Secret Sea Visions

Happy Holidays

2011-12-02T13:23:00.000-08:00

Happy Holidays

Now that Diving Indonesia’s Bird’s Head Seascape, the new guidebook we produced for Conservation International, is complete and now available, it’s time to think about diving again. (BTW, you can order the book directly from our website, www.secretseavisions.com. Just go to the “Books” tab and then click on “fishID” to order. If you prefer, you can order it from Amazon, but it will be drop shipped from "fishID" so save time and order it from them.) The book has received rave reviews. See Drew Wongs’s on Wet Pixel, http://wetpixel.com/i.php/full/diving-indonesias-birds-head-seascape-a-book-review. As Drew will tell you, the book is a must have for anyone visiting the region and for all fans of underwater photography. For those of you with divers or photography lovers on your Christmas list this book is the perfect gift.

Our 2012 and 2013 trips have been sold out for months, so for 2013 we have decided to add a land-based trip to Lembeh Strait and go critter hunting. We will be staying at our favorite resort in the Strait, Lembeh Resort. Just to make it more fun, especially for you nudibranch aficionados, we have asked one of the world’s leading “branchsperts” Dr. Dave Behrens to join us. Dave has written numerous books and identified more species of nudibranchs than just about anyone. Dave will give informal talks and be on hand to help with identifying new specimens. And yes, we will find new species. The divemasters at Lembeh are some of the best on the planet. They will amaze you with their ability to spot these spectacular animals, plus all the other critters that Lembeh is famous for, like Rhinopias scorpionfish and mimic octopus, to name but a few.

Join us in Lembeh June 28-July 8, 2013. Check out our web site for more details.

In 2014, some of our most exciting news is that we will be teaming up with Kerri Bingham and Hergen Spalink for some of our trips. If you’ve dived Indonesia, especially Lembeh, you probably are aware of Kerri and Herg. We were very impressed with them and their skills when we met during their stint as the cruise directors with Kararu Dive Voyages. For the last 3 years they have been the dive-ops managers at Lembeh Resort. They are super people, both of them have incredibly engaging personalities, are very talented photographers, critter spotters, group leaders, and we just love diving with Kerri and Herg.

In 2014 we have decided to spread our wings a bit and visit a destination that, believe it or not, is not in Indonesia. Our first trip with Kerri and Herg will be aboard World Wide Dive and Sail’s (the Siren fleet) new liveaboard in Palau. Palau was the first place we dived in the Pacific (1982) and we still remember it as being magical and have always wanted to return. We will plan a special itinerary that will incorporate Palau’s famous sites, like Blue Corner, with seldom visited, off the beaten track, sites. If you’ve never been to Palau or, like us, haven’t visited for over 30 years, this will be your chance.

The dates for our Palau charter are March 29-April 8, 2014. Look at our website for more details about this trip.

But, there is no way we can let a year go by without at least one trip to Indonesia. Keri and Herg suggested that we give all of you the opportunity to experience what we’ve been doing, virtually alone, for all these years. Exploring, finding new dive sites, and developing new itineraries is what we do best. So we’ve targeted a region we’ve all wanted to explore, the Forgotten Islands, which inscribe eastern Indonesia’s southeast Banda Sea. Names like Babar, Wetar, and Tanimbar should come to mind by those who have read Rudyard Kipling’s fascinating stories. This trip will combine known sites in the central Banda Sea and eastern Nusa Tenggara, with never before dived sites throughout this vast region. We’ll dive with sea snakes at Manuk, perhaps get lost in a huge school of barracuda off Fadol or simply marvel at the sites around the island of Dai.

We have chosen to charter the best boat in Indonesia for an exploratory adventure, the MV Pindito. Edi Frommenwiler, Pindito’s owner, is a legend. Aboard Pindito he pioneered virtually all of Indonesia’s most famous dive regions, but Edi has never been to the Forgotten Islands. (For more about Edi and his impact on Indonesian diving read the dedication, page 30, in our first guidebook, Diving Indonesia’s Raja Ampat.)

This adventure will cover an area so vast that it can’t be explored in a single trip. So you’ll have to choose between the northern or the southern itineraries. Of course, some of you may choose to join us for both! We will begin in Ambon on April 14, 2014 and break the trip in Saumlaki, on Yamdena Island in the Tanimbar group on April 25. The second trip begins in Saumlaki on April 28 and finishes in Maumere on May 9.

Join our team on this journey and experience what few others have ever seen while we discover a whole new world of diving. This will be a once in a lifetime opportunity and the trips are sure to sell out quickly. Book this trip soon and experience the thrill of exploration with us.

HO³,
Burt and Maurine

Diving with Edi "Pindito"

2011-09-28T20:03:00.000-07:00

Our dear friend Larry Smith introduced us to Edi Frommenwiler over 15 years ago. He told us many stories about Edi and his exploits aboard, Pindito, the phinisi schooner Edi had built personally in Kalimantan (Borneo). Fairly new to Indonesia at that time, Larry was somewhat in awe of Edi. Even though Larry became one of Indonesia’s best known and knowledgeable cruise directors, his admiration for Edi never wavered. Shorty before Larry’s passing, he told me that in his mind Edi was the undisputed father of Indonesian liveaboard diving. Now that we’ve known Edi for years, we completely concur. Edi is the king. He’s dived more and in more places than anyone we know in the archipelago.

When we met Edi, a Swiss expat, all those years ago, he graciously invited us to accompany him on a trip aboard Pindito. He said “join us anytime”. Little did any of us realize how long it would take. but, it finally happened a couple of weeks ago. Was I ever impressed! While motoring to Komodo, Edi showed me a film he made about constructing Pindito. And, I was even more impressed! Because Edi is Swiss and wanted the ship to be built correctly and fully insurable, he constructed it to Lloyd’s standards. You might say, “so what…aren’t all boats built to that standard these days”? The answer is NO. My guess is that none of the other ships in Indonesia’s dive fleet can make that claim. After watching the movie, I’m convinced that if it had been Pindito, instead of the Titanic, that struck that iceberg, the iceberg would have sunk.

But, what about diving from the Pindito? Isn’t the experience on this boat the same as any? Again, the answer is NO. As Larry would have said, “this ain’t Edi’s first rodeo”. On Pindito you get the benefit of Edi’s 19 years of experience. He and his super, well-trained staff know more dive sites, how and when to dive them, than any other operation. In fact Pindito is often followed by newer boats just so they can find out where Edi is diving. I asked Edi if this bothered him. He just laughed and said that it used to, but it’s so common, especially now with so many new boats coming on line, he hardly notices any longer.

Pindito uses 3 dive tenders (zodiacs) and often sends the boats to 3 different sites. So, the sites are never crowded. The zodiacs are equipped with very diver-friendly ladders, camera racks and tank holders. His current set of cruise directors/divemasters (both German, English and Indonesian) are almost as knowledgeable as Edi.

Edi has immaculately maintained and upgraded Pindito through the years, and it shows. A decade ago when photography became such a major part of the liveaboard experience, Edi reconfigured the ship and installed a camera room. Everything on the ship works with Swiss precision. Edi, a passionate golfer, even installed a “driving range” on Pindto’s roof so he can stay in shape! The captain has been with him for the entire 19 years, the chief mechanic for a dozen. Pindito is accustomed to working in remote locales so there’s a fully equipped machine shop and back-up parts for the back-up parts.

The food on the ship is locally sourced and most of the dishes are Indonesian. Nothing lavish, just simple good food. Drinks are comp, including beer, soft drinks and even liquor. Wine is extra, however. More importantly, Nitrox is included. Pindito was built in an era when diving was the reason people came on a dive trip. There’s nothing “luxurious” about Pindito but it has everything a diver needs, everything works and works well.

We have decided to use Pindito in 2014 for a trip through the “Forgotten Islands”. This is a region we have always wanted to visit since reading Kipling’s accounts of life in Babar, Wetar and Tanimbar. Parts of this trip will even be new territory for Edi! So keep a look out for details on our website and consider joining us for this excellent adventure.

Thanks again Edi (and Pindito) for a great experience.

Best Fishes,
Burt

To Blog or Not to Blog

2011-08-30T20:26:00.000-07:00

Greetings Fellow Divers,

Maurine and I have been wondering about blogging. We know some of you seem to really enjoy reading about what we’ve been doing. But a blog is not nearly as timely as a posting on Facebook, so we are questioning the value of continuing the blogging process. To us, the value of the blog is that it allows us to write in greater detail about our wanderings. If you like the blog let us know and we will continue the process. Otherwise, check us out on FB, where we post much more often. On FB search for Burt Jones or Secret Sea Visions. And, do let us know what you prefer, bits and pieces on FB or the longer blog approach.

It has been four months since our last blog post so I will bring you up to date. We spent the first five days of August sleeping on the floor of a Chinese print shop in a not so lovely Jakarta neighborhood. Printing a book is exciting, but the presses seldom stop, and having press checks every two hours, 24/7, is very fatiguing. Thankfully, that ordeal is over and a couple of days ago we received the first bound copies of Diving Indonesia’s Bird’s Head Seascape. It looks super and we can’t wait for you all to see it. As luck would have it, we began printing on the first day of Ramadan, the fasting month for observant Muslims. It was poor timing on our part, but the printer worked with us and got the job done. The book will be available at all Periplus bookstores in Bali and Jakarta as soon as Ramadan is over.

I haven’t mentioned that we are very proud of the fact that every marine life image in the new guidebook is new; no underwater photos from our previous book, Diving Indonesia’s Raja Ampat, are included in the new guide. We have been fortunate to have dived in the Bird’s Head so often and have so many wonderful images of the area that we could do another book and still not repeat ourselves! We listened to your suggestions; the new guide has much improved dive site maps and is easier to read. Enjoy and let us know your comments.

We are now in the midst of the tedious process of organizing the shipping of some of the book stock to the USA. Before 9/11 this was a simple endeavor, but times have changed. Or hadn’t you noticed? To give you an example, the pallet of books has to have it’s own “documented” security clearance. Finding a US certified inspector in Jakarta, despite it being a city of 17 million +, is not exactly a matter of looking them up in the Yellow Pages. Fortunately our Singapore agent has found the ways and means to get this done. But talk about jumping through hoops. There are at least 20 different forms that have to be in place before the books can be shipped. But that’s not really the issue. All those forms are so the books will clear US Customs upon arrival. If all the documentation is not in order US Customs will not accept the shipment. They don’t ship it back either, they just destroy it. And, for their trouble, we would be fined $5000. Yikes! Please keep your fingers crossed.

If we indeed have all our paperwork in order, the books should be in the states by late October. It will “officially” debut at DEMA in early November but it will be available on our website, from our US distributor, New World Publications (www.fishid.com) and on Amazon as soon as they clear customs. We will post an announcement on the website and FB as soon as they are arrive.

Have we been diving lately? NO. Are we ready to go diving? YES. I’m going out on Pindito in early September, but Maurine won’t get wet until our next Secret Sea trip in late September.

That doesn’t mean we haven’t been photographing, though. Bali is a treasure trove of accessible exotic subjects. We recently spent a few days in Ubud, where a royal cremation took place. What a spectacle! The cremation tower, used to transport the corpse from the royal palace to the Puri Dalem (Temple for the Dead) where it is cremated, was easily five stories high. It takes over a 100 men to carry it. The bull, the final vessel for the body, was huge as well, about twice the size of the largest real life bull you will ever see. I staked out a spot to photograph the scene at the death temple at 11:30 AM. There were already at least a 1000 people there who arrived before me. I found a good vantage point, however, but it meant sitting in the hot sun while fighting the mounting throngs to maintain my view corridor. The crowd grew to easily over 10,000, but I’m not good at estimating numbers and it could have been much larger. The tower and bull, to which the body is transferred at the temple prior to being set on fire, didn’t arrive until 3 PM. Finally at around 6 PM the bull, now containing the corpse, was ignited. It was a long, hot day to say the least. I must have drunk 10 liters of water and still felt dehydrated, not to mention sunburned to a crisp.

Prior to the cremation we photographed the Bali Kite Festival. Kites are flown to honor the gods. I’m sure the gods were duly impressed. These aren’t your typical diamond-shaped, Walmart variety, kites by the way. These things are colossal. Some of them are over 100 feet long! I will post a few images on the website and on FB of all these happenings soon. Of course, even if there is not an event of epic proportions taking place there is always something interesting to photograph in Bali. We’ve been visiting beautiful, off the beaten path, temples, which despite Bali’s overloaded tourist scene, are never crowded. Also jukungs, the native Balinese-style outrigger fishing vessels, with their big eyes and wildly painted hulls, make good subject matter.

Back to diving. For those of you interested in liveaboards, we just had lunch on Damai 2. We’ve been watching it being “finished out” for the last couple of months, but hadn’t seen it in the last few weeks. We could tell it was going to be something special, but were unprepared for the grace and beauty of this ship. It is completely over the top luxurious! If I had to choose one word to describe it, that word would be magnificent. This boat is going to raise the bar and every other operator is going to be jealous. We can’t wait for our first charter on September 30th.

In the meantime we are working on a Bird’s Head Seascape slideshow/movie to accompany the book, which will be posted on our website and on You Tube. If you haven’t seen the show we produced for the first book go to our home page and click on the movie (left hand column). The software program we are using to create the program is giving us fits, but the real problem is culling the photos for the show. Unfortunately some of our favorites images from the new book won’t make it. Don’t worry though, since vertical images don’t work well in the slideshow many “landscape” formatted images that didn’t make the book either will be included in the movie.

