Spectacular seascapes and undersea life in West Papua
Later this week, we will leave Sorong in Indonesian West Papua and head off along the coast through south Raja Ampat, then Fak Fak, and finally arrive in the waters south of Kaimana, an area known as Triton Bay. We’ll be travelling and diving from the Carpe Diem phinisi liveaboard and also spending a few days at Triton Bay Divers in Namatotte.
This is not our first visit to this special place.
We first saw Triton Bay in 2009 in the company of Alberto Reija and his crew on the then, brand-new liveaboard Damai. It was just us. We came to search for promising places to dive and help Alberto prepare for trips he was planning to run on Damai to this area.
Below is an article about our journey that I wrote for an airline magazine and, as the story is not available anywhere on the Internet, there’s nothing for me to link to. So I thought I’d let you read the whole thing here. It’s longer than the pieces I usually post directly in this newsletter, but I hope you enjoy it anyway and I’ll intersperse the text with a few photos to brighten it up. :-) (Apologies for the quality of the critter pictures. I was just taking happy snaps of what we saw. They were never supposed to be published.)
Over the past 15 years, Triton Bay has become better known, but even today it is still rarely visited and there is still much left to discover.
But, in 2009, it was really off the map.
Diving Off the Map in West Papua – Triton Bay - October 2009
Triton Bay is the coastal region east of Kaimana, a small harbour town on the southwest coast of Indonesian West Papua.
It is the next frontier in Indonesian diving and although Kaimana is now served by passenger flights, it is still very remote. From Bali, we needed five internal flights and 15 hours of travelling before we touched down in one of Express Air’s glitzy new turbo-prop Dornier 328s on the tarmac of a small airport cut out of the jungle 20 minutes drive out of town along an unnecessarily wide and largely neglected access road.
We were the only arrivals, having shed travelling companions along the way at previous stops in Ambon, Sorong and Fak-Fak, leaving three local travellers on the plane for its final hop to Nabire to the north.
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At the port, while we are waiting for the tender, we are entertained by a group of naked brown children who have recycled crushed plastic water bottles into tiny sledges that they use to ride down the sloping concrete harbour wall, catapulting themselves into the water at the bottom. It looks like a lot of fun.
We set off, darkness falls quickly and, exhausted by the journey, we turn in early and are lulled into a deep, dreamless sleep by the combination of the throb of the engine and the big, comfortable bed in our big comfortable cabin.
There is a storm in the night that does not disturb us but in the morning we wake to the mystical sight of clouds it has left behind hanging over the islands at tree level creating a series of mist-falls, waterfalls of suspended moisture, tumbling through the jungle towards the sea.
The coastline south of Kaimana is dotted with perfect palm-fringed, snow-white strips of sand lapped by crystal clear, bottle-green waters, each beach more idyllic than the last. Most are deserted and accessible only from the sea as the forest-covered limestone cliffs rise steeply behind. In places where there is a larger patch of beach and the cliff line slopes a little more gently, you see the occasional small village. Often these have been built in locations where offshore limestone outcrops create a natural barrier protecting the village from the sea.
Very few people have dived the reefs and coves of Triton Bay. We are travelling aboard the Damai liveaboard, and have joined the boat to help the owners explore areas around Triton Bay and find new dive sites. They have plans to expand their operations in this region.
The fact that this is still largely unknown territory is emphasised on the third morning when we enter a promising bay we have not visited before and find every other beach occupied by what seem to be pearl farms. A small boat approaches and asks us to report to the head village. We comply. We explain what we are doing but fail completely to convince them that we dive just for fun, that we are just sightseers. In the end, they say they will refer our request to dive in their waters to their elders and we head off to dive somewhere else.
The waters around Irian Jaya hold the world record for species diversity, so it is hardly surprising that every dive is very fishy with marine life in abundance. Things that are rarely found in other places are commonplace here. The waters are a warm 29 degrees C, we rarely go deeper than 20 metres and the average dive lasts 70 to 80 minutes. On every dive, you have the sensation that just about anything can happen and you start to expect the unexpected. One day, the first dive produces an encounter with a leopard shark, the second a couple of solar-powered nudibranchs and three ultra-rare yellow pigmy seahorses, and the third, several wobbegongs and a large school of barracuda.
