Pulau Nain and Montehage: Chasing the Big Boys

Live aboard is the best way to dive.  It is efficient to reach divesites, while all we do is eat, sunbathe, nap and

Map of North Sulawesi Islands

dive.  This time, the dive was organized by the Kapal Selam Diving Club (KSDC), using Murex as our dive operator.  We used the boat “Serenade”, which has capacity of 10 divers but there were only six divers: Irene, David, Fiona, Kim, Corey and I.  All of us are experienced divers and we were on the boat for 7 days.

The first place we dove was actually the Bangka Island areas, but I will post Nain and Montehage first because I have started posting about these islands.  The corals here are not that great, but we were here for one thing: looking for the big boys (i.e. pelagics).

Batu Kapal, P. Nain

At Nain, we woke up at 5:30 am to be in the water before 6:00 am.  The aim was to see our luck for the hammerhead sharks.  Even though we failed to see them (we went down about 45m deep), we didn’t find the hammies.  But the landscape was pretty amazing and the corals at the shallower depth were not bad at all.  The first dive at Batu Kapal was quite interesting; I used my wide angle lense to capture the morphology.

While we were doing our deco stop, we enjoyed the shallower section.  Althought the corals were not spectacular, it was encouraging to see some growth of soft corals, even hard corals at the depth around 6-10 meters.  Basrah, the dive master was quite keen to dive at Nain again to find the hammies, so the next day, we went to Batu Kapal site again.  This time, we looked at the tide chart and based on David’s experience, he suggested to get into the water around 6:30ish to 7:00 am.   Still, no luck.  While other divers were still at depth, I started to get distracted by this cloud coming out from a barrel sponge coral: the coral was spawning.  Interesting…I have never seen coral spawning before!  That was quite an experience.  The shallow part of the site was good, I was able to take pictures of dart fishes and also the corals.

Spawning Coral, early in the morning. P. Nain.

We moved to Montehage to look for school of barracudas and this time we were lucky.  We saw the big boys: devil rays, schools of black snappers, schools of jackfish and the barracudas.  The two devil rays were pretty much far from the wall, but I chased them just for the sake of taking a good picture of the fascinating creature.

There were probably hundreds of the barracudas in school, just swimming around and looks like making a formation of some sort.  It was spectacular and they were not swimming at deep: probably about 5 meters depth of water.

School of Barracuda, Montehage

We actually dove twice at Montehage, because Basrah, our guide was curious we didn’t find them in the first dive.  But surely, it was a show for me and others to see these barracudas at the second dive.  We just stayed and watched them swimming around, they even came close to me and I figured that they were not small: possibly as long as my legs!

And here is the picture of the two graceful devil rays, just swimming in the blue ocean.  So, for the big boys, Nain and Montehage is the place to go!  But it all falls into your luck again because you just cannot predict nature.  We were quite lucky.  We must have done something good.  Especially Basrah and Oni, our dive guides.

What needs to be reminded is that the current here can be quite strong, so if any of you are interested, at least you should have like 50 dives with you, I would say!

Spotted Eagle Ray, Montehage.