Best Fishes,
Burt and Maurine

Just another trip to Raja, NOT!

2011-04-16T02:08:00.000-07:00

Maurine and I just returned from another wonderful trip to Raja Ampat. We’d like to thank all our Secret Sea dive buddies for joining us. And we’d like to thank new comers Ray & Sheri and Rita & Dieter for fitting in so well. As some of you may recall this trip’s original itinerary was planned to begin in Ambon, then to transit through the Banda Sea, before finishing in Raja Ampat. Due to two major storms, on either side of the equator, our live-aboard The Seven Seas was not able to meet us in Ambon. Everything had to be rescheduled. Many of our divers, expecting to meet us in Ambon, were already in the country, but they were scattered all over Indonesia’s archipelago. What a mess! With 7 Seas help we were able to locate everyone, reschedule flights, etc. and the trip started on time and finished successfully in Sorong. Major kudos and our heartfelt thanks go to 7 Seas.

Our mission, photographically, on this trip was to fill in a few gaps for our upcoming guidebook, Diving Indonesia’s Bird’s Head Seascape, which will be published later this year. In fact we will be house, or should I say, office-bound for the next few months until we go to press. The book will be an expanded version of our original guidebook, Diving Indonesia’s Raja Ampat, published in 2009. The new book is planned to debut at DEMA in November and will include Cenderawasih and Triton Bays along with Raja Ampat.

One of the highlights of the trip was the best Manta encounter we’ve ever had in Raja. We’ve never had manta interaction like this before! There were 8 mantas around the site for the entire dive. They seemed to enjoy our presence and frequently swam out of their path to play with the divers. Jerry had a manta hovering over his head for 15 minutes while Ingo snapped away, and Linda filmed the scene for 7 Seas. BTW, right next to the manta cleaning station, and just out of the mantas path, is a small group of coral heads where a few cometfish live. Unlike most cometfish, which are very shy, these fish seem accustomed to divers and don’t mind being photographed. The group also photographed sea moths on the slope above the mantas, so now you need both macro and wide angle for the manta dive. What a dilemma!

Other highlights include Todd’s incredible spot of a frogfish carrying its eggs on a night dive at the Cendana pier in Aljui Bay. Dave got some great images and we plan to use one in the new guidebook. At “Happy Ending” on Batanta we found both a mimic and a wonderpus octopus. And on a new night dive at Balbulol, which we call “Surprise”, dive guide and cruise director Karl found a blue-ring octopus. Fortunately I did a rare night dive was able to get a couple of nice images. Even though we had to deal with a stiff current “Mayhem”, one of our favorite sites in north Raja, proved worthy of its name. We had fish galore and even a few grey reef sharks, spotted by Rowan, joined in the frenzy. “Blue Magic” also surpassed expectations with massive schools of barracuda, trevally, surgeonfish and fusiliers all swirling together.

For those of you who have never been to Raja and would like to go with us please see the “Travel” page on our website for availability.

So now the fun begins. While most of you are enjoying springtime we’ll be at our desks for the next few months working on the text and layout of the new guidebook. We’ll keep you posted on our progress from time to time.

Cheers and Best Fishes,
Burt and Maurine

Happy New Year

2011-01-04T23:35:00.000-08:00

Maurine and I would like to wish you all a Happy, Healthy New Year. We hope it is prosperous but more importantly our wish is that you all get to dive some place special this year.

Since our last outing we’ve begun working on an expanded revision of our 2009 Raja Ampat dive guide. The new book will encompass the entire region known as the Bird’s Head Seascape. In addition to Raja, it will include Triton and Cenderawasih Bays. Scheduled for publication later this year, it will debut at DEMA 2011.

For the holidays we took a break from diving and visited Laos (for Christmas) and Thailand (for New Years). We had a blast. Laos was an incredible surprise and we loved our time there. We landed in Vientiane, the capital city. One of the reasons we chose Laos was that we had heard it wasn’t crowded. The population of Vientiane is only 300,000, which is nothing when you live on a small island with a population of over 3.5 million! Laos has a long history of French heritage so the architecture is a combo of Asian and European. And the food, OMG, it was fabulous. Laotian food can best be described as a mix of Vietnamese and Thai, with the emphasis on lots of fresh, fresh lettuces and veggies. Of course there was plenty of European choices, mainly French and Mediterranean.

Due to the nature of the import laws in Indonesia, “non-essential” imported items like cheese and wine are scarce and very expensive. That is not the case in either Laos or Thailand. We usually ate Lao for lunch and French, or Italian, for dinner. Vientiane is a culturally interesting city with numerous major, and active Buddhist monasteries; many are quite old. We spent our days walking and photographing these amazing temples. It was so nice to be able to walk without sweating.

We thought Vientiane was nice until we arrived in Luang Prabang. LP is located "up country" on the Mekong River and the weather was cool and cloudy. Believe it or not, a sweater was comfy in the evenings and early mornings. The old town of LP is a World Heritage Site. There are over 60 monasteries in this sleepy laid-back town and most of them are active. In the World Heritage section of town motor vehicles are kept to a minimum, which means you can walk down the middle of the street without fear. Bars close at 10pm. The people are lovely and friendly, and the sites are spectacular. The surrounding region is an adventure lover’s paradise and there are many remote areas where trekking to visit isolated “hill tribes” is encouraged. We are insatiable collect-a-holics and the crafts of the region, especially the woven textiles, are superb.

We couldn’t have been happier. Great food, culture, crafts, and an uncrowded friendly population that believe in karma. As photographers, we never lacked for subjects. What a find. Go there before it’s “discovered”, but please don’t tell everyone about it!

Bangkok, well what can we say? It’s fun but very, very crowded. This was our 3rd visit to Thailand and it was a great spot to ring in the New Year. BTW, the bars never close!

We are now back in the office continuing to work on the new book and planning our diving travel for years to come. Thankfully all of our 2011 trips are full and for 2012 there are only a few spots still available. So if you want to “have the best dive trip of your life” book now!

Even though our 2013 schedule is not yet posted (we still have a few more details to work out) we are planning to make 2013 “The Year of the Bird’s Head”. Keep an eye on our travel page where we will be offering journeys to all the region’s areas including Raja, Triton Bay and Cenderawasih Bay. Even though it seems far away our trips fill fast so don’t wait too long. We’ll keep you posted and hopefully travel with many of you in the years to come.

All the best fishes,
B&M

Twice the Fun

2010-12-07T22:18:00.000-08:00

We just returned from two very pleasurable Secret Sea Visions trips; through the Banda Sea to Raja Ampat and then a pure Raja Ampat departure.

Our first group was with friends, part of the old Diving Docs group. The trip began in Ambon where we spent the first day diving Indonesia’s first “critter haven”, the Twilight Zone in Laha Bay. In 1995, while on a trip with Larry Smith, we “discovered” Laha’s amazing, bizarre critter life, but we haven’t dived there recently. On Steve’s, the Diving Doc’s founder, first dive he and his wife Linda literally landed on top of a pair of harlequin shrimp eating a seastar. These animals are rare, but the group saw 5 during our first day of diving. Frogfish were abundant and Phil got a great shot of one yawning. The group saw many pairs of mating pygmy cuttlefish, seahorses, yellow ribbon eels (the rare phase), and countless other oddities. What a way to start!

We spent the next few days zigzagging across the Banda Sea. One of the highlights was our visit to the Banda, or Spice Islands, the fabled islands Columbus was searching for when the Americas got in his way. Everyone’s favorite dive site was Run Island. Never heard of it? Likely not, but this island was part of a trade between the Dutch and the British in 1667. If the British had not traded Run for a similar size island in the Americas, called New Amsterdam (Manhattan) we’d all be speaking Dutch!

Our last stop in the Banda Sea was at Koon Island, at a site Larry Smith named “Too Many Fish”. Even though two decades have passed since Larry named this site, the fish life is still off the scale. The fish biomass was so thick that at times it blocked out the sunlight.

An overnight steam brought us to SE Misool in Raja Ampat, where we spent the rest of the trip. The Docs had been to Raja before, but they all agreed they had never seen Raja like this. One reason may be that we took them to our new favorite sites, many of which we discovered only recently. The Daram and Balbulol sites are not only as pretty as many of the more popular sites, but they have the distinct advantage of being off the well-trodden path of most liveaboards.

On our second charter was comprised mainly of prior clients who had also all been to Raja. The only exception being the Johnston bothers, Jeff and John, plus John’s wife, Pam. Even though they are all very experienced divers, this was their first trip to Indonesia and with us. Did they ever get their eyes opened! They were totally blown away.

The group’s interests were diverse. Jeff and John are keen photographers and very easy keepers. The only question they ever asked was “What lens for the next dive?” Pam, who has a hi-stress job, was on holiday. Although she made most of the dives, she was very into relaxing and taking advantage of Damai’s many amenities. Sally, from NYC, and Judithe, from Paris, France have both worked for environmental organizations and are very knowledgeable and avid divers. Judithe too, is an aspiring photographer. Mickey and Ellen are adopted Texans and very well traveled divers. They’ve been everywhere, numerous times. Mickey is interested in nudibranchs, and Ellen has a passion for Butterfly and Angelfish. Brian, a very distinguished British chap, was up for anything.

They all came with high expectations that were met and surpassed. Since many of the guests were interested in photography, we presented our lecture series, Revealing the Art in the Animal, How to Stop Taking Pictures and Start Creating Images. This multi-part series is designed to help any level photographer improve their image making. Jeff and John, both accomplished photographers, were amazed at their improvement. Judithe, although just getting started, made huge progress as well. Everyone, even the non-photographers enjoyed the shows. Mickey found 7 new (to him) nudibranchs and Ellen recorded more species of butterflyfish than she’d ever counted on a prior trip. Pam unwound and left the boat a very happy camper. Sally enjoyed “the best trip of her life”. And Brian, well, Brian got exactly what he was looking for…a little bit of everything.

Our vessel, the Damai 1, even though it is the same basic size as most of the boats operating in Indonesia, is built for luxury and only holds 8 pampered guests. Damai puts 4 dive guides in the water on virtually every dive. Quickly do the math and you’ll realize that means every buddy team has a guide. Talk about experiencing the reef. Everyone sees everything. It is amazing.

Maurine and I were very happy as well. Not only did we get some new images for the new book, but we also found an excellent new night dive site. The most gratifying thing we received, however, was thanks from our guests for “their best trip ever”. What more can we possibly wish for?

Join us on a Secret Sea Vision charter soon and let us take you on your "best trip ever"!

Cenderawasih Bay & Whale Sharks

2010-09-28T19:47:00.000-07:00

We just returned from our initial survey of Cenderawasih Bay and we know that many of you are very interested in what we found. Most of our diving, other than on Manokwari’s excellent WWII wrecks, was within Cenderawasih Bay National Park, Indonesia’s largest. This park is huge, half again larger than Raja Ampat; our 16-day survey barely scratched the “surface” of this underwater wilderness.

Cenderawasih, along with Raja Ampat and Triton Bay, makes up the Bird’s Head Seascape. Its reefs look nothing like Raja’s colorful, fish-filled reefs, nor are they similar to Triton Bay’s soft coral wonderland. Pristine and vast, the bay’s reef tops comprise some of healthiest hard coral gardens we have ever seen. Dramatic vertical walls with prolific sponge life abound on the outlying atolls. We found schooling fish along the reef points and ridges.

Cenderawasih also has a few unique features in Indonesia’s pantheon of rich reefs. The bay was geologically isolated until recently, and if you look at a map you’ll see that it is still somewhat confined. This means that less current moves through Cenderawasih’s waters, and therefore there’s less recruitment of marine larvae than in a place like Raja. This isolation has blessed Cenderawasih with a number of very colorful endemic species. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that many normally deep-dwelling fish species are found here in relatively shallow water. This topsy-turvy reefscape, along with the presence of the world’s largest fish, the whale shark, prompted Dr. Gerald Allen to call Cenderawasih “ the Galapagos of Indonesia’s Reefs”.

Our team included Drs. Mark Erdmann and Gerald Allen who were documenting fish and collecting new species. Mark is head of the Bird’s Head Marine Programs for Conservation International (http://www.conservation.org/). Gerry is the world’s leading tropical marine ichthyologist and the author of numerous popular books on reef fish identification. Also onboard were Titus, a national park ranger with a very enlightened attitude and invaluable local knowledge; Ruland, a UNIPA (University of Papua) graduate assisted Dr. Crissy Huffard, a cephalopod expert and Conservation International staff member, with a mollusk (tridacna clam) genetic study project spearheaded by the non-diving member of our team, Pak Hamed, a UNIPA professor. Maurine and I surveyed the reefs in order to suggest itineraries for liveaboards visiting the area in the future. The detailed results of our survey will be included in the new Bird’s Head Seascape dive guide to be published late next year. Grand Komodo’s excellent crew onboard the Temukira, especially Weka, their dive master extraordinaire, contributed to the success of our trip (http://www.komodoalordive.com/).

