, because we were hovering, sometimes out of consciousness, we dropped deeper and deeper as there was no certain bottom as the limit. But the sea was created perfectly; it was like all wall dives are customized for us. We could drop up to forty meters, but there were always places when we could hover for deco stop and finally, we could emerge out of the wall to find coral bottom to perfectly finish the safety stop and enjoyed the shallow ending dives.
For most of the dives, we would drift wherever the current brought us, but we had one special dive and special target, chevron barracuda. So for this dive site in Menado Tua, we had to fight the current. Lucky for us, best season, the current was not stronger than we could handle. We were told to roll from the boat and immediately descended to avoid carried away, but when we hit the water, the surface was calm, so we waited for one another. Below, there was medium current, so we used the reef hook to rest in between fining. When putting our reef hook, we did the best to look for rock instead of coral and to avoid damaging anything. In this Tanjung Kopi site, there were hydroids everywhere, if you hit them, they stung and left itchy, burning and painful feeling. I forgot my gloves that day, after leaving the gloves in the room as they were prohibited in Lembeh Strait, I forgot to put it back in my pouch. So when the current drifted, with slightest touch, the coral stung me and left some nasty mark on my both upper palm.
What we had to do during that dive was to make ourselves still by hovering or grabbing some rocks when there was strong current and looked up, we saw the chevron barracuda in small-medium school, they were near the surface, other than that, we saw jacks and blue fin tunas. After the chevron, we did whatever we could to fight the current, Frankie advised us to do underwater rock-climbing to prevent us from being carried away. Slowly but sure, we moved, along the way, we found a lot of great treats, such as tiny boxer crabs, nudibranch, blue ribbon juvenile and even sea snakes.
When me and Hubby saw the sea snakes, we tried to avoid it, as sea snakes are dangerous although they won’t attack unless provoked, they are found in shallow area as they constantly need to go up to surface to breath. When we saw one strolling around the coral, we finned away and informed Frankie who was nearby. I remember Botak’s comment on him “I’ve met a lot of crazy people but none of them are as crazy as you.”
So, instead of avoiding, Frankie approached the snakes and took it in his hand, he used one hand to hold the snake near its head to avoid being bitten. He passed the snake for us to touch. Although it was small sea snakes, it is said than even small snakes has flexible jaw and can bit an adult man’s thigh, and they are more toxic than land snakes.
Dangerous marine creatures, they are all mostly peaceful except provoked, intentionally or not. Unintentionally is difficult, like when I almost, well actually I have touched but lucky, a stone fish. Stonefish are maybe the most venomous fish in the world, other than their row of 13 venomous spines along their back, they are also master of camouflage, lying on the seabed or coral, looking exactly like an encrusted rock, it is easy to bump into them or mistaken them for coral, and they are almost everywhere in Menado, night and day. There was one, I mistook its orange side fin for some tuft tube worm, and I touched it, lucky the side fins was okay, as I was only less than one two centimeters away from everything else. And lucky, the stonefish shook its body and adjusted its position and alarmed me. I was blowing a deep relieve breath.
See-lah!
Difficult to spot, I met my favorite flangblenny once again, I find it’s hard to differentiate them from other similar blenny, that’s why I was very happy when Hubby showed me one. This blenny is special as they have very pleasant smiling face. While most of fish have pissed-off and frowned look, there are few pleasant looking fish, and those I know have been favorite of mine; dolphin, porcupine and flangblenny.
Although smiley, this blenny has nasty habit. They like to leave the hole they live once in a while to bite fish that pass by, then they hide again. Maybe that’s why they look so happy. It’s very small, few cm in length. Because we don’t have any picture of it, I borrow one from website. Can’t resist!
We went to one of the wreck, Molas ship wreck. The deepest part was the propeller at 38 meters depth. It was a very beautiful wreck, still intact and good condition. Colorful hard coral had covered all of the surfaces, and there are machine rooms and some other part we could penetrate. There was a spare tank hanging few meters deep from the surface, for spare air in case. The wreck was not visible at first, until slowly it emerged to sight, from big black shadow and we could see the beautiful colors, I especially love the exposed structure of the boat, which added to the beauty. We went down to the propeller, the best propeller I had seen on a wreck, we didn’t stay long on that depth, so we slowly hovered to a shallower area and penetrated into the inside of the ship, went up between the structure and explored the whole wreck. The front part of the ship was in perfect shape too, perfect for posing actually. It was a good spot to celebrate our one hundredth.
As I said, and I wondered, why everything was created so perfect for diving. After the wreck, there were shallower area with beautiful corals and many fish and species to be found. We found blue ribbon eels and the black-colored juvenile, huge crocodile fish, and many type of shrimps and crabs.
We did two night dives in the house reef. Original plan was only one, but we were so impressed that we added another one, we couldn’t add more as the other schedules were full of dive, dive, dive. I voted it as the best night dive I had so far.
Before we went for night dive, the boat would come back to the resort to refill the tank. We spent the waiting time on the boat, although the hotel room or swimming pool was only one two hundred meters away from the pier. We took pictures or just enjoyed the time. The pier was facing West I guess, because we could see very beautiful orange sunset. Sometimes we dipped into the water, the water around the pier on afternoon or night was always very warm, so we could have this nice warm water ‘spa’.
About the night dives, it was busy time. We spotted Monster Crab and Monster Snail, the monster size crab was sponge crab, the one which always carried sponge and only visible during nighttime. It was gigantic and very busy, with its two ‘hand’ it kept climbing up and down the coral. We watched it for few minutes and still couldn’t figure out what it wanted. Up, down, up, down, it looked like some tedious workout as the crab was imbalanced and gasping its breath (my imagination!) while the sponge it carried was swinging up and down too. Busy crab.
The monster snail was bigger than my head. At first we thought it was a coral, but we saw that it was moving and found out that it was a monster size snail.
We found a nudibranch garden. The nudibranch were transparent, with red polka dot, fat, and beautiful. One was climbing the grass, one chasing the other, and there was one couple mating further apart, and few other single ones. It was a beautiful sight between the green tall grass. Hubby and Leo were biting their regulator regretting their decisions not to bring camera, so Cynthia was the only one busy and busy. Night dive is always special because uncommon day creatures came into sight. Everywhere of the coral, we could see red eyes looking back to us, stone fish, shrimps, spiky crabs, even the juveniles went out to enjoy night life, we found a cute baby cockatoo, baby stone fish, and one memorable find, baby squid.
The baby squid was very small, maybe 1,5cm long, transparent with two blue eyes, alien look-alike, but it was super cute and energetic. Surround by us but untouched, it still tried desperately to scare us away, from moving its tentacle with threatening moment, until it was fed up and spurred ink, which was very little of course.
Other beautiful thing, there were always starfish everywhere. At first we found one, two, there the sandy landscape was full of them, it was indeed something we haven’t seen.
Not only big things, we could find special macro in Bunaken too, such as pigmy seahorse, and smaller than pigmy seahorse (it’s possible!), special hippocampus pontohi.
(Click for larger images)
*****
I can’t remember if Moby Dick is a man or a whale.- James Thurber
There is nothing – absolutely nothing –half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.- Kenneth Grahame
If your ship doesn’t come in- swim out to it!- Jonathan Winters
