Lembeh Straits - Diving with Critters

Met Lisa and Tracy Norris at the Bali Hyatt. (this is the second trip with them as they were in Galapagos with me when we went with the Buzzard Bay divers  of Onsat, Mass. in June of 2009.)  We then traveled to Lembeh Straits which t took the entire day of Sept 8 to get here!

Yellow Hairy Frogfish

At this time I have done 11 dives and on the very first dive I saw a Hairy FROGFISH!!! The diving here is primarily muck diving and was introduced to the area by my friend Larry Smith.  There is only about 10 to 15 feet of visibility and mostly on black sand. But under every leaf are amazing SMALL critters.  We saw 4 seahorses on one dive. I personally discovered a STARGAZER which seemed to everyone to be very special.!!!! 

Gladys, Dimpy and Tracy at Lembeh Straits

Cuttlefish

Gladys winning at Dominoes again!

The second day Tracy and I went on the twilight mandarinfish dive - just the two of us with a dive master. This was quite amazing as the male mandarinfish was darting about trying to convince about 5 small females to do the mating dance. He did succeed with a couple of them.  Beautiful colors, as they went twirling up!

We have a wonderful dive master assigned to just the two of us. Dimpy has a marine biology degree and writes out everything that we see on each dive.  We have seen the long arm octopus, the mimic octopus, coconut octopus, and the mototi octopus which has blue rings but is not the actual blue ring octopus. We are still looking for the real blue ring and the wonderpus octopus which is striped and quite large.  We have seen a lot of lion fish of all descriptions.  The pipefish are also all sizes and colors, as are the ribbon eels. The giant mantis shrimp wander around as if they own the place.   The flamboyant cuttlefish are amazing in color changes and size, Tracy seems to think we saw one that was about 2 feet long. Sometimes I think he is a fisherman with all of his tall tales. More later, as we are about to eat dinner. The food is definitely not up to the standards we had  on the Damai  and does not touch the food we had in Ubud.  Now I know why Pirates Point Resort is the number one resort with food!!!! 

Thanks to Tracy Norris for all these photos.