Most of the dives Maurine and I completed were short in terms of time, but long in terms of distance covered. We surveyed the reefs on scooters in order to locate potential sweet spots; ten minutes of scootering equals about an hour’s swim for most divers. We dived a few times without scooters to look for potential critter sites, and we did find a nice variety, including, seahorses (not just pygmies!) frogfish, unusual nudibranchs, several ornate ghost pipefish, a number of interesting cephalopods, and tiger shrimp. Mark and Gerry discovered at least 5 new species of fish, including a new dottyback and garden eel. They also increased the species count of Cenderawasih from 884 species to 955. The Bird’s Head fish species count is at 1596 at the moment!

The absolute highlight of our survey was our whale shark experience. The bay’s resident whale sharks have learned that the bagans, floating fishing platforms, throw their dead fish overboard. This is a bonanza of protein enrichment for the normally plankton-eating sharks. The bagan fishermen encourage whale shark visits because the enormous fish are considered good luck. We felt like the lucky ones! The sharks seemed interested only in their free breakfast (all of the action takes place at dawn), and ignore snorkelers and divers. We spent several magical hours with these magnificent creatures and were able to photograph them in quite decent viz. Clear water, unusual fish behavior and cooperative mega-fauna…Gerry might be right. Cenderawasih may well be “the Galapagos of Indonesia’s Reefs”

Cendrawasih, here we come!

2010-08-30T00:16:00.000-07:00

Dear Divers,

We just returned from a great trip to Komodo. The park was fab as always. Damai (www.dive-damai.com) is a wonderful home base and their excellent service and numerous divemasters made this a special trip.

We began in Bima on the island of Sumbawa. Just outside the harbor, in the mouth of Bima Bay, we dived a couple of outstanding critter sites. The usual suspects, including bizarre scorpionfish, ghost pipefish, pygmy cuttlefish, a couple of mimic octopus, myriad nudis, and numerous fire urchins were seen and photographed. The fire urchins were enormous, about the size of a basketball cut in half. It seemed like each one was more beautiful than the next and almost everyone had some variety of commensal. Zebra crabs, almost big enough to eat, were the most prevalent and many of them were carrying eggs. Surprisingly quite a few urchins had squat lobsters, and Maurine found one with a crab we’ve never seen before. The Bima sites are excellent critter hunts.

Most of the divers with us on this trip, however, were new to the South Pacific and were expecting excellent viz and great reefs. At Sangean they saw the reefs they had anticipated. The next stop was Banta where we dived a couple of new (to us) sites on Banta’s west side. The most spectacular feature is a lovely, extensive hard coral garden with the most anthias we have ever encountered. Fish completely filled the water column. Additionally, we found a terminal phase “yellow” blue ribbon eel, and Ariel Cohn saw the trip’s first manta! On an outstanding night dive at “Small World” everyone saw their first stargazer.

The next day we finally made it to the park proper. We spent our first day in a bay (Batu Monco) on the NW corner of Komodo and everyone really enjoyed the clear water and easy drifts along the wall and bommie-covered slopes. The following morning we anchored off Gili Lawat Laut where, for the next two days, we dived some of the fishiest sites in Komodo, if not in all of Indonesia. “Crystal Bommie”, which we still call “Easy to Find Rock”, and “Castle Rock”, known to us old-timers as “Hard to Find Rock” were phenomenal. Huge schools of fish and the giant trevallies feeding on them; quite a few sharks, mostly whitetips, cruised the bommie; and a two-meter-long grey reef shark with several blue runners in attendance passed by me a few times. Never close enough for a good photo, of course. The “Fish Bowl” was magical, as always. Zillions of fish and lovely glassfish-covered bommies are the features of this site, along with the mantas that are usually seen at the end of the dive (we did). A nice surprise was a male jawfish with its mouth full of eggs. By this time, Gladys Howard, owner of Pirates Point Resort on Little Cayman Island (www.piratespointresort.com) was duly impressed. Her only disappointment of the entire trip was not getting to dive with her “son”, the late Larry Smith.

Since the SE trades were still blowing to beat the band, we spent the rest of our time in the park diving the better sites in the north like the two “Tatawas”, Batu Bolong, and Pantai Mera (Pink Beach). On the next to last day, however, we got a radio call from Mark Heighs, the cruise director and co-owner of Seven Seas (www.thesevenseas.net). Mark was in South Komodo. He said the winds had calmed and the mantas were abundant, so we sailed down there for our last full diving day. The mantas were indeed there, and on the second dive of the morning a cold (69 degree), clear (100 foot+) current bathed the cleaning station. The resulting photos are the best we’ve ever taken of mantas in the park. It was a wonderful way to end the diving portion of our trip.

The next day we went to Loh Buaya on Rinca Island for a walk to see Komodo dragons. We saw over a dozen dragons, including recently nested females guarding the next generation. All of our guests greatly enjoyed the walk, and it was an excellent way to end the cruise.

As I mentioned earlier, and in our last blog, our next stop is Cendrawasih Bay. We will be surveying Cendrawasih so that it can be included in the next edition of our Raja Ampat guidebook. This book will be expanded to include two destinations in addition to Raja. I imagine the new title will be something like Diving Indonesia’s Birds Head Seascape. We hope to see nesting Leatherback turtles, WWII wrecks, pristine reefs, and oh yes; the resident population of whale sharks. Yes, you are reading “resident”; this population of whale sharks, the world’s largest fish, appears to be permanently located in southern Cendrawasih Bay. Read about the initial results of this survey in our next blog (late September) and a full report in the new book, which should be published in the fall of 2011.

Until September,

Burt and Maurine

Time Slipping Away

2010-08-14T01:03:00.000-07:00

Hello fellow divers,

I had hoped to give you a rundown on everything we have been doing since the last blog, but we, and Secret Sea, have been so busy; the time just keeps slipping away. Plus we just spent a fun week with our house guests, Kerri Bingham and Hergen Spalink, managers of Lembeh Divers, www.lembehresort.com. Check out Kerri and Herg’s personal website, www.gotmuck.com. While here Herg helped me set up a Facebook page. Thanks, Herg! Actually, I’m not sure I should be thanking him. Our internet connection is so slow that it takes almost 10 minutes for me to accept someone as a friend.

Tomorrow, we are off to Komodo for a Secret Sea charter. We’ll be on one of our favorite boats, Damai, www.dive-damai.com, for an 11 night itinerary. We are very excited about this trip. One of our guests is Gladys Howard, owner of Pirate’s Point resort on Little Cayman Island, www.piratespointresort.com. Gladys has been a friend for years, but she was our dear departed friend Larry Smith’s “second mother”. Larry found the resort for Gladys 1986 and worked there for a number of years before coming to Indonesia. Sadly, Gladys never dived in Indonesia with Larry. We feel honored she has chosen us to show her around one of Larry’s favorite places, Komodo National Park. After our trip she is off to visit another place Larry made famous, the Lembeh Straits.

We return to Bali on August 27 and, 10 days later, we'll fly to Sorong. We will be heading to Cendrawashi Bay (CB). CB is on the backside of the Bird’s Head peninsula of Papua. CB, along with Triton Bay and Raja Ampat, comprise the area known as the Bird’s Head Seascape (BHS). Some of you have probably visited Triton Bay, and more of you have been to Raja Ampat; but few of you, including us, have ever been to CB. This trip is actually a survey, and part of our job as consultants for Conservation International, www.conservation.org. The results of this survey, along with information from Triton Bay, will be included in the revised edition of our guidebook, Diving Indonesia’s Raja Ampat. The new guidebook, will encompass the entire BHS, and it should be in print late next year or early 2012.

Another purpose of this survey is to create a new itinerary for liveaboards. CB has great promise, including WWII wrecks, resident populations of whale sharks and dugongs, vibrant pristine reefs, and some of the best topside scenery in all of Indonesia. We have reports of endless white sand beaches and, located just west of CB, are largest leatherback turtle nesting beaches in the South Pacific. Sounds like a place I want to dive! Look for a full report on our return.

Until then...Best Fishes,

Burt and Maurine

Raja Reloaded

2010-04-20T23:25:00.000-07:00

We are back in Bali after 6 fabulous weeks in Raja. Maurine and I left Bali in mid-February and I returned at the beginning of April. This was not a typical trip for us.

We spent our first 2 weeks aboard one of our favorite liveaboards, “Seven Seas” (www.thesevenseas.net). We were to be on board assisting a private client, OPS, the Oceanic Preservation Society (www.opsociety.org). They were returning to Raja to continue work on a photo project they started a couple of years ago. BTW, OPS is the group that produced The Cove, an excellent documentary about dolphin slaughter in Japan. Three days before the charter was scheduled to depart The Cove was nominated for an Academy Award. The movie went on to win for Best Documentary. We just saw The Cove and it is an engaging, real adventure. For those of you who haven’t yet seen it, don’t fear that it is too bloody or depressing. The movie is very James Bond-ish. Most of it deals with the back-story regarding the issues surrounding the crew’s incredible ordeal to film scenes of an event that the Japanese government was attempting to cover up. The actual footage of the slaughter, although graphically disturbing, only comprises a few minutes of the overall film.

After the film was nominated, director and producers decided they had to stay in the US to promote it during the run up to the Oscar voting. Since the director and a couple of the producers are the principals of OPS, they had to cancel their charter on “Seven Seas”. Everyone was totally bummed out, but at least they received an Academy Award as a consolation.

The boat was paid for, stocked and ready to go. Our non-refundable tickets were issued so the show “went on”. Actually it turned out to be both a fun and a working trip. Seven Seas owners decided to hop on board and brought a couple of Balinese expat friends. We called a good friend in Australia, the infamous, marine life photographer Roger Steene. Roger had to jump through hoops, but two days later he managed to show up in Sorong with the rest of the group. We hadn’t seen Roger in a couple of years so it was a real treat. (BTW, for those of you who have had the pleasure to meet but, like us, haven’t seen Roger in a while; he’s still as crusty as ever!) So off we went exploring. What a wonderful scenario, an excellent boat at our disposal and no real agenda.

We turned the trip into a working holiday, however. We spent the first few days in the Dampier Strait photographing around the new capitol city of Waisai, on a project for our “real job” at Conservation International (CI). We are producing an educational program that will be used aboard the Kalabia, the floating schoolroom sponsored by CI and TNC (see our recently released dive guide Diving Indonesia’s Raja Ampat, for more about the Kalabia.) It was so helpful to have Seven Seas as our base. In only a couple of days we were able to document a number of topics that would have taken us a week or more otherwise. FYI, even though Raja is remote and the epicenter of marine biodiversity, there is still much to be done to protect and preserve this fragile region.

After a few days of photographing issues related to the dark side of Raja, like uncontrolled erosion due to the construction of roads and the dredging of the new port facilities, rampant growth issues, etc., we were off to one of our favorite areas, southeast Misool. We have been exploring a remote area in the extreme eastern section off Misool around a group of islands called Daram. A few stellar sites in this area (Andiamo and The Candy Store) are included in our book, but our goal is to create a multiple day itinerary in the area. We found two more incredible sites, so now the boats can spend at least an entire day diving Daram with their guests.

BTW, Roger had never visited the Blue Water Mangroves, off northwest Misool, so we visited that area toward the end of the trip. Some of you may recall that there was a croc attack on a diver there last year. Many of the liveaboards have now chosen to take the BWM off their itinerary. We were a bit apprehensive, but we spent an entire day diving there without incident. The BWM were beautiful as ever. We are NOT necessarily recommending that boats return to this region. Just reporting that we spent a day there without incident. Putting the BWM on a route is up to the specific operator, crew and the guests.

After dropping off our guests in Sorong, we were transported to Raja’s newest land-based resort, Raja Ampat Dive Lodge (RADL). This lovely, little resort is owned by our oldest Indonesian friends, Reno and Nyoman Kirtya, of Grand Komodo Tours. GKT runs a fleet of liveaboards throughout the archipelago, but this is their first land-based operation. RADL is located on Mansuar Island, very near the manta aggregation sites in the Dampier Strait. The lodge is simple, but the rooms are large with air conditioning and private baths. The food is plentiful and good, mostly Indonesian. The diving is superb and RADL is conveniently located with access to many of our favorite sites in north central Raja (see www.komodoalordive.com for more about GKT and RADL).

The resort is new and for most of our two-week stay we were the only guests. That meant we were able to do one of our favorite things: GO EXPLORING! We found three outstanding new spots with big fish like mackerel, dog-tooth tuna, and Giant Trevally (GTs). Two of the sites had large schools of big eye trevally and barracuda. One of these sites also had a large school of a smallish (12-15in.) tuna and, to top it off, a manta cleaning station. We were in heaven, and dived each site numerous times.

We are so lucky to have found a place like Raja where more and more sites just keep popping up. We know that many of you have already visited Raja. What you should know is that if you chose to return and dive there with us you will dive numerous new sites!

After RADL, Maurine had to return to Bali to deal with the “fun” part of our job, the office work. I, however, got to stay on for another 2 weeks, again aboard Seven Seas. This time around I was guest cruise director for another private client’s charter. Werner and Myra Kurn, owners of Ocean Enterprises (www.oceanenterprises.com) in San Diego had chartered Seven Seas for their first Indonesian liveaboard experience. It was great diving with them and their clients. Werner is such a hoot; everyone had a great time. Of course, we showed them some of the new sites, but since they had never visited Raja every site was their “the best site ever”! Raja IS that special.

We will both be in Bali for the next 6 weeks, and we’re busy finishing the educational program for CI, and processing and editing all the digital image files we took in Raja, nearly 10.000 new images. Fortunately all our scheduled 2010 trips are full, so we are working on charters for late 2011 and 2012. Check out the travel section of this site soon.

