Sunday, October 30, 2011

Diving in Secret Bay






Secret Bay was discovered a number of years ago by a well-known photographer and he was so captured by its amazing diversity that he kept it "secret" for a long time, but word is out and it hosts small numbers of divers daily. Today it was ONLY Anton & I....amazing! It's near the ferry port of Gilimanuk, which is the crossing point between Bali & Java and it has good water flow so it's a bit cooler water (like 77 degrees today!).

It's an easy shore entry and they have a nice shore support facility right there with bathrooms, showers, camera and gear rinse tanks and benches in the shade so it's a simple dive. It's also shallow...our maximum depth for both dives was only 25' so we had lots of bottom time....the only problem, of course, is that I got cold so we limited both dives to 60 minutes and I came back with chattering teeth & lots of air left in my tanks!

It's a dark sandy bottom with bright green algae covering a lot of the sand...lots of places for critters to hide! The algae is large-leafed like Romaine lettuce and quite attractive as a photographic background I found! It's also good perches for nudibranchs and other small critters.

They also have put out concrete "structures" with holes in them which are covered in sponges and offer safe haven for schools of striped catfish, shrimp, cardinal fish and lots of other creatures.

We saw three different species of pipefish including a Halameda ghostpipefish in only 5' of water on our way back to shore after the last dive....it's a beautiful green and did some lovely posing for our cameras! All the nudibranchs we saw today were new species for me and the other "usual suspects" like dragonets, lionfish, anemonefish, fang blennies inside of bottles...you name it, we saw it...except for any frogfish which are usually present here...oh well, maybe next time! Enjoy the images, I'm back to land touring tomorrow and won't be diving again until we get to Scuba Seraya near Ahmed on the 5th of Nov.

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