419 Dive Log Australasia AUGUST 2026

It takes a great deal of patience to get a

Octopus come out to hunt in the darkness

Male Black Spot Angelfish

edged a little too close before curiosity inevitably drew them back outside. Coral hermit crabs decorated every available crack. Every few inches another photograph presented itself. Macro photography has a way of changing your perception of time. You stop looking at the reef as a whole and begin exploring it one square inch at a time. An hour disappears. Then another. Eventually I glanced at my dive computer. Even forty feet has limits. Reluctantly I left the little reef behind and worked my way slowly up the sandy slope toward the boat, already thinking about what I had missed. The best dive sites often aren’t the biggest. Sometimes they’re the size of two Volkswagen Beetles stacked one on top of the other. Life Above the Surface Part of Matava’s appeal has very little to do with diving. The resort attracts an interesting collection of people. Perhaps that’s inevitable when there are only ten bures and everyone shares the same dining table each evening. One young couple seemed determined to make the most of the romance of being far from the rest of the world. We saw them occasionally, but never for very

long before they disappeared once again up the hill toward their private bure. Another group had gathered from several different countries for a family reunion. Their common language wasn’t geography. It was diving. The conversations around the dinner table flowed effortlessly between grandchildren, travel plans, camera equipment, favorite dive destinations, and the fish we’d seen that day. An Australian couple traded stories with a German couple while another pair from the United States compared photographs on the backs of their phones. By the second evening introductions were unnecessary. By the fourth, it felt less like a resort and

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Dive Log Australasia #419 August’26