Thanks for checking in with us and reading the blog. Don’t miss Maurine’s ongoing blog for Undercurrent (www.undercurrent.org). Apparently she chooses her subjects well because she is the highest rated blogger.

We are returning to the US for a short visit in late May and early June. Then we’ll be back in Indonesia on a new contract with CI for at least another year. Please stay in touch with us through this blog or by emailing.

Best Fishes,

Burt and Maurine

Life is Too Short

2010-01-21T20:50:00.000-08:00

I guess I’m going to have to face the fact that life is just too short to blog as often as I promised. Again, it’s been a few months since our last posting, and I know I vowed to do better, but time just seems to slip away. When we started diving and photographing PCs were not a personal possession/obsession, cameras used a product referred to as film, the internet hadn’t been invented, and I assure you nobody had even thought about blogging! Now it seems everyone is Twittering or Face Painting or whatever it is that cyber-people seem to have endless time for these days. It’s becoming obvious that we aren’t natural born bloggers! We got into this business to be outside, to actively participate with Nature. What can I say? Life is short, eat desert first!

Let’s see where were we…last September, at Lembeh Resort (www.lembehresort.com), we co-hosted, along with Fred Dion, a group of divers and friends. Many of you know Fred, former owner of Underwater Photo-Tech and presently a partner at Backscatter, (www.backscatter.com). Fred is an old friend and one of the dive industry’s good guys. Believe it or not, Fred had never been to Lembeh. We finally convinced him to come, but he was worried that many of his guests were concerned about a whole week of nothing but critter diving. Fred loved it, and more importantly his guests did too. Now he plans to make a trip to Lembeh an annual affair.

Lembeh Resort is lovely, has one of the best camera rooms on the planet, the divesites are only minutes away, and the new dive-ops managers, our good friends Kerri and Hergen, are the best. And, oh yes…the dive guides. Most of them have over 10,000 dives each in the Strait. They spot tiny cryptic animals from meters away and are very adept at helping photographers get “the shot”. In our opinion, Lembeh is one of the few destinations where a diver is better off land-based.

Of course the real stars at Lembeh are the critters. We had them in spades! If memory serves we saw 5 Rhinopias scorpionfish, one was a juvenile barely an inch long; countless frogfish and nudibranchs; at least 4 sightings of Blue-ringed octopus; plus a virtual cornucopia of other various sundry critters for which Lembeh is famous.

All the guests really enjoyed our photo seminar, Revealing the Art in the Animal: How to Stop Taking Pictures and Start Creating Images. We approach photography and structure our course, in a non-traditional manner. We learned by trial and error and have distilled our workflow into a course that is very user friendly. Virtually every guest said they learned something valuable from our lectures. (They weren’t just trying to make us feel good because we could see how much their photography improved!)

After the group left, Maurine and I did a short exploratory trip a couple of hours down the Sulawesi coast to Buyat Bay. Danny Charlton, who owns the dive operation at Lembeh Resort, is pioneering this new dive region. We had lousy conditions due to unseasonably high winds and were not able to dive all the sites, but the area is very promising. The hard coral gardens are some of the healthiest and most extensive we’ve ever seen. The critter sites were inaccessible, but that is not such a bad thing since now we get to go back!

After Buyat we returned to Bali and formally launched the book we produced for Conservation International (CI), “Diving Indonesia’s Raja Ampat” (“DIRA”) at the prestigious Ubud Reader’s and Writer’s Festival. Although “DIRA” is only a guidebook, we had a large, appreciative audience who were WOW-ed by the show. If you want to know more about the book check out Alex Mustard’s review on Wetpixel’s forum (http://wetpixel.com/i.php/full/book-review-diving-indonesias-raja-ampat/). To know more about Raja Ampat, visit CI’s web page (www.conservation.org) or their dedicated Raja Ampat webpage, (www.diverajaampat.org).

In late October we returned to the states for a visit (our first in a year and a half) and to officially launch “DIRA” at the dive industry’s annual trade show DEMA. Although our trip was a whirlwind of activity and travel, it was wonderful to see everyone. We started the trip by celebrating my mother’s 97th birthday. (She still lives alone at her home in Texas!) We then visited Maurine’s sister in Connecticut, attended DEMA in Florida, and returned to Texas to log some quality time with friends and family. On our way back to Indonesia we spent a well-deserved quiet week of R&R with our second family in California. We celebrated Thanksgiving there--Dungeness crab, wild salmon, and a plethora of outstanding regional wines-- before catching the flight to Bali.

It is hard to believe we’ve been back in Indonesia for almost two months. We spent our third Christmas and New Year in a row at sea off the west coast of Papua. This, however, was not just another trip to Raja; we spent most of our time further south along the coast, in Triton Bay. The diving was superb from our spacious comfortable home, the liveaboard Damai (www.dive-damai.com). And since we were the only boat in the area, we had the place all to ourselves. The only negative was on the second trip when we had reduced visibility due to an abundance of rain. So, we spent a lot of dives looking for critters. And did we ever find them! We found two new spots where we encountered multiple Wonderpus octopus. This was a real bonus since we were initially looking for flasher wrasse. (We found the wrasse, too.) I have been to Triton on 6 trips and had never photographed a frogfish. This time we saw 4 different species! And the seapens, a variety of soft coral that look like feathers sticking up out of soft bottoms, were hosting an unprecedented variety of marine invertebrates, from allied cowries to Tozeuma shrimp. Both groups of divers never wanted to leave and are already planning their return.

The last trip ended in Sorong, Raja Ampat’s gateway, so we did do a little Raja diving at the end of the second trip. Mainly, we spent time at some of the new sites we had discovered during the making of “DIRA”. The Daram islands continue to amaze. They offer some of the loveliest dive sites in all of Raja. Daram’s sites are located beyond the “standard” itineraries of most Raja liveaboards so, again, we had the place to ourselves. Many of our divers had visited Raja before, but none had dived Daram or the adjacent area we call Northern Lights. Everyone agreed that these two regions are as good as, or better, than anywhere they had previously dived.

We’ll be in Bali for nearly a month. We’ve got heaps of images to edit, and a gardening project to complete before preparing for our next trip. We’ll be assisting the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS) film crew (www.opsociety.org) who have charted Seven Seas for a Raja Ampat trip. They are riding the wave of their award winning documentary, The Cove, (www.thecovemovie.com). If you haven’t seen this movie yet, do so, and tell your friends to see it. It’s important.

Thanks to many of you, all of our 2010 Secret Sea Visions (www.secretseavisions.com) trips have sold out. Some of you have asked us to secure additional charters. Despite the world’s economic woes, surprisingly all of our preferred liveaboards are completely booked out for 2010. However, due to a cancellation we did manage to book space for early 2011 on one of our favorites, The 7 Seas (www.thesevenseas.net). Dates for this trip are April 2-13, 2011. We have planned a special itinerary that combines the best of the Banda Sea with our personal favorite sites in Raja. Don’t miss this trip. It’s one of a kind and spaces are filling fast! Visit the website for details.

Sampai jumpa lagi (until next time),
Burt and Maurine

DROP-OFF

2009-09-05T23:02:00.000-07:00

Don’t get too excited this blog’s title does not refer to a stellar new divesite we recently discovered but to the fact that a friend just wrote saying she loved the blog, but we appeared to have DROPPED-OFF the radar screen recently. I know in the last blog entry I promised to be diligent about writing more frequently, but we’ve been very busy and time has again slipped away. Hopefully you have noted we put our time to good use and, in addition to other projects, have redesigned our website. A special thanks goes to Peter Blumtritt for his site design.

At the end of May we returned from Singapore where we received new visas and, in early June, I headed to Komodo for a trip aboard one of our favorite live-aboards, 7 Seas. It had been a couple of years since we had dived in the park, and even longer since we dove our favorite southern sites in Horseshoe Bay and Manta Alley. Even though the water in the south was cold, we had super encounters with the mantas, and Cannibal Rock, although it clearly shows wear and tear from too many photographers lying on the reef, was still glorious. The fishy sites in the north, like Crystal Bommie and Castle Rock, were better than ever. Both sites had more fish including big fish, like dog-tooth tuna and GTs (Giant Trevally) than I remembered from previous visits. Sharks, too, are returning to these sites. Castle Rock has a small pod of dolphins that frequently visit and are becoming accustomed to divers. Komodo’s popularity is well deserved.

In the meantime we continued to dedicate most of our waking hours to the guidebook, “Diving Indonesia’s Raja Ampat”. To make a long story short, it is finished! We took delivery on them last week. The effort was monumental, especially toward the end, but the result is a book we are proud of. We went to Jakarta for the 48-hour non-stop print run. I should give credit where credit is due. Maurine and our publisher, Sarita Newson, pulled the back-to-back all nighters since I had to leave after the first day to prepare for a month in Komodo again aboard 7 Seas.

It hasn’t been all work and no play, however. Right before going to Jakarta for the book’s printing, we had to leave Indonesia again for a visa renewal (we have to exist/reenter every 2 months). We went to Bangkok, Thailand this time. We are lucky to have access to Air Asia, one of the world’s fastest growing airline companies. They offer no-frills budget airfares throughout SE Asia. So a trip to Thailand is quite affordable. In Bangkok, we hooked up with Mark, one of our best friends from Austin. He was in the area on business, but more importantly his significant other, Bo, is Thai and her family lives in Bangkok. Mark really knows his way around the city and Bo’s family treated us like royal guests. It also just happened to be my birthday so we had ample reason to take advantage of Bangkok’s remarkable cuisine and nightlife. My birthday started at 4 AM with a visit to Wat Arun (Temple of the Dawn) to pray with the monks. It ended at a back-street noodle house 22 hours later with a bowl of the best Pad Thai on the planet! Some of the activities must remain censored, no sordid details! Let me assure you, however, we had a grand time, although we all paid for it the next few days. Our thanks go to Mark, Bo’s family, and our incomparable taxi driver, Sam. Sam knows Bangkok and everything that is available in Bangkok!

I left for Komodo the day Maurine returned from Jakarta. Ten days later, with the first bound copy of “Diving Indonesia’s Raja Ampat” in hand, Maurine boarded the Damai, a new liveaboard, on it’s maiden voyage. This is the ship we have chartered for our 2010 dive itineraries. The ship proved itself and Maurine was very impressed. Congratulations to Damai’s owner Alberto. No doubt, Damai will quickly become one of the favorite liveaboards in Indonesia’s fleet.

As planned I, aboard 7 Seas, rendezvoused with Maurine on the last day of her cruise aboard Damai. Maurine “jumped” ship and joined 7 Seas for another cruise. Our lives had been a whirlwind for the past weeks so it was great for us to be together and for me to see the book. We had a lovely cruise visiting the best Komodo had to offer both north and south. We found two different species of Rhinopias in Horseshoe Bay and the big fish action in the north was spectacular. Dragons were abundant both on the beaches in Horseshoe and on the Rinca Island walk. Every nest had a female dragon guarding it so there were plenty of photo-ops.

Next week Maurine and I will join our friend Fred Dion, former owner of Underwater Photo Tech, now part of the Backscatter group, in Manado. We will dive Lembeh and Bunaken. We are really looking forward to being with Fred again, and seeing our divemaster friends at Lembeh. Hunting for critters in Lembeh is so much fun, it’s like an Easter egg hunt! We will be back to Bali toward the end of September. “Diving Indonesia’s Raja Ampat” will debut here in Indonesia at the prestigious Ubud Book and Writer’s Festival the first week in October. Then the last week of October we will fly to the states for a visit with family and friends. It will be a whirlwind of activity starting with my mother’s 97th birthday in Texas, quickly followed by a trip to Connecticut to visit M’s sister, then down to Florida for the guidebook’s US debut at the annual dive industry trade show DEMA. After the show we will return to Texas for another week before heading to what we hope someday to be our new home, upstate California. We’ll stay there until Thanksgiving when we head back to Bali to continue the battle to save the world’s reefs one book at a time.

BTW, “Diving Indonesia’s Raja Ampat” will be available from the website as soon as they arrive in the states. It will likely still be a couple of months, but keep checking. We will also be sending out a newsletter about the book’s launch and our Secret Sea dive trips for 2010. Most of the trips have sold out but we do have a few spots left on our November (2010) Raja Ampat trip. Let us show you a Raja you’ve never seen before!

Best Fishes,
Burt and Maurine

Happy Ending

2009-05-01T21:19:00.000-07:00

I hate starting anything with an apology but it has been so long since we made a blog entry that I’m left with no option but to say, “We are sorry for the delay!”

Many bubbles have passed overhead since the middle of January when we last wrote. At that time we were in Sorong , Papua at the halfway point in our survey of divesites for the Raja Ampat (R4) Dive Guide we are producing in conjunction with Conservation International. On January 14 we left, “Oh So Lovely”, Sorong harbor aboard the liveaboard “Archipelago”. The divemasters aboard this vessel are our old friends Made and Ali. Made and Ali learned about diving and showing people great critters when they worked for Larry Smith. Watching them give the dive briefings brought tears to our eyes on more than one occasion. Diving with them also brought back many wonderful memories of when Larry was still with us and we were all diving together. We also met “Archipelago’s” cruise directors James and Francesca who had only been on-board for a few trips, but certainly had their act together. They said learning the “ropes” was quiet easy. All they had to do was ask Made or Ali what “Mr. Larry “ would have done and do it. Smart cruise directors and delightful people. James is British so he talks funny; Francesca is an Amer-Italian from New Jersey so she talked funny too! They are a most welcome addition to a stellar operation and the crew loves them, which means they are doing it right!