We do several dives inside a large inlet at the tip of a long peninsula, where a group of tiny tree and bush-covered limestone islands are reminiscent of the Rock Islands of Palau. We split into small groups so we can cover more ground. There are some gorgeous pinnacles, covered in soft coral and glass sweepers, particularly in the shallows where the mid-morning sun shining through the clear water and reflecting off white sand brings the colours to life.
The night diving is spectacular, with every other patch of weed the hiding place for a dwarf scorpion fish, a sea moth, a ghost pipe fish, or a bobtail squid. It’s astonishing how many exotic animals we find and an hour flies by quickly. We spot a titanic moray eel (it wasn’t difficult!), a giant blue map puffer-fish and in one area there are a dozen pleurobranchs scattered like large round autumn leaves on the seabed. There is no moon on the first two nights we are there so our dive lights cause havoc among small fish and other night-swimmers who bombard us in their excitement.
One dive sums up pretty much everything good about diving in this part of southwest Papua. As you drop in you are greeted by countless schooling fish, a monster potato cod the size of a small car, as well as several of its junior relatives, a Napoleon wrasse and a giant super-trevally cruising for prey.
The profusion of soft corals covering the sea-bed distracts you briefly and you find a whole host of the small unusual creatures that Indonesia is famed for such as dragonets, ghost pipe-fish and coral shrimp, but you cannot afford to take your eye off the open ocean as every so often something incredible happens.
On one occasion we look up and see a school of over a hundred batfish cruise by, some of whom detach themselves from the group to tear apart a large pelagic jellyfish that has arrived in the wrong place at the wrong time. The batfish mob the jelly, some of them grabbing tentacles and sucking them in like spaghetti, others attacking the jelly’s fleshy head.
A few minutes later some mobula rays fly by in formation and behind them you spot a circling school of chevron barracuda. You are on the point of heading over to check them out when another member of your team calls and points out a wobbegong sleeping partly concealed beneath an overhang, the frill around its mouth hanging in the sand like an old man’s drool, its long tail curled securely under the rock. Below, a large area of sand at around 18m is home to thousands of garden eels, swaying in the current as if charmed by some oceanic necromancer with a magic flute.
Never has an hour underwater passed so quickly.
On another morning, we drop into what can only be described as a negligently over-stocked aquarium and sit in awe on the sand for the first ten minutes as thousands of fusiliers swim past in a seemingly endless parade while red snapper and black snapper hang in large clouds above us and blue-lined snapper patrol the edge of the surrounding reef. Forests of black coral cover the seabed in places and some of the sea fans are home to whole communities of pygmy seahorses; we count ten on one fan alone.
Even when on one night dive we drop in and, unusually the site does not look particularly promising, forty minutes of fairly mundane, uneventful exploration of a hard coral slope are rewarded right at the end with discoveries of a rare epaulette shark hiding amidst some stag horn coral and an unusual toadfish, endemic to Australian waters, that does not seem to have been identified in Indonesia before, at least according to the extensive fish spotting library on board. Debate over these two finds consumes dinnertime conversation and a dive that seemed as if it would offer very little becomes the most talked about of the week.
Triton Bay promises to be an exciting new destination; it offers world-class diving and visiting divers are likely to have the reefs to themselves. Its remoteness is the guarantee of exclusivity. However, this brings logistical problems for those who travel here and organise trips. Make sure you choose a reliable operator.
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I’ll tell you all about the trip we are about to embark on now, 15 years later, in a future Scuba Conversational. We will visit plenty of new dive sites - and another waterfall that we’ve never been to before.
It promises to be outstanding! :-)
Meanwhile, here are a few more Triton Bay pictures from the most recent trip we made in 2019.
We are not alone in our fascination for this part of the world, as Brandon Coles’ lead-in to his Kingdom of the Fishes article in a recent issue of DAN’s Alert Diver Magazine makes clear.
Coles’ article begins
TRITON BAY, INDONESIA, was one of the last places I visited before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Looking back, part of me wishes I would have been there instead of at home when the world turned upside down and international dive travel became almost impossible.
An extended sabbatical in the middle of bustling hordes of fish and wildly colourful coralscapes would have been therapeutic. Having the ocean to yourself — or more accurately, feeling like you are the only human for miles and the marine life infinitely outnumbers you — drove me to this outpost in the wilds of West Papua in the first place.
