Diving in General

In spite of alluring dive site names we saw no turtles at Turtle Parade, no leopard (zebra) sharks at Leo's Point and no barracudas at Barracuda Point. But according to the guides we were just unlucky. We did find a striking absence of fish of more than 10 cm or so.

Most schools were small bass at the reef tops, and along the walls we now again bumped into squirrelfish, angelfish and parrotfish. On the other hand, the reefs seemed absolutely crowded with scorpionfish. Some were camouflaged beyond recognition, others flashed bright and radiant colours and still others had adapted the most delicate pastel shades. Really beautiful and spectacular.

Nudibranchs were the order of every dive and we often found “new” species, i.e. slugs we hadn't seen before. It seemed that the dominant species was Chromodoris elizabethina but we managed to run into C. willani as well. Also the very large variety in hard corals was impressive.
 

As previously mentioned high and low tide in this area differs by 1½ metres so we went with the current on most dives though on some occasions going against would have been totally impossible. No more than 100-200 metres from Maratuas's east coast the depth plummets to a staggering 2½ kilometres, and four out of five dives were vertical wall dives.