Next we boarded the “Seven Seas”. We’ve known Jos Pet, one of the owners, since our early diving days in Komodo. Jos was the manager for The Nature Conservancy’s field station there. He’s a really good guy who knows his stuff. His partner is Mark Heighes. Mark has been diving in Indonesia as long as anyone. He first came to the country in the mid-80s with his aunt and uncle, the famous Australian marine life filmmakers, Valerie and Ron Taylor. Mark previously ran a boat called the “Evening Star”. Three years ago Jos and Mark bought a phinisi (schooner) hull and Mark basically built the “Seven Seas”. It is a very tight ship. They crew is stellar as well.

Aboard the “Seven Seas”, as acting cruise director, was Stew Esposito. (Stew runs the Raja cruises and Mark does the Komodo itineraries.) Stew was the “Truk Aggressor” captain for years so he knows his way around a wheelhouse and divesite. It was really great getting to know Stew and diving aboard the “Seven Seas” again. (You may remember that we were aboard “Seven Seas” for the month of October ’08 when we assisted Howard and Michele Hall film their latest IMAX movie, “Under the Sea-3D”. *See the blog that refers to that time period for that expedition report. The film is in release and has received excellent reviews. Check it out in your local IMAX theater.)

Our next stop was a visit to Max Ammer’s Sorido Resort in northern R4. Max has been in Papua for a long time and has done an incredible job building this up-scale resort in the heart of the Dampier Straight. Sorido’s house reef, Cape Kri, is one of the fishiest sites in all of Raja and famed Sardine Reef is only a 5 minute ride away. Along with the more basic Kri Eco Resort, which is just around the corner from Sorido, Max’s resorts sit in the ideal location for diving the best sites in northern R4. He and his crew of divemasters have done a lot of exploring over the years. So staying at either place will enable you to dive many sites not on a standard liveaboard’s itinerary. (You’ll be able to read more about Max in the guidebook.)

For three days we had been doing some wonderful dives when we got a call from James, cruise director of “Archipelago”. Francesca had developed some strange symptoms and needed to seek medical attention immediately. Problem was they had another group arriving the next day so they asked if it was possible for us take over for them. We couldn’t leave them in a bind so we packed our wet gear and headed back to Sorong and rejoined the “Archipelago”. We do have some experience as cruise directors, but it had been 20 years since we were the managers (the first ones) aboard the “Bilikiki” in the Solomon Islands. Cruise directing is like riding a bike and with Made and Ali’s help it was a piece of cake. All we actually had to do was interface with the guests. Fortunately the group from Dolphin Divers (Sacramento, CA) led by Alan Markis was delightful and comprised of experienced divers who really needed no assistance.

We did a southern itinerary, but on the last day returned to Batanta (central R4) to dive a critter site we started the trip with. The winds were blowing quite hard, however, and it wasn’t possible to dive the spot we had chosen. So we looked at the chart and headed down the coast to a bay that was a bit deeper and offered some protection from the waves. To our knowledge no one had ever dived there so we were a bit concerned that the last day of diving might be a bust. Those fears didn’t last for long! As we entered the water and drifted slowly to the silty bottom the first thing I saw was a mimic octopus! And the dive only got better. We found another mimic plus two wonderpusses, two pair of ghost pipes, plus numerous unusual nudis and allied cowries. Everyone loved the dive and since it was the last day, we named the site “Happy Ending”. Ask for it on your next liveaboard itinerary. BTW, fortunately Francesca received a clean bill of health; she and James are back on the boat.

Changing our plans in the middle of our survey did have one negative consequence however. After Sorido we were scheduled to board our long time friend Edi Fromenwiler’s liveaboard, the “Pindito”. Although Edi understood and gave his blessing to our subbing aboard “Archipelago”, it was a big disappointment. Edi has been diving Raja longer than anyone and we were really looking forward to the trip with him. Hopefully the chance will come again next season. BTW, I just talked to Edi an hour ago. He was in Sorong about to start his last R4 charter of the season. He had just finished his previous trip at…where else?…”Happy Ending”. Edi had never dived it before and his group found great critters including both varieties octopi and ghost pipefish. It really made our day knowing we were able to give Edi a tip about where to dive in Raja! (Read more about Edi in the guidebook.)

When we got back to Sorong on February 17 after guest cruise directing on the Archipelago we said “so long” to Sorong! Our survey was complete. Actually we had run out of time. Raja is so vast we could easily spend another season or two or three exploring never-dived sites, but we came home pleased with over 12,000 new images and over 30 new sites for the book.

Once in Bali we set up housekeeping again. I started editing photos and Maurine continued work on the text. Editing that amount of photos takes a while! To date I’ve done about 500, which is more than enough for a guidebook that will only contain 150 pages. Maurine continued to work on the text but 10 days later I was back on the plane bound for…Sorong.
I was asked to act as guide aboard a private yacht visiting the area. The “Andiamo” is a 150 ft, Dutch built, “Feadship” owned by Nancy Mueller, former owner of Nancy’s Frozen Foods. (Apparently her frozen quiche is quite good.) Anyway she sold the business a few years ago to fulfill a life-long dream of diving the world’s best reefs. The ship is immaculate and run by another Truk alumni, Raymond Heer. He was with the Peter Hughes fleet. We had a great two-week trip. Nancy was a delight and accepted my critiques of her photography with open arms. She had a wonderful group of experienced divers and friends with her, and the trip was a huge success. We even did a bit of exploring in the far eastern part of Misool near the Daram islands, location of the “Candy Store” divesite mentioned in the previous log. We found a couple of excellent new sites, but Daram still needs further exploration. We really like this area. It’s not dived much because most of the liveaboards don’t venture that far east, although actually Daram’s only a couple of hours from the eastern sites on most Misool itineraries. Daram normally has clearer water than the sites to the west and some of the area’s most beautiful beaches. We feel sure there are many more wonderful dives waiting to be discovered around Daram.

By the time I returned to Bali Maurine had basically finished the text of the guidebook. Even though we hate being apart, I guess my absence wasn’t totally a bad thing! I had not taken cameras with me aboard the “Andiamo” so I didn’t have more images to work on. We were home for about two weeks and I was able to finish editing all the images for the book. During this time we received a number of pieces of sad news. One of our good friends in Austin, Brian Chamerlain, had succumbed to cancer and another friend from Bali, Sasha Dambach, one of the Kararu Dive Voyages owners, had a fatal accident on his Harley. This news was a double shock to us coming in the same week. We will really miss Brian and Sasha’s presence in our lives. One would think that the loss of two friends in our circle would be enough but death is always a constant in life. One should live life to the fullest because you never know.

Early April brought to Bali a group of stateside friends we hadn’t seen since leaving last June. Aboard the “Seven Seas” we hosted one of our Secret Sea charters. Virtually every guest was a previous client and most of them are close friends. Bali is a wonderful place and we’ve made new friends but being with people that you consider family is something the heart needs occasionally. So we spent a fun week wining and dining, playing tour guide, etc. (Actually not that much wining was done. Indonesia recently placed a 300% duty on all foreign imported luxury goods. That means the cheap bottle you buy at the grocery costs somewhere between $30-40 here. What’s worse is that cheese prices have also tripled.)

We took the group to Maumere on the island of Flores, our gateway to a spectacular dive trip around Alor. We started the trip off with a bang by visiting the actively erupting (about every 5-15 minutes,) volcano of Komba. After Komba we worked our way east to Alor, which lies on the southwest corner of the Banda Sea, diving some fabulous walls along the way. The reefs were literally blanketed with purple anthias, and on a couple of sites we had multiple shark sightings. We also found an outstanding new wall during an exploratory dive in Alor. Alor also has some of the better critter sites in Indonesia and we spent time with frogfish, fire urchins and their commensals, and octopi. Village visits were also outstanding, so the trip had a good mix, walls, critters, and culture. One of our shore visits was to the famed traditional whaling village of Lamalera on Lembata Island. This is the only place in Indonesia where the natives still hand harpoon whales by leaping from small boats powered by nothing but sails and muscle.

As we headed back west we dove a new critter site off west Lembata that turned out to be a real find. We photographed two different species Rhinopias, a red skin-flap and brilliant yellow weedy. Other finds included regular reef octopus, fingered dragonets, frogfish, and multiple giant plurobranchs on the night dive. But the real highlight for most of the divers was the “squid ballet” taking place in 10 feet of water. Around 8 large reef squid (12’’ long) were mating and laying eggs for the entire day. Actually they had been at it for over a week, as there were hundreds of eggs scattered around the site, hidden in various clumps of acropora corals. The squid were very accepting of the divers and continued their activities while we watched, mesmerized by their dance.

We ended the diving at the island of Pamona just north of Maumere. This site was once one of Flores’s best but was heavily damaged, along with every other site in the area, by the ’92 tidal wave that nearly washed Maumere off the map. Mark had not dived the site since ’91 and was a bit apprehensive about what we would find. Turned out the wall was in very good shape, and at the western point of the island the fish life was outstanding. The divers had one of their best dives of the trip watching schooling snappers and trevally, eagle rays, dog-tooth tuna and 4 grey reef sharks. It was another “Happy Ending”! Most of our clients agreed it was their best trip ever.

An interesting and disturbingly scary event took place in R4 while we were aboard “Seven Seas” in Alor. A large crocodile attacked a diver in the Blue Water Mangroves off NW Misool. Diving the BWM is one of the highlights of a charter to Raja. This area is especially attractive for photographers and we have spent many hours on scuba or snorkel wandering through the labyrinthine channels that comprise this area. The diver in question had finished his dive and was on the surface when the croc came out of the mangrove and attacked. The diver and his buddy fought animal. Details are a bit sketchy and contradictory at this time, but it is big news on all the dive forums. If you wish to read more, visit www.wetpixel.com and do a search for croc attack/Raja Ampat. There is controversy regarding whether the crocodile should be eliminated from this popular dive area. Consensus seems to be overwhelming that the croc was exhibiting normal behavior in its environment. It being the diver’s choice to either accept the animals presence or not dive the area. We agree. Bottom line, the diver was evacuated to Singapore and is doing fine even though he’ s had to endure numerous operations on his hand.

When we got back to Bali and opened our email we learned of the passing of one of our very best friends, Steve Drogin from San Diego. Many people in the industry know Steve. He was so helpful to so many. He knew everybody and if Steve liked you (he had no time for jerks); he was truly your friend. If you wish to know more about Steve check out the Wetpixel website. They have a nice tribute to him. I talked, via Skype, with Steve every couple of weeks and will really, really miss him. And we sure hope that Death has moved on now. It has certainly taken its toll in our circle of friends.

Now it’s back to the book. The editor is almost finished with the text and we will meet with the designer next week to begin laying out the book. It is still on schedule for a debut at DEMA, the annual industry dive show, in Orlando in November, assuming DEMA happens! The industry is really suffering in this economic climate and it appears that none of the big equipment manufacturers will attend this year.

Maurine’s sister and brother-in-law come for a short visit next week and then at the end of May we go to Singapore to get our visa renewed. June 3 we will have been here for a year! Once back from Singapore it will be the Komodo dive season and we are looking forward to diving some of the sites we pioneered in the early ‘90s. A newsletter will be going out shortly announcing our travel programs for 2010. Hopefully we’ll see many of you on our upcoming Secret Sea Visions charters. I promise to be a better, or at least a more frequent, blogger in the coming months. And speaking of blogs, we have been asked to contribute a blog on “Undercurrent’s” website. So look for that as well. Until next time we wish you all a Happy Ending and…

Best Fishes,
Burt and Maurine

Greetings from So Wrong

2009-01-11T19:11:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year,

Maurine and I are spending a few days R&R in lovely Sorong, aka So Wrong. Sorong is the gateway to West Papua and the Raja Ampat (R4) Islands. We are presently at the midway point of a 3 month diving survey to discover new sites and revisit old favorites. The results of our surveys along with the photos we are creating will be included in the guidebook we are producing on R4 in conjunction with Conservation International (CI). We have a couple of days break between trips and are presently at CI's offices, which is about the only place in town where we can access the internet.

Don't get me wrong Sorong is not the worse place we've ever had to stay but it certainly ranks in the top 5! Sorong is an oil town with few tourist amenities or infrastructure. Lonely Planet is spot on when they say, "Sorong is not a place to linger!" Actually it is getting better as more tourism (mainly diving) comes to the region. Since the air service into and out of Sorong is not the "best", tourists occasionally get stuck for a night or two. We are attempting to locate the best attractions Sorong has to offer. It is a difficult task. There are couple of decent restaurants, an internet lounge, and a comfortable hotel. Fortunately too, there is a good company that offers bird watching tours. Bird watching in Papua is outstanding and the chance of viewing two species of Bird's of Paradise on a day trip out of Sorong is likely.

We just returned from the newly opened Misool Eco Resort located in the heart of southern R4s best diving. The resort is "Conde' Nast Traveller" beautiful. The setting of the over the water bungalows is stunning. The resort is truly "eco", 90% of the wood used in the construction was milled from driftwood. When you consider they have more than 500 feet of over the water boardwalk you begin to realize, that is a lot of driftwood. If you are interested in visiting or knowing more about this incredible new resort check out their website, www.misoolecoresort.com.

