Apart from that, the crew on board the boat are all exceptional -- nothing but good stuff to write about the staff, chef, dive guides, and cruise director, an excellent young Frenchman called Cedric.
The Food
The typical daily schedule was: wake up at 7am for a quick breakfast (fruit, cereal, coffee); morning dive; big breakfast (mix of western and asian; this boat actually gets the chef to come out to the deck and cook eggs on-order); late morning dive; buffet lunch (couple of meat dishes/curries, vegetables,
rice/noodles, tons of superb fruit); afternoon dive; tea (cup-cakes, coffee); sunset/night dive; dinner (again, buffet style with soup, meat dishes that are usually fish, chicken and occasionally beef, veggies etc.). The chef is good; we had one diver who had gluten allergies -- the chef made rice noodles sepcially for her on each meal. We had great fruit, including fantastic mangos, cantaloup, watermelon, bananas, papaya, comquat, pineapple, apple, pear, snake-fruit at all meals. Most memorable food were, grilled and curried barramundi dishes.
Diving:
We were divided into three groups of 5 or 6 divers, each group had a fixed dive guide (Unka, Anto and Cedric) who are really very good -- they know every rock on perhpas every one of the 100 or so sites in the area, and could spot critters in the few mm size range with regularity. Visibility ranged from 10m to 30m; it was, I think, a bit better in the Misool area than in North Raja Ampat. We never had really strong currents, maybe max 1 knot in some places, when we were out looking for big fish. Temperatures were typically 28-29C, some people dived without wetsuits (even I went in swimming trunks once). The diving plan for the trip was:
15 Jan (Sorong): Check-out dive
16 Jan (Daram and Misool): Andiamo, Living colors, Candy store, (n) Orchard road
17 Jan (Misool and Boo): Magic mountain, Boo windows, Yilliet, (n) Yilliet
18 Jan (Fiabacet, Misool Island): Nudi rock, The egg, Tank rock
19 Jan (Balbulol, Forondi): No contest, Forondi caves, Wagmab wall; overnight sail to Raja Ampat North
20 Jan (Yangeffo): Way pretty shallow, Citrus ridge, Mangrove ridge, (n) Yangeffo
21 Jan (Mansuar Island): Manta spa, Manta spa, Blue magic, (n) Saonek
22 Jan (Dampier strait): Sardines, Cape Kri, Friwinbonda, (n) 5 Rocks
23 Jan (Dampier strait): [morning trek to watch Birds of paradise mating]; Mioskon, Mike's point; [sail to Sorong]
A great book for a general description and superb images of this area is Jones & Shimlock's Diving Indonesia's Birds Head Seascape; I wish they release it as an eBook.
About the photos
Once more I succumbed to gear lust, and splurged out for a Sony Nex7; this was my first time out with the camera, and as expected, I struggled quite a bit to learn how to use the camera. I'm hoping that image quality will improve over the next few trips, as I learn more about the camera, and perhaps after adding a macro lens. This trip I use the kit lens, which is a 18-55mm lens; I also jerry-rigged an adapter to use my Inon 165 macro wet-lens, but in the end, it's a bit of a hassle to use and I didn't really get too many good photos using the combo. The camera is housed in a Nauticam Na-Nex7 housing, which is very nice; lighting was by a single Sea&Sea YS-01 strobe driven as an optical slave; I switched from my trusty Inon Z220s because the YS-01 has a focus light, which I also used as a night torch couple of times. Kitty's images are from her Canon G12 in Canon housing, and she's switched from a strobe to the Light&Motion sola 800 video light. The crappy topside photos are from my panasonic TS4. Images are processed using PS elements, and cropped to max width of 1200px, or max height of 900px; click on the thumb, and the larger image will come up in a new window.
