Mark B Hatter twice hits the centre spot with a special itinerary straddling two of Indonesia’s prime dive sites – Raja Ampat and the Lembeh Strait – onboard the Raja Ampat Agressor
Words and Photographs by Mark B Hatter
The late-afternoon light is still bright when we roll from the dinghy into the warm waves south of Misool Island, Indonesia. Three underwater seamounts thrusting up into a blue sea, straddling the undefined boundary between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, are our diving coordinates.
‘I like this site, it’s one of my favourites in Raja,’ Pep, our cruise director, tells us during the dive briefing. ‘There are some anchovies on the pinnacles, and we may see some mobulas, jacks and other predatory fish as well.’
As we descend, I’m aware of bullwhip-like cracks punctuating the white noise of my exhaust bubbles somewhere below me. When large fish or large schools of smaller fish accelerate from zero to full speed in an instant, the equivalent of an underwater sonic boom occurs, leaving an audible sign that either an attack or an escape has taken place. Both predatory raids and desperate escapes are happening at a frenzied pitch.
My buddy, Kevin, is roughly six metres to my right. I lose him on our descent, as he is swallowed by an ephemeral shadow stretching across my entire field of vision. The afternoon sun is reduced to nearly twilight by the shapeshifting shadow as I reach the crown of the seamount at ten metres.
Scores of reef predators are having their way with hapless anchovies, the source of the shadow, numbering in the millions. Those which fail to negotiate the requisite lastminute escape manoeuvre leave themselves fodder for the hunters corralling them on the periphery.
It’s mesmerising. The ever-shifting anchovies seem to behave more like a single, amorphous being. For the next forty-five minutes, Kevin and I move maybe three metres. And, even then, it’s to check a new foreground to frame the main event of shifting anchovies over a twilight reef-top as it constantly reshapes before us, like an underwater aurora borealis.
Although I can’t see him, the signature of his strobes, popping at regular intervals, reassures me that I’m not alone. We are deep into our 12-day itinerary aboard the Raja Ampat Aggressor, which departed from Manado, Indonesia more than a week earlier after two days of epic muck diving at Lembeh Strait.
With each site we visit, from the black sands of Lembeh, with its unrivalled micro biodiversity, to the equally biodiverse panoramic reefs off Raja Ampat, every dive scales successively in grandeur. Yet, according to Pep, this dive, as well as those that preceded it, are, just another average day, on perhaps the world’s best diving itinerary, presenting the greatest in marine biodiversity for animals large and small.
If one were to design the perfect destination dive trip for experiencing the best of the best in marine life, what would it include? As a photographer, the analogy of building a perfect three-legged chair is useful to describe the exercise. A three-legged chair is inherently stable, by definition, but to create perfection, each leg must have equality in craftsmanship, length and finish.
In my opinion, the first leg of my metaphorical chair’s design is represented by the world’s best in muck diving. ‘World’s best’ is defined as presenting the greatest opportunities for finding the rarest and most unique animals of the tiny, micro world.
The second leg is shaped towards perfection via an abundance of reefs with panoramic views showcasing the greatest diversity in hard and soft corals. Plunging walls and expansive reef tops, all exploding in rainbow colours, are a design ‘must’.
Lastly, leg three must include dive sites exhibiting lots of schooling fish. Bonus design points toward the finished product are awarded when sites can provide a real possibility of seeing mantas and whale sharks.
Within the tropical Indo-Pacific, many countries can compete in the perfect chair contest, with proven itineraries showcasing all three exquisitely crafted legs. Indeed, all of these competitors fall within the greater bullseye of the Indo-Pacific’s Coral Triangle.
Certainly, a diver/photographer can ‘find it all’ at many such places in the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, or Palau. But for my model, we’re talking about the highest probability of witnessing the rarest and most diverse marine fauna with regard to speciation. The ultimate winner in this very close competition is the bullseye within the bullseye – the inner bullseye with the dartboard’s highest score.
One nation trumps all others with a pair locations meeting the criteria. That nation is Indonesia and its two top destinations must be Lembeh Strait and Raja Ampat. However, Lembeh Strait and Raja Ampat are geographically separated by more than 700 kilometres (400 miles), which would normally require two separate destination itineraries bridged with a commercial flight to experience them both during the same trip.
Arguably, this geographic separation might be grounds for disqualification, save one expeditionary option offered by the Raja Ampat Aggressor II with its seasonal itinerary sailing from the port of Manado, entry point to diving Lembeh Strait to Sorong, entry point to diving Raja Ampat (or this same route in reverse, when the boat returns up north).
On our trip we launched from Manado and spent two days diving Lembeh, where the rarest micro species are common. Indeed, within two days I was able to capture images of several blue-ring octopus and a flamboyant cuttlefish, species which had forever eluded me until Lembeh. Kevin was equally fortunate, scoring Coleman’s shrimp on a fire urchin.
At the end of two days of diving, Kevin and I had racked up images of endemic Banggai cardinalfish, several species of ghost pipefish, pygmy seahorses in a variety of colours, and countless nudibranchs, ranging in size from nearly invisible to several centimetres in length. A couple of days of diving Lembeh Strait seemed just right.