Prior to our visit "down south" we were guests aboard Kararu Dive Voyages live-aboard, the Cheng Ho. With Cheng Ho we dived mostly in the north and were able to show the cruise directors some of the new sites we found on our survey last September. They were quite impressed by the sites and we were quite impressed by them! We had been hearing good things about Kerry and Hergen for over a year and they lived up to the hype. They were outstanding and rank right at the top of our list of the best cruise directors we have had the pleasure of meeting! Visit Cheng-Ho yourself and see what we mean, www.kararu.com.

R4 is really two destinations, the north and the south. It is possible to see both in one trip but you'll only barely see the highlights. If you have the time it really makes since to visit twice or do back-to back trips with different itineraries. We have a hard time deciding which region's diving we like better. It usually just boils down to where we are at the time. When you consider the caves of Uranine, the critter sites in Aljui and southern Batanta along with the stellar wide angle sites near Kri, Yangello and Fam you would have to say the diving in the north is more diverse. However, the south is home to one of the favorite places we have ever dived, the unique Blue Water Mangroves. And, of course, the sites near Fiabacet/Boo and Wagmab/Faroundi offer the most beautiful and diverse reef scenics on the planet. So it's really a toss-up.

So far this survey's diving included revisiting sites in the north and exploring new ones in the south. Many of the new sites we visited while staying at MER were stellar. The resort dives a number of locations not yet "discovered" by the live-aboards and many of them are outstanding. One day we went to the remote Daram island chain in the far east. We found a few great spots including a dive we are calling "The Candy Store". The site was unbelievable, two small rocks surrounded by submerged pinnacles, walls and ridges. There were so many fish and so much to see we didn't know where to begin. We were just like kids in a candy store. This is now one of our favorite spots in all of R4. We only spent one day in Daram and found 6 new sites. Many more await discovery. This is an area we hope to revisit sooner than later and feel sure will become a welcome addition to the itineraries of the live-aboards.

When checking our email this morning we read the latest news from Michele and Howard Hall about their new IMAX film, "Under the Sea-3D". From our previous blogs you will remember we worked with them on that project last year in PNG and Indonesia. The film is nearing completion and will open nation-wide in over a 100 IMAX theaters on Feb 5th. For those of you in Austin look for it at the Bob Bullock Theater on that day. Make sure and stay for the credits; our names should appear near the very end in the smallest print possible, but what the heck it will still be in 3D IMAX! So now that we are about to be famous we'll be looking forward to the rich part too.

We head back to sea the day after tomorrow. We have 3 more liveaboards and one more land-based resort to visit before completing the survey. We should be back in Bali in late February. Since we won't be able to access the internet between now and then don't expect a blog entry until we get back to Bali.

Hugs and Fishes to all,
Burt and Maurine

IMAXing - Somebody's got to do it!

2008-10-31T21:46:00.000-07:00

Maurine and I are back in Bali after a month at sea filming with Howard and Michele Hall and their stellar IMAX crew. We worked with them, last April in PNG, on the initial shoot for the film and now on the final leg in Indonesia’s Nusa Tenggara region. That area, if you’re geographically challenged, begins, more or less, east of Bali includes Komodo National Park and continues east to Timor and the Banda Sea. We covered over 1000 nautical miles on our journey!

On the first night of the trip Howard showed us a rough “video” cut of the film compiled of footage from the four previous shoots (two in PNG and two in Australia). The film that audiences will see is shot on 70mm film stock with the IMAX 3D camera. (There are only three of these cameras in existence and we had two with us.) Even at that stage the film looked great, but Howard pointed out segments he wanted to strengthen. On the last night of our cruise he showed us a new rough cut. It was absolutely amazing to see how much stronger the film became during our month of filming. To be a part of the evolution of a 3D IMAX movie was a thrill that words can hardly convey (but I’ll try)!

The film titled, Under the Sea - 3D, is due for release in late February ’09. Although we worked very hard capturing images of animals and their behavior (at times the film crew was underwater for 6 hours without a break), for Howard and Michele the grunt work of the film lies ahead. Between now and February they will spend countless hours in dark rooms, writing and rewriting script, editing and reediting the footage, recording music and narration. If you are interested in learning more about the process visit the Hall’s website, www.howardhall.com; then to find out when the film will be in an IMAX theater near you follow the link to IMAX’s website.

Filming in IMAX, especially 3D IMAX, and specifically underwater 3D IMAX is very difficult. Howard often jokes that there has never been a less friendly, more cumbersome, challenging format invented. Frequently words like idiotic and stupid get tossed in. But Howard has been doing this a long time and seemly has infinite patience. No one does it better. The camera is heavy, add the housing, and it’s much heavier, bulky and awkward. Depth of field is about 4 inches and you have to be within about 3 feet of the subject. There are hundreds of feet of cable, snaking through the water column for powering the surface-supplied movie lights, which must be dealt with. The bulbs explode from time to time, which is always startling to crew and subject. A team of between 4-6 divers is required underwater to operate the camera and keep all the equipment sorted out. Most of the film crew use re-breathers, in lieu of SCUBA, so they can stay down for extended periods and avoid long decompression times. Once everything is set the film rolls…for a whopping 3 minutes! Once those 3 minutes are exposed the camera has to be “recovered” (by another team of divers) hauled to the surface, returned to the mother ship, and winched on board for a film change. Then the camera is re-launched and delivered to the site for another 3 minutes of filming. A film change alone usually takes about an hour. Contending with current is a major factor so for camera delivery and retrieval underwater scooters are employed. All this is taking place while the subject patiently waits for his queue, NOT!

On September 27th we boarded the live-aboard Seven Seas in Benoa Harbor, Bali and headed east. Before I begin the trip log I’d like to say a few words about Seven Seas. Maurine and I have been on quite a few Phinisi vessels in Indonesia and Seven Seas, www.thesevenseas.net, is one of the best. Owners Mark Heighs and Jos Pet know what they are doing and it really shows. They built the boat for the comfort of divers and photographers based on their years of experience in the industry. It is very seaworthy, the cabins are spacious and the food is delicious. Most importantly, and anyone who has ever sailed on a Phinisi will know what I’m talking about, Seven Seas deck’s don’t leak! The crew is outstanding! Mark began diving in Indonesia, with his aunt Valerie Taylor, in the early ‘80s. For years Jos worked with TNC and is in large part responsible for the successful marine conservation efforts in Komodo National Park (KNP).

We sailed east for two days stopping first at Sangeang Island just west of KNP. Those two travel days allowed us to get our sea legs and sort out the 7 tons of gear required for filming. The camera weighs several hundred pounds but when it’s placed in the housing it tops the scales at 1300 pounds. Needless to say you don’t chase after the marine life! At Sangeang, an incredibly beautiful volcanic island that towers to nearly 7000 feet, we were after garden eels. I know what your thinking garden eels, everyone has seen garden eels. Well not in 3D they haven’t. The eels will appear to be right in your face, so close you’ll think you can touch them. With the 3D effect, they will tower over and around you. The footage is awesome!

After the eels we continued east into KNP. M and I spent many years exploring this region during the early and mid ‘90s. We have over a 1000 dives in the park but we haven’t spent much time there in the last few years. Captain Mark and his crew know it intimately however and many of their sites were new to us. We concentrated our efforts in the north, where the water is warm and clear. The focus was to capture beautiful, vibrantly healthy reef panoramas with swirling, schooling fish life. Northern Komodo has this in spades. The conservation efforts begun there in the mid 90s, initiated by TNC (Jos was head of the field station at the time) have really paid off. Fish bombing is a thing of the past and the fish life is outstanding. Diving is much better now in KNP than when we spent time there a decade ago. If you’ve never been to Komodo or haven’t been lately; definitely GO or go again! It’s a premier, world-class destination. Many of the northern sites not only have masses of schooling reef fish, but there are big fish as well…tunas, mackerel, and GTs (giant trevally). One site has a resident pod of dolphin and sharks are making a strong comeback. Mantas are seen at numerous locations throughout the park and the critter life is the best in Indonesia outside Lembeh.

Another sequence that Howard wanted to film was anemone fish. Komodo is home to an abundance of anemonefish species. Again you might say anemonefish, how common can you get. Well go see the film. You’ll quickly develop a love affair with numerous species of these lovable dancing fish.

After Komodo we continued sailing east past the islands of Flores, Lembata, and Alor; our next destination, Gunung Api (Fire Mountain) in the Banda Sea. Gunung Api is only a speck of land, actually the tip of a volcano. It sits alone in the middle of the Banda Sea and is home to an amazing variety of birds including shearwaters, terns, boobies, frigates and red-tailed tropic birds to mention a few. But we didn’t go all that way for the birds. We came for the snakes, sea snakes! For some reason this island in the middle of nowhere is home to hundreds if not thousands of sea snakes. They are in the cobra family and highly venomous. Fortunately they have very small teeth set far back in their small mouths but more comforting is the fact that they virtually ignore divers. Actually that’s not true. They are curious and swim right for you, especially to your feet for some odd reason. It seems like every time you look down there is a snake or two poking around your fin tips. They also wind around your legs, swim up your back and over your shoulder. It’s a bit unnerving initially; hell it’s unnerving period. But you quickly learn they are treating you as part of their environment and have no malicious intent. Forget “Snakes on a Plane” wait until you see sea snakes in 3D!

By the time we’d spent days filming the snakes, believe it or not, nearly a month had passed so we headed west back to Maurmere on Flores Island where we were scheduled to fly back to Bali. But flights kept getting rescheduled or cancelled. Some of the crew had international flights to catch so Michele chartered a plane and the next stop was where we began, Bali.

M and I have been showing some of the crew the sites of Bali for the last few days. A number of them had never visited this lovely island so instead of leaving immediately they wisely decided to spend a few days of R&R. They’ve been wining and dining, getting massages, shopping, visiting temples and photographing 1000 year old terraced ricefield…shopping. Did I mention shopping? Bali is the handicraft capital of the world. The dollar is strong right now and you just wish you were on one of the crew’s Christmas gift list! Today, Halloween, we attended a massive cremation. The gaudily decorated cremation tower was 4-5 stories tall. It required at least a hundred or more bearers to carry it down the streets of Ubud to the cremation grounds where the body was removed from the tower and placed into a 20 foot tall Bull effigy; then everything was set on fire. It was a grand party and a blazing farewell for the deceased. Not a tear was shed, the kids had a fine time, and what a photo opportunity.

Maurine and I will be home, in Ubud, for the month of November working on the Raja Ampat guidebook, the real reason we are living here. At the beginning of December we will take a short break from Indonesia and visit the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Then in the middle of December we fly back to Papua for another 3 months that will complete the diving portion of the book project. Our home in Papua will be a series of live-aboards and land-based resorts. It’s hard work but somebody’s got to do it!

Best Fishes,
Burt and Maurine

Discovering Raja Ampat (again)

2008-09-27T01:29:00.000-07:00

Maurine and I are back in Bali after a month’s voyage aboard Grand Komodo Tour’s live-aboard Putri Papua. As most of you know we are working jointly with Conservation International to produce a dive guide to Raja Ampat (R4). During the past 25 days we logged nearly 150 dives (each) surveying areas of R4 seldom, if ever, dived by the live-aboards which operate in this amazing dive destination off the western tip of Indonesian New Guinea (West Papua).

Our mission was to find new divesites in order to relieve pressure on the most popular sites and give the live-aboards more options and flexibility when creating their itineraries. Because September is early in the dive season we concentrated our efforts in the North where the south-easterlies, that blow this time of the year, have less affect. We found over 30 wonderful new sites many of which will certainly be on live-aboard itineraries in the coming years. R4 is noted for its diversity; it contains more reef species than any other place on the planet. Visiting divers are awed by its stunningly beautiful coral reef panoramas with clouds of reef fish. Our findings confirmed that the area still has something new to show returning visitors. We were also committed to finding new “critter” sites and we found a few of those as well. On one site we photographed ornate, robust and halameda ghost pipefish. We also found flamboyant cuttlefish and wonderpuss (the octopus)!

We’ve never dived some much in such a short period of time. On many days we hardly got out of our wetsuits. Typically we would do 20-30 minute dives to see if a site merited being included in the book. We had submersible scooters, so in 30 minutes we could cover a distance much greater than the average diver would in an hour dive. Often the four of us (Maurine, myself, and Putri Papua’s two excellent dive guides, Weka and Jhonny) would drop in at four different spots in order to cover more territory. This way we could get a pretty good feel for any given region fairly quickly. We would often be surprised when 3 of us would come up reporting disappointing dives and we’d consider the area a write-off but then the 4th would surface having discovered a real keeper. A “keeper” being a dive we would want to do again…and again. It was fun but exhausting work! Especially considering we only had 3 days out of 25 when it didn’t rain part of the day!

We will be returning to R4 in December to continue the quest. We are scheduled to dive with the following live-aboards who have graciously donated time to complete the project; Archipelago, Arenui (a new live-aboard about to begin operations) Cheng-Ho (Kararu Dive Voyages), the Pindito (owned by the original explorer of R4, Edi Fromenviller) and Seven Seas. We will also be staying with Max Ammer, another R4 pioneer, at one of his two resorts in Northern Raja and hope to do some aerial photography in his new ultra-light aircraft. Plans are to also stay at the new Misool Eco Resort, which opens next month and is located in SE Misool. We’ll get a chance to thank all these fine operators in the book but we’d like to thank them here as well.