With Indonesia finally open for travel again, it is an excellent time to giant stride into these fishy waters flowing far outside the mainstream. How far? I flew more than 7,000 miles (11.265 kilometres) from landlocked Spokane, Washington, to submerge in these current-swept, critter-packed seas. Your mileage may vary, but unless you live in eastern Indonesia, expect a long haul to reach Kaimana, the gateway to the Triton Bay region. Once I was submerged, however, my exhaustion faded immediately.
It’s an excellent, comprehensive piece and if you are not already smitten by the idea of heading to Triton Bay, then this should seal the deal. Read on…
Christmas and New Year on Pindito
We have been in Bali for the last couple of weeks following the north and central Raja Ampat voyage on the Pindito that I mentioned in the last issue of Scuba Conversational.
It was a wonderful trip aboard a legendary boat that has been lovingly cared for and is still in superb shape.
As you can see below.
Our Raja Ampat and Triton Bay Guide on Amazon
And our Guide to the best dives in Indonesia, several of which are in Triton Bay (and Raja Ampat).
Technically Talking
In Bali, I have spent much of the last few days in Martin East’s studio recording the audiobook for Technically Speaking. We had an eleven-day window to complete the whole thing and we have made it with 24 hours to spare. Each hour of audio takes about three hours to prepare with two full re-reads and edits to improve the flow, 90 minutes to read, at least two hours to engineer, and then 90 minutes to review. After that, the final file needs further engineering to make it ready to upload to Audible.
It’s time-consuming, energy-consuming and demands enormous concentration. Unavoidable fatigue means errors creep in, towards the latter stages of the process, you have to be even more than usually alert. On day 8, we managed to leave the record button off for over an hour of narration - imagine our “amusement” when we found out!
Grey Sallang, my usual graphics guy, as always has produced a nice-looking audiobook cover.
The font is slightly different from the paperback/hardback/e-book cover and he has made the image really “pop”.
I’ll let you know as soon as the audiobook is published.
In the meantime, if you want to read it before listening (or instead of listening), then here is the link.
Technical Diving on Amazon.com
The text versions of the book have elements that the audiobook doesn’t have, of course. These include the name list of those who were involved with the development of technical diving, Cathie Cush’s epochal articles for Sports Illustrated, the “Technical Timeline”, aquaCORPS’ Blueprint for Survival 2.0 and the Technical Diving bibliography.
It’s a gas, gas, gas 1
There’s an article adapted from Technically Speaking in the latest issue of X-Ray Magazine, issue 123 which has a fabulous picture of sperm whales on the cover (as well as yet another piece on Triton Bay inside!)
My article subtitled …it’s a gas,gas, gas, is the origin story of nitrox in sport diving and describes in detail how and why we started diving with mixed gas instead of air, and identifies the key people who made it all happen.
It begins…
…an abridged version of an early chapter in my history of the early days of technical diving, Technically Speaking - Talks on Technical Diving Volume 1: Genesis and Exodus. The nitrox saga would end up as the subject of vitriolic debate and bitter division in the sport diving community for half a decade.
This is its origin story.
The tale begins in 1977 at the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), where diving program head Dr J. Morgan Wells came up with the notion that, instead of air, NOAA scientists should start using a diving gas containing less nitrogen and more oxygen. This would enable them to carry out longer dives with no required decompression stops or planned decompression dives with less hang time than air dives with the same profile. It might also mean that they could accomplish in a single nitrox dive a task that would otherwise require two air dives, making their diving safer and more straightforward.
Read more here
This is one of the pictures illustrating the article and it was taken out back of Professional Sports Divers - in the hooch, as we called it - over a quarter of a century ago. Nobody had seen anything like it before in this part of the world. Note the Haskel booster pump, the double filtration, gas tanks in decanting sequence, the gas mixing log and decompression cylinders with regulator covers.
Who can tell me why we used regulator covers?
Cave Explorer Xavier Meniscus
In Technically Speaking, I write about deep underwater cave exploration during the 1980s and 1990s…
The technology of technical diving pushed cave diving into a new era during the 1990s. Rebreather technology allowed groups like the Woodsville Karst Plains Project (WKPP) and the US Deep Cave Diving Team to set astonishing distance and duration records, while depth records tumbled all over the world, thanks to the advent of helium-based mixes, accelerated decompression on high percentages of oxygen and mixed gas decompression tables.