With these and other muck critters indelibly recorded on our image memory cards, our itch for macro photography was sated, paving the way for wide-angle shooting for the balance of the trip. Sailing southeast, we headed for Raja Ampat, stopping only briefly for a few dives along the way. It was Pep’s desire to get us to Raja as quickly as possible so that the boat could give us the richest experience in diving the other bullseye.
Raja Ampat, surprisingly, varies considerably from north to south. While Lembeh Strait is small and can be completely experienced in a couple of days, Raja Ampat is an expansive region which can take weeks for one to explore it all.
The quality of the diving, with its sheer abundance and diversity of marine species within the surrounding waters, is nothing less than ‘royal.’ The underwater topography varies substantially from north to south within the regency.
The name of Raja Ampat (Raja means king, and ampat means four) comes from local mythology that tells of a woman who finds seven eggs. Four of the seven hatch to become kings who occupy four of the regency’s largest islands; Waigeo, Batanta, Salawati and Misool (oddly, lore has the other three eggs becoming a ghost, a woman, and a stone).
The two islands of Waigeo and Salawati, locally referred to as Central Raja, are characterised by warmer, shallower water, dominated by stony corals found mostly on fringe reefs along shorelines and islands, with a few notable reefs on shallow plateaus in open water between the largest islands. In fact, more than 600 species of hard corals, equalling about 75 per cent of known species globally, and more than 1,700 species of reef fish, can be found in Raja Ampat.
Interestingly, the stony corals have adapted to thrive in water temperatures averaging just under 30ºC (86ºF) around the central islands. Misool, at the southern end of Raja, has less surrounding landmass and is characterised by slightly cooler, deeper water. Averaging 28ºC (82ºF), the best dive sites are underwater pinnacles and sea mounts with slopes or walls where reef crowns – smaller in area than those found in the central islands – are dominated by soft corals.
While relatively drab leather corals dominate the tops of the reefs, brilliantly coloured gorgonia, sea fans and dendros (Dendrophyllia sp.) dominate the walls and slopes. Regardless of location within the regency, the convergence of two great oceans, heaving against one another on a grand scale, creates strong currents washing between the islands and over offshore pinnacles with regularity.
Pinched between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the nutrient-rich currents enable the proliferation of astounding numbers of fish, and contribute to the extreme biodiversity by importing larval stages of marine life from the two different oceans. Accordingly, it is no surprise that Raja Ampat also presents the densest populations of fish in both species and numbers that I’ve witnessed.
From anchovies to fusiliers, from snappers to sweetlips, from chromis to anthias, every dive site we visited was teaming with schooling fish streaming up, down and across the reefs. For an underwater photographer, the opportunity to capture great images does not get any better!
Fortunately for the planet, notwithstanding the pressures of global impacts on the environment, the Indonesian government in collaboration with Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Worldwide Fund For Nature (WWF) began establishing a network of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) under the jurisdiction of central and provincial governments in 2004.
The latest MPA designation occurred in 2019 and, collectively, the MPAs now account for more than 23 million hectares of protection, including 1,411 small islands, cays, and shoals that surround the four main islands of Waigeo, Batanta, Salawati and Misool.
Prior to 2004, local villages routinely used dynamite to harvest fish for food, to devastating effect on the targeted reefs. However, in parallel with the establishment of the first MPAs, the Indonesian government invested in many of the same local villages where dynamiting had become a normal practice of subsistence, hiring and training villagers as park rangers to steward the regency’s treasured marine resources going forward.
Funding for the rangers comes, in part, from the park fee that divers pay as part of their cost to dive Raja Ampat. To be sure, dynamiting still occurs, but it is far less widespread than prior to the establishment of the MPAs and deployment of park rangers.
We finish our adventure in the warm, calm waters off Central Raja. As with the diving in Misool, we anticipate escalating grandeur and are not disappointed. At multiple dive sites we are treated to acre upon acre of hard-coral stands.
At one offshore location, we enter the water at the face of a shallow plateau and ride the current seaward for nearly an hour over an endless, uninterrupted metropolis of corals flanked by ever-present fusiliers streaming around us.
The current is strong and we are unable to completely stop to shoot images. Yet there is no point in stopping, the reef-top is uniformly continuous, changing only with different shapes and colours of corals representing impossible stands of different species. We go with the flow, shooting on the fly.
As quickly as I flare my fins to brake my drift to frame Kevin in a shot, he disappears downstream from the pull of the current. No matter. In a couple of kicks, I retrieve him at the edge of the visibility, where he has braked to wait for me to reappear; it’s what photography buddies do.
After lunch, we finish the day diving at pair of piers along a coral-choked channel between two islands. The piers are havens for schooling snapper, sweetlips and sergeant majors. We stop to shoot as the afternoon wears on, but the current here eventually pulls us from the structures and we sail along, past the gallery of hard corals replete with streams of fusiliers in the waning light.
We end yet another series of mind-blowing dives in Central Raja but our dive guides seem nonchalant despite our excitement. After all, it’s just another average day of hitting the bullseye.
To find out out more about Raja Ampat Aggressor itineraries, go to www.aggressor.com
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