TRAVELSPECIAL
Anthias and damsels dance in the gentle current
After all, how much space do you need when you’ re spending most of your time diving, eating and drinking? The only mild inconvenience was having to do an eightminute walk of shame back to the room if you left a dive computer or similar there. The solution is to use the camera room near the jetty for charging your all your gadgets.
Current affairs
Halmahera’ s coral and reef fish are world class; there are also great spots for muck diving and you’ ll always be the only dive boat on the site. Most of the sites we dived were reef slopes, which could have been quite samey, but we tended to see different things on every dive.
While I wouldn’ t describe it as a big fish destination, we encountered some chunky bumphead parrotfish, and there’ s a population of blacktip reef sharks. Baby
blacktip reef sharks cruised the shallows in front of our villas.
Sali Bay diving is all about current – sometimes working with the flow, but mostly avoiding it. We’ re not talking about a gentle drift, but powerful tidal races surging through the strait and whipping up whirlpools. Up-currents, down-currents, inside-out currents... you get them all.
Much as current can be a safety consideration, it delivers the nutrients on which coral communities thrive. This was best seen at a pinnacle called Tobias on the northern point of Sali Besar, dominated by whip and fan corals. The best part of the dive was when we ascended to the shallows to be met with clouds of reef fish billowing in and out of the coral. The water column was sometimes so thick with anthias and damselfish, they blotted out the sun.
I became addicted to the reef tops, tangled coral formations stacked on each
A Samla bilas nudibranch, with orangebanded cerata
The endemic Halmahera ghost pipefish
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Coleman shrimp on a fire urchin