You might wonder what we’ll be doing between now and December. In 2 days we board Seven Seas with Howard and Michele Hall to continue work on their newest IMAX film, “Under the Sea 3D”. We worked on the first segment of the project in PNG and are excited to be helping them again on this, the last leg on their filming schedule. We will be at sea for another month. We leave from Bali and head East to the Banda Sea where we hope to get footage of feeding sea snakes at Gunung Api. On our way to the Banda we’ll be stopping for a couple of weeks to film in our old stomping grounds, Komodo National Park. (BTW, Komodo has been protected for 15 years and the diving is better now than when Maurine and I originally began diving there in the early “90s.) The Hall’s movie is due in IMAX theaters in April ’09. We know the team has captured many incredible sequences and the film promises to be their best yet! Don’t miss it.

During November we will be working in the office getting all the back-story information prepared for the Raja book and the first week of December we will fulfill a life-long dream and visit the ruins of Angor Wat in what is presently Cambodia.

We’ll get back with you around Halloween.

Until then…

Best Fishes,
Burt and Maurine

Raja Soon

2008-08-19T01:15:00.000-07:00

Raja Soon

Even though we don’t have much in the way of “news” to report we thought it would be a good idea to let you know what we’ve been doing since our last entry, and before we leave Bali for the next two months.

Mostly we have continued to study the national language, Bahasa Indonesia. It’s relatively easy to learn if you speak the “street” version, but to speak proper, grammatically correct Bahasa the learning curve is quite steep. Basically the language consists of root words that morph into additional words with various meanings by the addition of prefixes and suffixes or a combination of both. A
single root word can be a verb, adjective, noun, or adverb depending on what combination of prefix or suffix is applied. For instance the root “study”, with various additions, becomes “learn” or “teach”, “teacher” or “student”, the “teaching” or “course of study”. Verbs change states, transitive to intransitive, passive to active all with the addition of a letter or two. For our “old” brains it’s been an uphill battle. Even though it’s challenging we are good students happily doing the homework assigned by our guru.

We are about to put what we’ve learned into practice. On August 25 we head to Raja Ampat(R4) to begin a month long private charter to document and discover new
dive sites. Since most of the crew will speak about as much English as we speak Bahasa we’ll need all we’ve learned and a whole lot more. By the time we write again we should be able to function without asking for the toilet when what we really need is a beer.

We are very excited that our “real” job is finally about to begin. Conservation
International has hired us to create a guidebook for R4, which has become “the” hot-spot diving destination within the last few years. More operators are moving into the area and one of our goals is to find new dive sites so that theliveaboards can spread out and also relieve pressure on the most popular sites . Our mission is to find as many new sites as possible during the next month.

We will return to Bali in late September but will only spend three nights here before boarding another boat, the Seven Seas, to assist Howard and Michele Hall with
their new 3DIMAX movie, Under the Sea 3D. It’s the sequel to their award winning Deep Sea 3D. Look for it at IMAX theaters in the late spring of ’09. We worked on the first shoot in PNG and will now work on the last, here in Indonesia. The plan is to head east from Bali. We’ll first stop in Komodo National Park before heading further east through the Alor region and on into the Banda Sea where Howard hopes to capture images of sea snakes. It will be another adventure we are sure.

We return to Bali in late October and at that time we will update the blog. It will be a long time without hearing from us, but rest assured we will have many stories to entertain you when we return.

Best Fishes,
Burt and Maurine

Jam Kerat-Rubber Time

2008-07-02T01:16:00.000-07:00

Yes, we have arrived in Bali and I apologize for taking so long to write this first report from our new home. As the title "Jam Kerat" implies, however, nothing happens fast around here. Mostly that's a good thing. We obviously love living in countries with a "manana" attitude and certainly Indonesia falls into that category.

The island of Bali is Hindu even though it is surrounded by Islamic Indonesia, the most populous Muslim nation on the planet. Every Balinese home has a temple, every town has at least three! Offerings are made to various deities at auspicious locations five times a day and there is always a ceremony taking place somewhere. Therefore, when someone tells you something will happen tomorrow or next week, it's only an estimate. More than likely there will be a ceremony the day that the person making the promise forgot to tell you about so your request will have to wait. Likewise the Balinese are hesitant to ever commit themselves. So again everything comes with a "flexibility" clause.

Another endearing quality is that the Balinese seldom, if ever, use the word "BAD". Nothing is really ever bad, things might not be good right now but things always change. Also the Indonesian word for bad,Jelek, means ugly and the Balinese don't like ugly!

I should mention the Indonesian language since we are taking lessons. Bahasa Indonesia or Bahasa is a trade language (a language of convenience) created after WWII when the over 18,000 islands of the archipelago were consolidated into one
nation. As you might have guessed all these islands had various and numerous languages. So in order for everyone to speak or trade with each other a common language was needed. Theoretically Bahasa was created to be a simple language and easy to learn. It has no tenses, plurals are created by just repeating a word, etc. Sounds easy! On the surface "common" Bahasa is indeed simple, but for westerners like us who've only spoken a Latin or Germanic-based languages it gets a bit more complicated. Few Bahasa words have a recognizable root so you have to memorize every single word, which is not so simple, at least not for our "old" brains. Additionally we have quickly learned that in order to be able to read a newspaper or speak formally the language is anything but simple. Most foreigners just learn common Bahasa but we are trying to integrate ourselves into the culture so we want to speak the more "formal" form of Bahasa. Yesterday we learned that most of the verbs have additional prefixes and suffixes, in many cases multiple ones, that enhance their meanings. This gets very, VERY complicated indeed; not so easy!

Now the Balinese have their own languages. Because most of the population living in Bali is Hindu, a class system exits. Each one of the three classes within Balinese society has its own distinct language, not dialect, LANGUAGE! Few foreigners ever attempt Balinese. We won't be going there either!

We have rented a one bedroom "villa" in a very small village just outside the tourist mecca of Ubud. We live in Nyuh Kuning, which is south of and adjacent to Ubud's Monkey Forest. NK is quiet with very few signs of tourism. For us it's ideal. A five
minute walk through the Monkey Forest takes us to the hustle and bustle of Ubud with all its restaurants and shopping opportunities. Five minutes back and it's almost like the "old" Bali, no hawkers and no one asking if you need "transport"!

Initially we thought would look for a house to rent for the next couple of years, but our work means that we travel most of the time and we decided that we didn't want the responsibility of a house and staff. Over here a house needs security, really two "somebodies" one for day and one for night, plus a maid, plus a gardener, plus a pool guy, plus you have to pay bills, etc. It goes on and on. Once we realized that we would have to maintain a small village of people as well as trust them to watch our "stuff" while we are away, we quickly decided to look for something within a
compound. Villa Kerti Yasa , our new home, comes with a pool and the required small village of maintenance personnel.

We rented a motorcycle the first week here to just get around the area. I know I've made Ubud sound like a metropolis, and compared to NK it is, but Ubud itself is small. It only has three main streets, but it's big enough that you do need some form of transport . Motorcycles are the transport of the masses in Bali. They are everywhere all the time. I'm not fond of and have never driven a motorcycle. Maurine, with just cause, is deathly afraid of them. She rides behind me and I have scars on my shoulder from her grabbing me every time she feels threatened, which is, again justifiably, often. We ride down the street in a motorcycle bubble. It seems like they are not only on each side of us, in front and behind, but above and below as well. It's madness and it's scary. Of course by the second week here I was beginning to feel confident. (Beware that feeling, Burt.) I ran into a wall, just scraped it actually. It hardly hurt, but I was wearing shorts and by the time I got back to the villa my leg was a mess. It's healing well, thanks, but I'll have a scar to remind me to beware of that "confident" feeling next time it comes around.

We are very close to signing a contract with Conservation International to produce a dive/travel guide to Raja Ampat. In case you don't know, the Raja Ampat islands, located off the western tip of the island of (Indonesian) New Guinea, are diving's
hottest spot with good reason. They are remote, over 1500 miles from Bali, and the marine life is abundant. So abundant that researchers from CI as well as WWF and TNC believe the area contains the world's highest concentration of marine species. We aren't scientists, but to our well-dived eyes there is no doubt that RA's reefs are the best we've ever seen. We have little doubt we'll ever see better.

Even though remote, these reefs are under numerous threats. Increased tourism is one way that may help preserve them. Our mission is to not only produce a guide but to explore the area and "discover" new sites. Reducing pressure on the premier sites means that the numerous live-aboard dive boats operating in RA can spread out. You might think that overcrowded dive sites would ever be a problem in such a remote area. But consider a place like Cozumel, Sipadan or Thailand. At one point whether it be the 70s, 80s or 90s you probably would have been quite alone at any of these destinations. Go now and you basically have to queue to dive the most popular sites. RA already has 10-15 liveaboards in the region and more are on the way. Don't stress, one of the wonderful things about RA is that it is vast. Even now, seeing another boat is unusual. Still, go sooner rather than later.

We will be in Bali struggling to learn the language until the first of September when we will start diving in RA. Although the weather for diving is best there from October through April, we are going in September. Jam Kerat remember! We can't wait, but will. Once we get ourselves sorted out we'll make a schedule for upcoming Secret Sea Dive trips not only to RA but to many other superb Indonesian dive areas. Plan to join us. Stay tuned for more.

Hugs and Fishes,
Burt and Maurine

Texas, No mas!

2008-04-12T11:44:00.000-07:00

Our intentions were good but unforeseen events conspired and intent turned into so much wishful thinking. Finally I've found the time to make another entry. We've been back in Austin since mid-February and events have not gone exactly according to plan. I'll make a very long story as short as possible.

A week after our arrival my 95 year old mother became seriously ill. She consequently had 3 surgeries during a 2 week period. We thought it was likely the end of her incredible life but we underestimated her strength and will to live. After 5 weeks in the hospital we took her home last weekend. She doing miraculously well and we'd like to thank all our friends for their love and support during this difficult time.

When we last wrote we were about to leave Bali on the way to PNG to work on Howard and Michele Hall's new 3D IMAX movie. After a short stop over in Singapore, where we indulged ourselves dining in what we consider the best food city in the world, we flew into Port Moresby. Our plan was to fly west the next morning to Rabaul on the island of New Britain to meet the Stardancer (live-aboard), the base of operations for the film project. That plan promptly changed! The volcano that all but destroyed Rabaul in the mid-90s was throwing out so much ash the airport had to be closed. Instead we flew into Hoskins and met the ship at its home port, Max Benjamin's Walindi Plantation. We hadn't visited this lovely resort in nearly a decade. Although we didn't dive, the resort was better than ever and all the diving guests raved about their dives.

The IMAX crew all eventually arrived and a couple of days later we headed out for the south coast of New Britain to begin filming. We passed Rabaul on the way around the island and witnessed the volcano's actions. Fortunately one of the sequences Howard wanted to film was an active volcano which he thought he'd have to travel to Hawaii to film. The volcano performed brilliantly so happily and unexpectedly we got the film's first sequence in the can without getting wet. The volcano did, however, rain an incredible amount of ash on to the Stardancer. Within minutes the entire ship was totally blackened by ash, what a mess! Certainly we were glad the airline didn't try to land in those conditions.

We had a marvelous experience working with the Halls and their incredible crew on the movie, tentatively titled, "Under the Sea 3D". It's basically the sequel to their award winning "Deep Sea-3D". The film is about animal behavior and we were there for our critter finding skills. So Maurine and I spent the days, and a few nights, exploring Linden Harbor locating subjects for Howard's camera. That camera and its housing, by the way, weigh 1300 lbs. Although neutrally buoyant in water it is massive and creates plenty of resistance especially if a current is running. The crew often had to use a team of underwater scooters to manoeuvre it to the film site. We learned a great deal about movie making in general and specifically what makes for good 3D imagery. To achieve the 3D effect there needs to be content in the foreground, mid-ground (usually where the primary subject is located) and in the background. Another interesting fact is that the run-time on the film is only 3 minutes. Then the whole thing has to go to the surface for a film change. The turn around process takes about an hour. Getting wild animals to cooperate and "do there thing" in a 3 minute window is an extreme challenge. We spent a lot of time "baby sitting" the subject so that Howard could pick up where he left off filming. Even though this was the first of seven charters, and primarily a shakedown cruise for the camera and crew, Howard managed to film a number of behavioral sequences. The subjects included cuttlefish, "wonderpus" octopus, ghost pipefish, garden eels, frogfish, and a new species of lionfish. All in all a very good beginning. The crew is presently on their second charter filming in Mine Bay. Good luck to them. Look for the film to be released early next year.

While we were still in Indonesia, Mark Erdmann, who is in charge of Conservation International's marine programs for Indonesia, asked us if we'd be willing to work with him on a couple of projects. Specifically Mark wants to produce a dive guide for the Raja Ampat region which is located off the western tip of Indonesian New Guinea Island. One of CI's goals is to properly manage and promote tourism to this region. The job description as Mark explained it is for them to charter us a boat, for us to explore and chart new dive sites, and then produce a guidebook for the area. This is something we have been training to do for our entire career. We couldn't have scripted it better.

So it's "Texas, No mas!" Maurine and I are in the process of moving again. On arriving here in February we took all our household goods out of storage and set up living quarters. Now, at the end of May, we'll be putting it all away and moving to Bali. The plan, which if you know us predictably changes, is to base there for at least a couple of years. We are very excited as we will not only be doing our favorite thing, exploring and then sharing new dive sites, but we'll be learning a new language and living in a new culture. Since we've been traveling to that part of the world for 15 years the move is not unexpected and we are somewhat prepared but it will be a challenge; something that we enthusiastically embrace.

