Picture of the Day

This, my friends, is something called an “ornate ghost pipefish.”  It’s maybe 4-5 inches long, and it’s one of those fish so cleverly disguised as something else that it stands out for miles.

Underwater, where the reds fade out, it looked completely white.  Putting the red back in makes it a good deal more striking.

Here at Lembeh the diving is completely different from Siladen, where I lodged last week.  At Siladen it was wall diving, cruising with the current along magnificent coral cliffs.  Sometimes we’d dive shallow slopes, bright coral sand loaded with coral outcrops.

Here in Lembeh we do “muck diving,” on sloping black volcanic sand mixed with rubble, with just a few coral outcrops here and there.  We’re looking for small stuff: nudibranchs, crabs, shrimp, octopus, cuttlefish.  And we’re finding a lot of it!

I look in my dive log and find the following: “leaf waspfish, needle cuttlefish, fingered dragonet, ornate ghost pipefish, coconut octopus, crocodile snake eel, smaller mantis shrimp, broad club cuttlefish, devil scorpion fish, ocerated octopus, orang utan crab, long arm octopus, humpback scorpion fish, white nudibranch.”

And that’s all from a single dive!

I had my final dive this morning, so I’ll be packing up my gear and getting out my travel duds. I’m going up to the Minahasan Highlands, then on to Singapore.