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Two members of Freeflow divers, Suzannah Browning and Nick Moore spent a week diving in the Lembeh strait, North Sulawesi, Indonesia.
The Lembeh strait is probably the most famous muck diving destination in the world. The strait is shallow, and the bottom largely consists of black volcanic sand with occasional areas of sponge, coral and plenty of rubbish. This, together with lots of plankton, seems to make the ideal habitat for a wide variety of weird and wonderful animals that like to sit and pose for photos.
Getting to Lembeh from Singapore is easy, there are direct flights to Manado four times a week on Silk Air.
To avoid ‘visa rage’, the fittest member of the party took the passports, and sprinted from the gate to the visa desk. Well worth the effort, there were still about 30 people in the queue when we left the airport.
We were picked up by the resort owner himself, and the car journey from the airport to Bitung took 1 hour 15 minutes. A boat was waiting for us, and the journey across the strait to the resort on the southern tip of Lembeh Island took 15 minutes.
Owned and run by Linda and Rob Sinke, Divers Lodge Lembeh has only five guest chalets. Each chalet is isolated on a jungle covered hill side, and each has a lovely view from its gin-terrace. There is no aircon, we really didn’t need it, but there are ceiling fans, the hot water is solar powered, and electricity is from a generator.
Meals are in a communal restaurant hut, and are mainly traditional Indonesian, and of very high quality. There are pancakes, nasi goreng, homemade bread and omelette for breakfast, and snacks available at all times.
They don’t mind you bringing your own food/booze, but Bintang is only €2 a bottle, so no need to shrimp and save.
There is a TV and computer available for guests to use to look at photos/video, and to burn CD’s. Mobile phones work everywhere in the resort, although no one would know if you just turned it off.
The resort was well run, and well maintained. Linda and Rob live in the resort and were always available to help. They were even on the ball enough to get us diving with the mandarin fish (house reef) about 90 minutes after we arrived.
All the diving was from boats, and we stayed on the boat between dives. Onboard there were tanks for cameras, a DAN first aid pack, 220V power, fresh water to wash yourself (there’s a reason it’s called muck diving), lunch and even a loo. We opted for ‘no-limits’ diving, which (aside from diving as much as you like) also means you get one boat between two divers. We did up to four dives a day, the only limit being no deco diving allowed. Dives averaged about 70 minutes.
The resort provides one guide between two people, and you really need them. Lots of the stuff is basically invisible to all but the really experienced. We used two different guides during the week, Atu and Andris. Both were excellent, and actually found us everything we asked to see and much more besides.
We did most of our 20 dives in the black sand, and these were certainly the best bits, although we did not have a single bad dive. The highlight (actually I think it was my best dive ever) was a night dive at a site called Jahir. Andris spent well over an hour pointing out more things than we could shake a camera at. We saw several things that we had never even heard of before.
Another highlight was a site called Dante’s slope, this has a large cave that is OK to go into. At the back (~25m in) were hundreds of flashlight fish, and several large lobsters.
We also did some dives on the east coast of Lembeh island. This is not as often dived as the straits. There are coral walls (some bombed) and visibility greater than 30m. The dives were very nice, and made a change from the black sand, but for my money you can’t beat a good bit of muck.
The water temperature was a constant 28ºC, we wore full length suits because in Lembeh if it doesn’t bite, it stings.
Everything! Well everything you might see in the sand. The holy grail of muck diving is the mimic octopus, and the guides found us two, we played around with each for some time, and even got video of one pretending to be a flounder and then something else (lionfish?). Some of the other interesting stuff we saw:
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The list continues, and some of the better photos can be seen here: http://www.albumsnaps.com/?c=folders&fID=10600
The other stars of the show at Lembeh are the frogfish, and we met most of the family.
We also saw lots of macro stuff and, rarest of the rare, two juvenile hairy chunky monkeys.
Excellent resort, even better diving, very reasonably priced. We shall return.
All photos by Suzannah and Nick.
December 2005
