Trip images and report: Triton Bay, Dec 2018 (click to hide/show report)
Living, Food and Diving:
We learnt about Triton Bay from a dive report on Wetpixel, and immediately decided to go beacuase there are few places that combine a very high chance to dive with whalesharks with tons of macro and muck dives. The place is remote: we flew from HK - Jakarta - Manokwari - Kaimana, with the last two flights on Lion Air affiliates. From Kaimana, it's a 15 min drive to the pier, and a 1.5~2 hour boat ride to the resort. The resort (superbly managed by the partner, Leeza English, when we were there) is quite nice. As of writing, there is no phone signal, and very limited WiFi at the resort -- so we were isolated from the world for the six diving days (well, the wifi sort of worked, but only for short messages). There are six identical wooden, Balinese style bungalows; they are nice, spacious, and look out to a superb bay past a fine white-sand beach. The area and scenery is not unlike that in Misool or Raja Ampat -- tons of small, lush Islands, sandy beaches, and lovely blue waters. The resort has it's own supply of stream water, and it's own power generator (which shuts off from 11pm-6am, so photographers should pack extra batteries that can be charged during the day).

The Food
Food includes a simple cooked breakfast in the morning (typically eggs, bread, coffee and fruit). Lunch and dinner are a mix of local and international dishes: there is no beef or pork, but fish, chicken and venison appear regularly. There are several types of chili sauces (sambal) that I used regularly to spice up the food. In general, given the remote location, food was actually pretty good. There is a limited stock of wine and beer.

Diving:
The major attraction of Triton Bay was its mix of macro and sharks, particularly the whale sharks which come to feed off the nets of the several bagans in the neighboring waters (these are wooden floating structures with large fishing nets hanging underneath in the water, with live fish for sale to foreign markets). In the dive sites near Triton Bay, there are also resident walking sharks (epaulette shark) and wobbegong sharks. But the majority of local diving time was spent in macro- or muck-mode. There are countless different pygmy seahorses, many types of nudibranches, shrimps and other tiny critters. Diving conditions were consistently easy: there were no currents, occasional swells, and the water was a mild 27~29C. Most of our dives were guided by either Rein, or Jack, both were superb at spotting the various macro targets. During our stay, there were only 5~7 divers in total, so most of the time dive groups were two or three for each DM.
16 Dec: Aquarium, Engine, Froggie
17 Dec: Boulders, Kira-Kira, Tangga, Walking shark (night dive)
18 Dec: Little Komodo, Froggie, (house reef) Flasher wrasse
19 Dec: Bagans (whale shark), Batu jatuh, Kira-Kira
20 Dec: Batu dramai, Christmas rock, Macro rock, Kira Kira (night dive)
21 Dec: Little Komodo, Tangga


About the photos

Gear: Sony Nex7 with stock 18-55 lens with Subsea +10 diopter wet macro; Sea & Sea YS-01 strobe in slave. Kitty used a Canon G1x Mark II in Canon housing, and and X-Adventurer 1200 lumen video light. If you'd like the originals of any of these images, email me.