The dive trip I recently completed on the Seven Seas liveaboard in Komodo, Indonesia was simply wonderful. I went by myself (Donna didn't want to get chased by Komodo Dragons, she knew I'd dreamed of seeing them since I was a kid in Florida fascinated by lizards, snakes, and dinosaurs, and the trip was expensive) with a great group of divers all connected through Tom Campbell, a well known high definition underwater videographer. Also on the trip was one of the world's leading experts on Manta Rays, Andrea Marshall. Andrea wonderful to have on the trip. In two days of sensational Manta ray feeding she was able to identify 63 different individuals using Manta ray belly shots. Each Manta has a unique pattern of spots on its belly. There is a program available, at
http://www.mantamatcher.org/ which allows divers with manta belly pictures to add their manta to the data base and learn if it is a known individual. The boat, the Seven Seas, is beautiful and kept perfectly neat, clean, and shipshape. It is a beautiful two masted Indonesia schooner. The crew were delightful and eager to help. The dive guides were excellent and the food was superb. On days when we weren't moving a great distance the dive days went like this: cold breakfast at 6 to 7 am (cereal, sliced fruit, yogurt, tea, coffee (regular, expresso, capucino), fruit juice. First dive at 7:30am, 2nd breakfast - a hot breakfast, they take your individual order when you get back on board from the dive - bunch of great alternatives, Indonesian fried noodles or rice with eggs, pancake with eggs and bacon, omelet with bacon.. 2nd dive at 11:00 am, full, wonderful lunch, 3 pm afternoon dive, snacks, night dive at 6:30, dinner around 8:30. All wonderful.
The Seven Seas Liveaboard is a beautiful boat with an outstanding crew.
We got our skins on and everything ready to dive before taking easy stairs down to the waiting launches (which had our tanks, bcs, weights) to go out for a dive.
We hiked across a gorgeous island to a beach on the opposite side where our boats came and picked us up. Its hard to see in this picture but it is red (ish) sand caused by organ pipe coral erosion, beautiful. We also had white and black sand beaches.
Upper deck was where we ate our dinners on evenings when the weather was good (which was most evenings and most days).
The diving was great and you could either choose to follow the guide or dive independently (which is what I did about 80% of the time). Dive briefings were very good and though I came up alone with no one and no boat in site several times I was soon picked up, no worries. They kept track of who went out in which group and who skipped dives so they knew how many folks to retrieve.
One of the reasons I like to dive alone is so that I can just focus on what I want to and it allowed me to for instance, park, at some cleaning stations and record fish coming in for a cleaning. Here is a link to a moray, a couple angelfish, and a large coral trout (grouper) getting cleaned by wrasses and shrimp.
https://plus.google.com/photos/110159573286645489662/albums/5973801595636499889?authkey=CKftssnti_umBQ
I'll do a couple more blogs from this great trip with Mantas, Komodo dragons, octopus, macro stuff...
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