Diving in the Celebes Sea
Crazy storm last night here – came around midnight – lightening, thunder, heavy winds, rain, thought it was a friggin’ hurricane!
Ran around closing all the shutters and then hoped my hut wouldn’t collapse into the sea. What a welcome to my first night in Kapalai.
It was a beautiful morning though, the calm after the storm. It was sunny and clear, so clear that you could see Sipidan and even the mainland. Good start to a great day.
Did 4 dives today – all nearly sixty minutes and one was actually 70 minutes so basically I was underwater for 4 hours of the day. All really, really good. So much stuff to see here! The vis is not so great, maybe 12 meters max, but the water is warm (unlike Byron Bay) and I’m seeing SO much stuff that I’ve never seen before – frogfish, crocodile fish, manta shrimp, mating mandarin fish (again) and so many different kinds of shrimp and nudibrancs. And I’ve seen lots of my favorites – mostly octopus and cuttlefish and today I saw a hawksbill turtle as well.
In between dives I head back to my hut and sit on the deck while enjoying the view of the sea all around me. I could definitely think of worse things to do with my time!
The staff here are great, very friendly and really knowledgeable about the fish, and the other divers are nice as well. At the moment there are only 8 people here – one American couple from Florida, one British couple, 2 Japanese guys, one German guy, and me. The Americans and Brits are big-time underwater photography buffs so they are usually spending the entire dive fighting to take a photo of one tiny little thing. Fair enough if that’s what you’re into. At least they’re all excellent divers – I don’t have to worry about anyone kicking me in the head or knocking into me AT ALL. And they all know tons about the fish so I can learn a lot from them.
Yeah it was a full day. Diving at 8:30am, 11:30am, 3:00pm, and 5:30pm. I’m tired now but definitely looking forward to doing it again tomorrow.
The huts at Kapalai (mine is the one on the left)
My home away from home
Balcony breaks in between dives
Add comment September 15th, 2002