Today are still onboard Tatawa, as our manta safari continues. This morning we completed a deep dive at a site called The Arch, near to Padar Besar. This dive was part of our PADI Advanced Open Water course. Then we dived at Karang Makasar to look for mantas. We only found two, and both were reef mantas (Manta alfredi), though one was a melanistic colormorph that was black in color.
A reef manta (Manta alfredi) at Karang Makasar
After lunch we went looking for mantas again at Karang Makasar. But after one hour of searching we were unlucky, and did not find anything.
Later in the afternoon we dived at The Cauldron, and saw a lot of beautiful things including fusiliers, trevally, blacktip reef sharks, whitetip reef sharks, pygmy seahorse, and Napoleon wrasse. Towards the end of the dive, just as the sun was setting, we found two beautiful Manta alfredi that swam around us for 15 minutes. It was just like they were asking us to take their photos!
A lazy whitetip reef shark (Triaenodon obesus)
The Cauldron is a special site. It has a very strong current, so we had to do a drift dive on this site. Sometime mantas visit to feed in the current. We finished this day with a big smile, because the mantas were here, swimming around us again and again.