Stay tuned for more!

Best Fishes,
Burt and Maurine

New Year, New Horizons

2008-01-12T17:43:00.000-08:00

We hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and are on track for a memorable New Year. We celebrated Christmas and New Year's aboard the Seahorse (www.indocruises.com). The Seahorse is a traditional "Pinisi"-style vessel built for diving. Most of Indonesia's liveaboards begin their lives as Pinisi schooners, the traditional Dutch-Bugis hybrids that have been used for the last few centuries as inter-island trade vessels. The Seahorse was conceived as a dive vessel and many dive-friendly features were built into the design so it is one of the better Pinisis we have sailed on.

We had excellent diving both in the northern and southern regions of Raja Ampat. We found a few new sites, a couple of which were world-class, and visited some of our favorites. Maurine hadn't really gotten to know the Fiabacet to Boo area of SE Missol that well, so she was very excited to be able to spend a few days in the area. That one stretch of reef is truly extraordinary, actually worthy of its own book. I could go on and on about the details of the place but words will never do it justice. Come diving with us and see it for yourself.

Currently the only way to visit the region is on a liveaboard, but soon all you who prefer land-based will have a way to see these reefs. Missol Eco-Resort is about 8-12 months away from being a reality. (They have a website but I'm not sure what it is, just google the resort by name and you'll find it.) The owners are doing an incredible job. They've done their homework with the locals and are building the resort out of driftwood they scavenge from the beaches. The facility is lovely, and the location is drop-dead gorgeous! The bungalows are on stilts over the bay, so every room not only has a view but a hammock over open water. A research center is under construction for scientists to study the region's fauna and a local "village" is being built to house the workers. This resort will be state-of-the art and an "eco-resort" in the truest sense of the word. Their biggest challenge will be accessibility, but then the best places are often the most remote. We wish them the best and will be monitoring their progress over the coming months.

After our tour of Raja we returned to Bali for a few days and then flew west, to Singapore, in order to arrive in PNG, only a few hundred miles east of where we had been for the last month. It is truly a case of "you can't get there from here" as it is impossible to fly from Papua, the Indo province, to Papua New Guinea. We are now on New Britain Island (PNG) at Walindi Resort (more lovely than we remembered) waiting on the tons of gear to arrive that are required for our next adventure: advising Howard and Michele Hall on their latest film project, the sequel to their acclaimed "Deep Sea 3D" IMAX film. Before you get the wrong idea rest assured that Maurine and I haven't given up the still cameras, we are here for our "critter-wrangling" abilities. We are looking for content; Howard and crew will do the filming.

We are very excited about the region where we are slated to film. Alan Raabe, owner of Febrina and Star Dancer, has visited the south coast of New Britain over the years but the area we are going has never been on either ship's normal itinerary. From what Alan says, however, we might be in for a real treat. We have to steam half-way round New Britian to get to the site which is only 30 miles as the crow, or should I say the bird-of paradise, flies from Walindi. We will be diving off black sand beaches with cool water upwellings, freshwater inlets and an occasional village thrown in for additional organic input to complete the mix. It sounds like lot like Lembeh! They've seen frogfish, rhinopias and odd octopi on previous trips so we are primed for exploring what we hope will be the newest hot-spot.

Stay tuned for the report. You'll likely have to wait until we are back in the states, however, since we won't have internet access until the trip is over. That will be in February. Stay tuned...

Happy New Year,

Burt and Maurine

View from the field-

2007-12-15T22:57:00.000-08:00

station that is! The Conservation International Waiwo field-station on the island of Waigeo. Maurine and I are now in Raja Ampat, Papua, Indonesia. Yes, we're at the end of the earth but also smack-dab in the middle of tropical reef diving's hottest spot! We've been here for almost 3 weeks but quite a few things have transpired since Maurine last wrote from Bali. At that time I was on the private mega-yacht Athena. Showing its owner the finest reefs on the planet. This was Athena's second visit to southern Raja Ampat, to southeast Missol Island to be exact. It was also my third charter as guide aboard this incredible vessel. Along with me were two of the world's leading tropical fish geeks. Dr. Gerry Allen, who if you are a marine life photographer, you'll know from his fish ID books. Gerry is the world's foremost tropical marine ichthyologist and an old friend. ( I did my first dives in Indonesia with Gerry in '92 when I was invited to tag along on the initial survey's of Komodo National Park.) Accompanying us was Dr. Mark Erdmann, who is Conservation International's head of marine programs in Indonesia (hence the reason we are presently at CI's field-station).

Jim, the owner of the Athena, at my suggestion, invited them along on his expedition to photo-document the "world's most beautiful reef". When I showed Jim the Fiabacet reef system in SE Missol last May he felt he had found the last best reef on the planet and wanted to document it for posterity. Problem was he didn't think his 16MP Canon did it justice. So he commisioned, a "rather" expensive, one of a kind housing and port for a 39 MP view camera! What really makes these photos special, besides all that detail, is the four element aspherical dome. It creates an image that is tack sharp edge to edge. He got some amazing imagery and will have a gallery show, of near billboard dimension photos, next year in New York City. While Jim and crew were photographing Mark and Gerry were finding new fish, 5 species to be exact! We had quite a time. Look for an interview with Gerry in an up-coming Fathoms magazine.

After Athena's trip I returned to Bali and Maurine and I went to Yogjakarta on the island of Java to visit the ancient, 8th century, temple complexes of Borobrodur (Budhist) and Prambanan (Hindu). We spent a relaxing 5 days photographing the ruins and shoping for old dance masks in the back streets of Jogja. This was actually our second trip to Jogja. We visited 25 years ago. At that time the temples were out in the country in a very pastoral setting. No longer! They are not only surrounded by the city, they are overrun with vendors selling cheap tourist souveniers. Fortunately the vendors are confined to the parking lot, outside the temple complex. We also discovered that going in the middle of the day was not only insufferably hot but the temples were overrun with irreverent tourists. We decided to return to Borodrodur at dawn and virtually had the place to ourselves. Very peaceful, like the way we remembered it from so long ago.

Two weeks ago, we returned to Sorong, the "lovely" gateway city to Raja Ampat and visited Max Ammer's Sorido resort. Max is Dutch and originally came to the area looking for WWII artifacts. He fell in love with the region, people and diving and decided to spend the rest of his life here. Sorido is his 3rd resort. What a lovely place, with all the ammenites, in the middle of north Raja Ampat's best reefs. If you are not a dedicated live-aboard fanatic and want to dive from a superb land-based resort Sorido is the place! The diving has been a bit disappointing due to visibility issues but the sites are wonderful, with more fish than you can count including a wonderful manta dive too.

So we are now at Waiwo where I started this blog. Even though we are within site of Sorido resort it's a whole world away. We were expecting a step down but had no idea how far down the ladder we were going! Before I tell you about conditions here (pleading for your sympathy) you need to understand two things. This is not a resort, it's a working field station for scientists. It's not built for comfort, no AC for starters, at the moment we are even boiling well water to drink! Secondly, there was a communication error, we were expected for 2 days but were coming for 2 weeks. Unfortunately the first words out of the manager's mouth were, "Did you bring food?". Not a good start, especially since our reply was, "NO". Anyway Maurine and I are diving and exploring for new sites, which is wonderful. We are eating salt or tinned fish and rice with the occasional egg thrown in for variety. No beer either!! Not the diet most of you are enjoying now that the holiday season is upon us/you. We only have 5 days to go and then we will head back to Sorong and the live-aboard MV Seahorse for a Christmas/New Years cruise. Food and accomodations will improve!

We'll post again after the New Year. Until then...

Hugs and Fishes to all (and think about us out here when you are toasting good times with good cheer!)

Burt and Maurine

Critters, Incense, and a Bad Case of PCO

2007-11-11T20:03:00.000-08:00

I'm writing this as I sit in my friend Dave's beautiful open-air living space perched above one of Bali's loveliest rivers. The smell of incense is in the air and around the lotus pond frogs are serenade me and each other. Dave lives just a five minute walk from Ubud's center but this house is a world away from the town's crowded shops and galleries. I'm staying in Bali while Burt is guiding the Yacht Athena through Raja Ampat. I've had two weeks of Bali bliss after our trip to Lembeh Straits where we experience some of the best critter diving in the world. I'll try to catch you up on the last month of diving and wandering through Indonesia.

We arrived in Manado on the green, volcano-strewn island of Sulawesi in mid-October. Our first stop was the incredible Minahasa Lagoon Resort, about 45 minutes away from the center of Manado. I hate to say it, but this resort is almost too nice for divers. The service was superb and the food incredible. Of course we were there for the diving and it also surpassed our expectations. The walls of Bunaken National Park were as lush and filled with fish as promised, but our group wanted to hunt critters, in anticipation of Lembeh. With Minahasa's expert guides we saw and photographed animals as diverse as Flamboyant Cuttlefish and Pegasus Sea Moths. On one dive a tiny Painted Frogfish landed on top of a white Scorpion Leaf Fish!

But the main act was waiting for us at the Lembeh Resort on Lembeh island. Long famed for it's wealth of unusual marine animals, Lembeh did not disappoint. Although Burt and I had spent several months diving the straits with Larry Smith a decade ago, we were thrilled to learn that Lembeh is one place that is better than it was when we first dived it...something you can't say about may reefs in the world!

Highlights were sightings of Blue Ring Octopus on four different occasions. We photographed a total of eight octopus species including the Motote, a small relative of the Blue Ring we had never seen before. When we arrived in Lembeh,Kat and Johan the very capable dive ops managers at Lembeh Resort asked us to list the animals we wanted to see. They teamed us with Ronald, an expert guide and friend of many years. For two weeks Ronald was in a zone and even found the very elusive Hairy Octopus! Our portfolio now includes the cockatoo flounder, a mantis shrimp with eggs that posed for several minutes, numerous sightings of the mimic and wonderpus octopus, a pregnant warty frogfish, and the utterly beautiful Tiger Shrimp.

Divers become addicted to Lembeh, There's no place else where finding and photographing elusive animals is so easy. One of our photography week participants, Tony Kressic from Chicago, said it was absolutely the best trip he'd ever been on. Tony's photography skills improved so much during the week, he may have gotten the best Blue Ring shot of us all! Jack and Nancy Malo, veteran divers and photographers from Minnesota, were thrilled with the ease of diving Lembeh and came down with a bad case of PCO, or progressive critter overload, as our friend and Lembeh pioneer, Larry Smith used to say.

When Burt returns from Raja Ampat we'll take a short break and travel to Java for a few days of photographing temples and checking out some of Indonesia's best crafts in Yogjakarta. We'll return to Bali and prepare for a month in Papua where we'll dive the best sights in Triton Bay and Raja Ampat.

First Step

2007-09-28T09:05:00.000-07:00

Maurine and I, gypsy life-stylists we are, are in the final stages of packing up our belongings and moving everything to a storage locker in preparation for an extended five month adventure to Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. We'll start with a week in Bali. Bali is a great place to begin and also recover from jet lag. Hotels are reasonable, food is good and cheap and Bali happens to be home to Pak Ketut, owner of Bodyworks in Ubud, our massage therapist. There's nothing like a deep tissue therapy massage for getting jet lag kinks out and preparing for an adventure.

We begin our diving journey by flying to Manado (Sulawesi Island). From Manado's Minahasa Resort we'll dive the walls and reefs of Bunaken National Park with our long time friends The Diving Docs. A week later everyone will drive across the pennisula and we'll be spending another week hunting & photographing "critters" at Lembeh Island Resort. After the Docs depart M and I will host a Secret Sea Seminar week at the resort. Our seminar series "Revealing the Art in the Animal" or "How to Stop Taking Pictures and Start Creating Images" offers instruction and entertainment to anyone with an interest in the marine environment and under water photography.

Next we'll head to Sorong, Papua, formerly Irian Jaya, for a couple of weeks aboard the private mega-yacht Athena. (If you are interested in knowing more about this incredible vessel just Google "Yacht Athena".) We are guiding the owner around Raja Ampat and down to Triton Bay. Mark Erdmann, head of marine programs in Indonesia for Conservation International, and Gerry Allen, the world's leading tropical marine ichthyologist, will be joining us. One of our goals is finding new species and also documenting the reefs for a future gallery show in New York. BTW, David Doubilet, National Geographic's principal reef photographer, is expected to join us for part of the journey.

After we leave Athena, Maurine and I will be going back to Triton Bay to work on various projects in association with Conservation International. Operations will be based out of CI's new field station located in the heart of the world's richest reefs! We'll be at the station at least a month. We'll have a white Christmas on one of the most beautiful (white) sandy beaches we've ever seen!

Then just after the New Year we'll head to the other side of the island of New Guinea to Papua New Guinea's New Britain Island. There we'll be assisting Howard Hall Productions who are filming the follow up to their award winning DEEP SEA 3D Imax film. Long time friends Howard and Michele want us there not just for our photography skills but more for our "critter-hunting" abilities. Of course we'll have cameras in hand but mainly we'll be scouting subjects for the 3D Imax camera.

We'll be back in the states, if our plans don't change though they often do, sometime in mid-February. We'll be making BLOG postings along the way, so stay tuned for Step Two!

Best Fishes,
Burt