Every few weeks brought news of ever more extraordinary feats.
As far as depth records were concerned, Jochen Hasenmeyer and Sheck Exley traded punches throughout the 1980s, then new names appeared on the scene led by South African Nuno Gomes and Frenchman Pascal Bernabe. By the end of the decade, 14 cave dives on scuba had been recorded beyond 150m (492ft).
That was then.
This is now. Times have moved on and new explorers are doing some quite astonishing things, mostly outside any glare of publicity and with zero interest in becoming celebrities.
One of these is Xavier Meniscus, a notably reticent cave diver who, nevertheless, Michael Menduno managed to pin down for a fascinating interview in InDepth recently.
This is how the piece begins…
Fifty-five year old French cave explorer Xavier Meniscus is one of a handful of elite divers making sub-200 meter cave dives and holds the record for deepest cave dive at 286 mfw/938 ffw, which he conducted at Font Estramar in 2019. Meniscus, who was trained at the Institut National de la Plongée Professionnelle (INPP) in Marseille, is a former army combat diver, and a commercial saturation (SAT) diver with COMEX. He started cave diving in 2000, while still a SAT diver, and has explored many caves around the world such as the Goul de la Tannerie in France, the Pozo Azul in Spain, and Boesmansgat in South Africa. Meniscus is also a cave diving instructor with the Fédération Française d’Etude et des Sport Sous Marin (FFESSM). Meniscus recently published a book on his cave exploration work, Les mysteres de l’eau en pays Gervanne entre l’emergence de Bourne et les Fontaigneux
It continues here
As you will discover, notably, Meniscus takes as his example Olivier Isler, who was one of the superstar cave divers of the Technical Diving era, albeit a similarly unsung superstar.
It’s a gas, gas, gas 2
And while I’m on the subject of deep diving…
This is essential viewing for deep divers concerning the current state of helium supply and demand, and forecasts for the next few years. The good news is that it may not always be as expensive as it is now, but, of course, there is huge uncertainty.
Michael Menduno gives a clear, thorough, simply stated account of what’s happening and why. I loved the off-the-cuff remark on how you find helium:
"You just poke a hole in the ground and gas comes out".
Very interesting and well worth a few minutes of your time.
Watch the 10-minute video here
Last but not Least
Divernet has posted a wonderful article on the latest DivePhotoGuide.com competition, won by this astonishing picture of a small fish taking a ride on a jelly fish with snow-capped Mount Vesuvius in the background!
As Steve Weinman of Divernet writes…
“Best of Show” prize in the 2023 DPG Masters Underwater Imaging Competition has been awarded to Italian photographer Marco Gargiulo for The Passenger, his split-shot (above) of a juvenile imperial blackfish riding a jellyfish beneath the Mount Vesuvius volcano. The Italian's photograph also took the Gold award in the Over-Under category.
The winning images and short films entered in the annual contest have just been announced, with the website DivePhotoGuide, which organises the event, saying that thousands of photographers and film-makers from dozens of countries had competed in what it describes as the “world championship” of international underwater imaging events.
Entries in the seven image categories and video section were judged by a panel of photographers comprising Stephen Frink, Renee Capozzola, Scott ‘Gutsy’ Tuason, Allison Vitsky Sallmon, Matty Smith and Amanda Cotton.
Top three and Highly Commended awards are given in each category, with the winners sharing prizes valued at US $75,000. As in previous competitions, 15% of the entry fee proceeds is earmarked for marine conservation.
I’ll add one more incredible photo. This one is from Baja California where we’ll be going in November 2025 on the Rocio del Mar liveaboard. Can’t guarantee sights like this, but you can always hope. :-)
The Divernet article shows all the winning pictures and it is quite an astonishing selection. Check them all out here
This is obviously a top competition. To find out more about Dive Photo Guide and what they do, check out their website.
Right, that’s it from me for this issue.
Chat with you again next month in Scuba Conversational #58.
Hi Ryan, wonderful memories for me too. Cheers!:-)
Seeing the mixing station brings back a lot of good memories of afternoons (and evenings, and a few nights..) spent sitting out back of PSD with 'The Pack'...
Simon, your patience with us is still greatly appreciated! Lol....