Eastern Indonesia’s newest critter sites

Until recently, few dive operators considered Batanta’s foreboding southwestern quadrant except to steer clear of the logjams of detritus that often clog the narrow Sagewin Strait separating Batanta from Salawati.

In early September 2008 we began an exploratory survey of Raja Ampat, anticipating that we would find some good muck dives. The survey was part of our work as dive tourism consultants for Conservation International (CI), and one of our goals was to expand the range of Raja Ampat diving to include more sites where unusual marine species like mimic octopus and ghost pipefish could be observed reliably. Under CI’s auspices we are producing a Raja Ampat dive guide aimed at attracting more divers to the (recently declared) most bio-diverse reefs in the world.

Critter or muck diving, while extremely popular in Lembeh Strait and Ambon, Indonesia’s macro meccas, has not been a big part of Raja Ampat’s appeal. One of our missions was to change the diving public’s perception of Raja as a great place to see schools of fish and healthy, beautiful reefs, but not so great if you want to see a flamboyant cuttlefish or a tiger shrimp.

During the initial survey we explored a number of bays along the southwestern Batanta coast, logging several excellent dives at the sites called Algae Patch 1 and 2. Previous to our survey, divemasters had reported finding a few nudibranchs and pipefish in these small bays, but no one had yet fully documented the area. On our exploratory dives along the neighbouring black-sand slopes we found substantial numbers of nudibranchs, three species of ghost pipefish, both the mimic and the wonderpus octopuses, a pair of tiger shrimp, and enough other unusual creatures to realise we’d discovered a critter diving “honey hole.”

Excited about our new finds, we subsequently took groups of divers through Raja Ampat to the Algae Patches. On our final trip, as we were returning to Sorong Harbor, an unseasonable wind blew through the Sagewin Strait sending an impossible swell through Algae Patch 2’s small bay. All we had time to do was move to the protected bay just west of our position. As far as we knew no one had dived there before, but the way this bay faced the strait quieted the swell so that divers could get in the water without swamping the dinghies. I was the first to descend and I nearly landed on a mimic octopus – a very auspicious omen! Throughout the day everyone revelled in the full pantheon of the weird and wonderful, from winged pipefish to warty frogfish. A general consensus named the site “Happy Ending.”

Convinced now that certain areas of Raja Ampat had the kind of muck diving we were looking for we revisited Aljui Bay, which had always enjoyed the reputation of being Raja’s best critter spot. Near the Fuel Dock we photographed four different blue ring octopuses on one night dive, certainly a record for any muck site! Halimeda ghost pipefish and cockatoo waspfish soon followed.