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Log Date: Saturday, December 3rd, 2005
Entry By: Niall Lawlor
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Dec. 3-10, 2005 The age of Aggressor moves onwards and upwards. Our first week in North Sulawesi was a feast of underwater delights and treats. After a 2,000 mile crossing from Truk to Sulawesi, with a 4 week dry dock to boot, we were ready and eager to have guests back aboard the vessel and get our Indonesian adventure truly underway.
Day one: We left our anchorage close by the Kungkungan Bay Resort and made a short run up the Lembeh Strait and moored up in Teluk Kambahu. From here we were only a few minutes run to a least a dozen sites. Teluk Kambahu is home to the famous muck diving sites were all kinds of weird and wonderful little creatures like to live...we saw cuttlefish, lionfish, stonefish, frogfish, leafish, ornate ghostpipefish, percula clownfish (Nemo), seahorses, even a couple of hairy frogfish and wunderpus octopus...all this if you can believe it or not was on the very first dive we did !!
Day two we crossed the Lembeh Strait to the tip of Lembeh Island to explore some coral formations and mini walls.
"California Dreaming" was our first stop and guests came up from a explosion of colour and life. Softcorals and lots of tropical fish was the order of the dive and a very clear contrast from the muck diving of the day before.
Next dive up was Angels window for more soft corals, seafans, a very cool pygmy seahorse and a big cuttlefish swimming around and posing for photos.
Day three we got going early and made the 3-hour run north to the Island of Bangka. This area is too far for most of the day boat operations and so does not get many divers.
The dive sites of Sahaong Island offered us all kinds of colour and all kinds of life. Hundreds of schooling fish and dozens of soft corals, sea fans and sponges had our experienced group coming back very happy. In the afternoon we headed to the northeast tip of Bangka Island for a dive at Batu Gosok. The topography here was very different. Large underwater pinnacles encrusted with soft corals where the water surged slightly back and forth, best find here was a large Dugong that cruised by.
Day four we kept the Bangka area all to ourselves, the only company we had was local fishermen headed off out to sea on small outrigger boats. Schooling fish and soft corals, huge seafans and giant sponges was again the order of the dives with scorpion fish and lionfish , anemones and nudibranchs dotted all along the reef.
Day five we again got an early start and headed back toward the Island of Lembeh but this time we tried a dive on the open ocean side. Very few divers have been to this area so it was very much an exploratory dive. Although this dive did not prove to be very exciting there are lots more areas for us to explore and we hope to do at least one exploratory dive every week. For the afternoon we headed to Teluk Kambahu for more critter hunting on the black sand and the hunt was very successful...we found two giant orange anglerfish, hairy frog fish, mimic octopus, flatfish, dozens of lionfish, a large school of poisonous catfish to mention but a few.
Day six started at a dive site know as "Nudi falls" were many different nudibranchs can be seen but also a purple seafan plays host to a dozen or so pygmy seahorses.
To end our maiden voyage and in homage to all the years spent in Truk Lagoon, the last dive was on a shipwreck. The wreck is named after the nearby village of Mawali and is covered with soft corals, seafans and whip coral.
And so came to end our first week here in North Sulawesi. We had muck diving, glorious reef diving, wreck diving and a couple of exploratory dives aswell.
We truly hope to see you here aboard the North Sulawesi Aggressor in the newest destination in the Aggressor family.
Until next week, Capt Niall, North Sulawesi Aggressor
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