Today is Thursday. Nothing unusual about that, right? Just a normal day. But for the MantaWatch Interns, today was an awesome, special and amazing day! Today we saw manta rays for the first time in our lives!

A selfie on Bidadari Island

But let’s start at the beginning. This morning we set sail on the MV Tatawa with the crew from Dive Komodo. This will be our home for the next four days, as we sail around West Manggarai and Komodo looking for manta rays.

MV Tatawa, our home for the coming days

Onboard we have a chance to study for our PADI Advanced Open Water course, and of course to learn more about how to survey and identify manta rays. Our PADI instructor is Wai, and on the way to our first dive site she gave us an introduction to the PADI course.

Wai, our PADI Instructor

Our first dive was at Sebayur Kecil. This was our Peak Performance Buoyancy dive, and we practiced many buoyancy skills to help us minimize our air consumption and approach mantas responsibly. We also explored the coral reef ecosystem, and my dive buddy Niomi and I saw moray eels, giant clams, lobsters, blue spotted stingrays and lots of reef fish. There was so much diversity.

Practicing our buoyancy skills

Then we went to Karang Makassar for a drift dive. The current was very strong. Very, very strong! We had to kick hard whenever we wanted to go against the current, making us consume more air in the tank. But we found manta rays! Ten reef mantas (Manta alfredi) swam right above us. They were like giant birds, moving slowly and elegantly while we were kicking furiously in the current. We saw two colormorphs today: chevron and melanistic mantas.

Manta rays are the biggest ray species in the world. They are vulnerable to extinction according to the IUCN Red List. I feel so luck to have seen them. After the dive all the MantaWatch Interns were talking so loud, we were flying without out wings, just like a manta!

Manta ray at Karang Makassar

Mantas flew right above our head