Group Adventures

CRITTER HUNTING IN THE LEMBEH STRAIT

Face to face with the weirdest creatures

John Boyle has spent thousands of hours diving and filming in the Lembeh Strait. John’s ‘The Critters Trilogy’ films have won multiple international awards – including an unprecedented double Palme d'Or at the prestigious Antibes Underwater Film Festival. Come with John and he will introduce you to the weird and wonderful creatures you have always wanted to meet!

‘The Critters Trilogy’, and also John’s ‘Undersea Homes’ films, which were mainly filmed in the Lembeh Strait, have sold to television stations worldwide. These films are available on DVD from John (see website www.sharkbayfilms.com), so if you want to get a taste of what is on offer, get hold of copies!

Now John plans to return to the Lembeh Strait, not to make a film, but just for the fun of it as he leads a select group of Divequesters who want to see lots of fabulous creatures, maybe shoot a lot of images and really enjoy the underwater world with a leader who knows these amazing dive sites inside out. Few people have spent as long diving in the Lembeh Strait or know its dive sites and creatures so well as John. Mimic Octopus, Hairy Frogfish, Bargibanti’s Pygmy Seahorse, Mandarinfish – John knows where they live and will show you too. John’s knowledge of these creatures and these waters means that not only can he introduce you to these amazing animals but he can tell you about their strange behaviour too. Armed with a new High Definition video camera he aims to recapture some of the creatures and their behaviour in that new format.

Indonesia lies at the epicentre of marine biodiversity and, for reasons still not understood by science, the very focus of that evolution seems to be in the Lembeh Strait. Diving here is easy, generally involving fairly shallow dives between 10 and 20 metres, and usually current free, so the trip is suitable for all levels of diver, whatever their experience.

We will be staying at Kungkungan Bay Resort , a very comfortable resort which is set right at the waterside. The guest book here is like a Who's Who of the underwater photographic and scientific world. The resort is one of the most diver friendly places you could wish to find. Eat what you want when you want, enjoy the shared enthusiasm of staff and guests for the bizarre creatures of the strait, and chill out on the balcony of your traditional wooden cottage as you watch the local boats passing by. Please see the Kungkungan Bay Resort entry earlier in the brochure for more details of the diving and accommodation at Kungkungan Bay Resort.

There is a fascinating house reef literally outside your room; all other diving takes place from the resort's fast boats – no dive site is more than 15 minutes away.

The trip will appeal to everyone - muck diving enthusiasts, fish watchers, video makers and photographers, as with the help of Kungkungan Bay Resort's excellent dive guides we hunt out even the most elusive and secretive creatures of the sea floor and of its fringing reefs. There are dozens of dive sites, each with their own special and bizarre residents, and the dive guides seem to know each intimately and are able to spot even the tiniest and best-disguised critters. To give you a flavour of the Lembeh Strait, this is what John wrote about just one dive site, Hairball Two, during his last visit there. It ranks as one of his top three dive sites on the planet!

“Every time I dive this place – and I must have done well over fifty dives on this spot alone – I think of a worm tank I used to have when I was a kid; a glass tank which at the surface was just flat earth, but in cross section showed the worms and their incredible tunnels and tracks. I always wish I could see the substrate of Hairball Two in cross section to watch the incredible array of creatures that live in the semi liquid fine black volcanic sand that makes up the sea floor in the strait.”

At first sight Hairball Two is the most disappointing place you have ever dived – a flat expanse of nothing just off a scrappy Indonesian fishing village, the sea floor for much of the year being covered with a thin layer of green algae which gives the site its name; in fact Hairball is the adjoining dive site which is why this one was named Hairball Two. Rubbish from the village is all you first notice – old bottles, cans, the occasional tyre. And then, as you look closer, just like one of those puzzles that you have to stare at for ages before you see what the picture is, eventually things start to come into focus. That clump of algae has legs and is moving, that dead leaf swaying with the current is not a leaf but a fish, that lump of debris has just started to walk and is in fact a decorator crab, that unmoving small bump on the sea floor that you have already swum over several times is in fact a perfectly disguised frogfish. And that spiky sea urchin on the sea bed that seems to have just got up and walked away is in fact on the back of a carrier crab giving it protection and disguising it from predators!

You will see virtually nothing swimming in the water column here, and the visibility will never exceed more than a few metres at best. All the action is on the sea floor, where the strangest and most bizarre tiny sea creatures exist in an unceasing struggle to survive. It seems that just about everything is trying to eat everything else or mate with its own species, making this a perfect spot to observe behaviour often never seen before. John has filmed frogfish feeding, female jawfish laying eggs in the male's mouth, pygmy sea horses head butting each other in an unexplained ritual that could be courtship or could be a territorial dispute.

Some of these creatures spend their whole life on the sea bed itself. But many others bury themselves in the soft substrate, only emerging to feed – snake eels’ snouts poke vertically from the sea floor, other eels emerge and sink just as quickly back into the near fluid sand, hunters like star gazers lurk just below the surface. It is difficult to describe the site without slipping into simply listing all the creatures you can spot there – which in turn sounds like any photographer’s wish list.

Then there are the totally unexpected encounters such as the tumbling wall of hundreds of large catfish that rolled towards me on one dive, scouring the strait for food.

And then there is Hairball Two by night. Usually I try to avoid night dives - at night in most places it is just like day diving – the same creatures but far less of them, and it is dark, and by then you would much rather be sipping a cold beer than getting into a wetsuit and back into the black night of the ocean. But Lembeh is my exception to this rule. By night the day shift of the sea floor seems to have disappeared and a whole new crew comes out to hunt in the night time sea. Many different species of octopus roam the sea bed, all types of eels slither in search of prey, bizarre crabs and lobsters emerge from their daytime hiding buried in the sand to scurry across the undersea plain. Shells crawl across the sand leaving trails behind them, and a variety of nocturnal red-coloured fish with huge eyes which absorb even the tiniest glow of luminescence crawl around on leg-like fins having long since lost the need to swim. Strange nocturnal fish stalk, many with huge eyes enabling them to use even the faintest glimmer of undersea moonlight to hunt. Many are red in colour as red is the first colour of the spectrum to disappear so their red colouration is like a night time cloak of invisibility. And with all this activity there is always intriguing behaviour; a frogfish gorging itself on small fish attracted to the light of the video camera, an octopus dashing from its lair to capture a passing shrimp, cuttlefish cruising across the sand their long tongues darting out to snare their victims.

You can see just about anything at night, including the strangest small jellyfish shining like stars in the black undersea night, lumbering spanner crabs and delicate decorator crabs. None of these are creatures that would ever emerge by day, but ones which only appear with the coming of darkness and disappear just as suddenly with the first light of dawn. Come with me and I will open up an whole new world of night diving for you – definitely worth missing the sunset beer for!