Raja Ampat

It’s a long transit day today, as we fly from Sorong to Jakarta to Bangkok and finally to Chiang Mai. It’s exciting to start exploring cities again after more than two almost-continuous months of being out in nature, save for a couple of days in Rio and Buenos Aires.

We spent the last two weeks sailing through the area around Raja Ampat, home to three-quarters of the world’s coral species and a third of all fish species, the epicenter of Earth’s marine biodiversity. This trip marked the midpoint of our sabbatical, and was the last thing we had booked before leaving home in October. We’ll be figuring out much of the next four months as we go.

The thing I’ll remember most about this time is being struck at how full of life the ocean was at every scale, in a way that just doesn’t exist on land: on a single dive, we could look up and see manta rays the size of an SUV; then, in front of us to find hundreds of fish in the distance and uncountably many plankton floating right in front of our eyes; and finally below us to the seahorses, critters, and crevice-dwellers that seem to be everywhere in and among the coral.

The Damai

Our home for the voyage was a liveaboard built in the style of a traditional Indonesian pinisi schooner. We sailed for twelve days from Kaimana, through Misool and central Raja Ampat, to Sorong, among the iconic limestone karst islands of the region.

Check, check, double check

We dove between two and four times each day, starting at 7am, for ten straight days. We weren’t actually sure if we liked diving before this trip, and were a little worried about what we had gotten ourselves into; the longest dive trips we had done in the past were just for a weekend, and back then, we’d often come back on the boat feeling cold and with a mild headache. But the diving this time felt like a totally different experience: the water was 30 degrees Celsius, almost warm; we dove with oxygen-enriched air (Alice is now officially nitrox-certified) that dispelled any headaches; and the scenery and wildlife was on a different level to anything you could find in our usual diving haunt in the Florida Keys.

Macro Alice

There are two styles of underwater photography: wide-angle, focusing on coralscapes, fish, and megafauna like manta rays or whale sharks, and macro, looking for “the small stuff” like nudibranchs, pygmy seahorses, shrimps and tiny crabs. These little critters make themselves incredibly hard to find—pygmy seahorses are the size of a pinky fingernail and look exactly like the sea fans they live on—and our guides spent our dives combing through sand and coral looking for them. Macro-focused dives were the perfect chance for Alice to level up her wildlife spotting skills once again, and by the end of the trip, she had even gotten her own red-light torch and dive-guide stick to look for the weird tiny creatures of the ocean. She didn’t quite manage to find a pygmy seahorse, but did end up being responsible for a small collection of blurry nudibranch photos!

Wide-angle Marshall

It turns out I’m on the other end of the macro vs. wide-angle spectrum from Alice, which in retrospect seems entirely predictable. I couldn’t be bothered to slowly comb through rocks and coral to look for little animals, and instead spent many of my dives taking in the beauty of the expansive soft coral landscapes in front of us. Of all the coral we saw, my favorite were the white sea fans, some of them taller and wider than several people. They reminded me of underwater cherry blossoms.

Four Kings

Before Alice discovered her passion for macro, her favorite part of Raja Ampat was staring out into the blue and marveling at the huge underwater highways of fish that would swim by. I was usually facing the other way, looking at the corals on the reef. But there were plenty of times, like this one at Four Kings—named for the four underwater pinnacles that make up the dive site—where we didn’t have to choose. 

Spirit animal

Whale sharks are the biggest fish in the world and swimming with them might have the been the one thing we were most excited about when we first planned our sabbatical. In Triton Bay, bagans—traditional floating fishing platforms—haul up anchovies and other small fish that also attract whale sharks looking for a snack. We spent four hours in the water with six of them. They were a little goofy, totally majestic, and sometimes a little terrifying. Alice always thought whale sharks reminded her of me, and I guess this picture sums up our relationship nicely.

Bottle-feeding

Like many huge marine animals, whale sharks are filter-feeders. They tend to swim through the water with their mouths wide open, collecting plankton and small fish. But in Triton Bay and a few other places around the world, some of them use a technique called bottle-feeding, where they suspend themselves vertically at the ocean surface and gulp down enormous amounts of air, water, and plankton, which has to be one of the most awe-inspiring sights in the natural world.

Selfie

One more picture with the whale sharks, just because they were so amazing.

Mustering courage

My favorite little fish have to be the anemonefish. They always seem to be trying to muster the courage to venture out from their home, gingerly swimming away into the open water until inevitably, something—usually just another harmless fish swimming by—scares them and they dart back to the safety of the anemone’s tentacles. But I love that they always try again and again to push themselves to face the big, scary ocean. 

Let’s get wet

We had more days of torrential rain and stormy seas than sunshine on the trip. We surfaced from dives a few times to tropical storms and rain that was falling horizontally, and our wooden boat sprang more than few leaks from the ceiling. There were some nights where we tried to sleep even as it felt like we were going almost airborne each time we crashed into a wave. Fortunately, the divers on the boat didn’t mind getting a little wet.

Safety stop

At the end of every dive, divers hover for three minutes fifteen feet below the surface as a precaution for avoiding decompression sickness. During the safety stop, we’d let the current carry us into the blue. These few minutes were a time to empty our minds as we floated weightlessly in the open ocean, practice blowing air-rings with our bubbles, or watch out for a visit from a passing mobula ray or dolphin.

Jellyfish lake

Lenmakana Lake is filled with jellyfish that have been isolated from other life for so long that they’ve lost their stingers. As you swim below the surface, you’re surrounded by them, pulsating stars in some strange other universe. Visitors used to have to climb on exposed rock faces and through dense Indonesian jungle to reach the lake, but about a year ago, the locals finished carving some steps into the stone and installing a couple of wooden ladders to make the hike easier. In spite of that, I managed to slip off the last muddy ladder on the way to the lake, and fell a couple of feet onto the rock below. I walked away with a nasty bruise on my hip, some scars on my hand and shin, and a scrape on my forehead, but it’s unnerving to think about what could’ve happened with a small re-shuffling of injuries and body parts.

The longest dive

Oceanic manta rays, the bigger and rarer cousin to the more common reef manta, travel thousands of miles across the world’s oceans each year, foraging for plankton. We saw one in the Galapagos, just for a couple of seconds, as it transited through our snorkel site. Throughout their travels, they’ll take pit stops at cleaning stations, sea mounts where specialized fish make a living eating the parasites that have attached themselves to bigger creatures. On our last day, we dove at one of these stations, and saw two female oceanic manta rays, with fifteen-feet wingspans each, getting their cleanings. They circled back to the station four or five times, and were curious enough about us that one of them slowly swam right up to one of our fellow divers’ camera, seemingly looking at her straight in the eye. I pushed the limits of my air on that dive, trying to squeeze every last second I could out of the tank, and logged my longest dive ever at 70 minutes.