405_April_24

Juvenile broadclub cuttlefish are everywhere at Ambon

garden rooms. Facilities include a large restaurant and bar, a camera setup room and a well laid-out dive centre with plenty of washing and drying areas. They operate four dive boats and offer four daily dives to the best muck sites in the area. Arriving at the resort at noon gave us time to settle into our room, sort out the camera and dive gear before the afternoon dive at 3pm, and also enjoy the very filling three-course lunch without having to rush. A package deal with Spice Island Divers includes all meals, and these are a great mix of Asian and western dishes. In the afternoon we strolled down to the dive centre, met our local guide Haris and boarded our dive boat. Spice Island Divers have around 50 muck diving sites they visit in Amboyna Bay, and occasionally venture outside the bay to explore reef sites. With our stay only being for five nights we were happy to concentrate on the muck sites that have made this area famous. Our first muck site was only minutes from the resort, the wonderful Laha 2. This site is typical of the area, with a sandy/rubble slope dotted with patches of seaweed and coral. Going no deeper than 24m, in the 12m visibility we fanned out to look for critters. We quickly spotted snowflake, white-eyed and fimbriated morays, lots of compressed and blackspot tobies, lionfish, porcupinefish, small cuttlefish, mantis shrimps, flasher wrasse, razorfish and stonefish. Haris showed us the resident pair of harlequin shrimps munching on a blue seastar and quite a few Coleman shrimps and zebra crabs on their fire urchin homes. We also found jawfish, nudibranchs, fingered dragonets, demon stingers and several sawblade shrimps clinging to algae.

Harlequin shrimp feeding on a sea star.

It was a great first dive, however, we were saddened by the amount of rubbish, it was everywhere. There were plastic bags and other rubbish on the bottom, in mid water and on the surface. This rubbish was evident on every dive. The Indonesian Government really needs to get its act together and clean up the environment and ban single use plastic bags, as other countries like the

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DIVE LOG Australasia #405 - April ‘24

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