DIVE LOG AUSTRALASIA ISSUE 413 AUGUST 25

and super macro that keeps me busy on dives. As an avid macro photographer, it comes naturally for me to want to explore and discover the smallest well-hidden gems on any site. Something I really wanted to do on this trip was to try out my new camera set up, as I had only just switched from my trusted Olympus TG4 to a Sony full frame camera earlier in 2024. With this in mind, a couple of the other macro enthusiasts at the resort and I went from little Lissenung Island to the even smaller Ral Island, only about 15 minutes away by boat. It was the first dive of the day and we started off on the sand at a shallow depth of around 18m. With the sandy bottom and the current coming out of the channels on the day, the visibility was okay with around 15m, but it being a muck site, this didn’t matter much, really. Once we hit the bottom, we started looking for critters. At first, we came across a patch of finger long sea grass. ‘Not much here, today’ I thought, checking every single grass stalk. I knew the site from my first visit and was pretty sure I just didn’t look closely enough. That’s when Peni, one of the local dive guides, called me over. He’d found a pygmy pipehorse, my first subject of the day. By the time I was finished taking pictures of the little relative of the sea horse, he had already found a couple of little porcelain crabs in a sea pen. We kept going and going, there were so many things to see. I was nowhere nearly done when suddenly my computer told me I was running low on time. Had we really been down here for that long already? Apparently so, so we followed the slope up towards the island, still far from the fringing reef. On our way we found a juvenile cockatoo waspfish and a single juvenile razor fish. Spectacular! Before finishing the dive, we scoured the last patch of halimeda in search for a halimeda ghost pipefish. We didn’t end up finding one, but the little green halimeda shrimps surely made up for it!

Tiny Shrimp

The next day, we went to a site which is very well-known in the area for its large amount of fishes but it actually offers much more than that. Big stuff for wide angle friends when looking up and small stuff for macro geeks when looking down. The site is called Albatross Passage. I’ve heard many great things about it over the time and have, of course, experienced it many times myself. Here, the current coming from the deep waters of the Bismarck Seas brings in lots of fish, virtually a fish soup. As visibility can reach up

Skeleton shrimp

Black Tip Reef Shark

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Dive Log Australasia #413 August‘25

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