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Published: June 19th 2009
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Banded Boxer Shrimp
Curious little buggers June 18th
Today's dive sites were at the reefs surrounding Bohayan, an island about an hour east of Semporna. Rumour has it that there is about 25 Pygmy Seahorses hiding amongst more than 200 sea-fans. We hoped we could find at least one.
The first dive was at Pygmy Point and it was a drift dive next to a wall of coral. We saw Scorpionfish, Clown and Titan Triggerfish, Bluespotted Stingray, different Nudies, all against a gorgeous backdrop of lush sea plants and corals. The site did suffer from a severe absence of Pygmy Seahorses. These little guys are about 1cm high and look just like the sea-fans they call home. There's not much chance of spotting one without spending a lot of time staring at various fans.
The second dive site was called Green Marker. We saw an Orangutan Crab (so called because of their long, brown and hairy arms), a minuscule Whip-coral Shrimp a bunch of Clownfish, a small Spotfin Lionfish, a few Stonefish, two Boxing Shrimps and a lot of Nudies. Again, no Pygmy Seahorses.
After lunch on the boat we went for our 18th and last dive in Borneo, called Mid Reef. It was
Love the Nudi
check out his mouth like a garden with tons and tons of plants and corals growing on a gently sloping reef. We saw a Cuttlefish, Clownfish, Blue Spotted Stingray, Juvenile Midnight Snapper, two Banded Boxer Shrimp and various Nudies. Sadly, no Pygmy. We were told that there's a bunch in Bali, so we have no choice but to head that way soon...
😱
We enjoyed the diving here a lot and we realise that we've been very blessed to have had the opportunity to dive all these great places and see these gorgeous creatures. We are very very thankful.
Today's highlights:
1. Diving.
2. Boxer Shrimps, Orangutan Crab, and cool Nudibranch.
June 19th
Happy birthday sister Deirdre! Hope you have an awesome day and a year filled with blessings, joy and fulfillment! We love you!
PS. Congrats on the new job! Awesome! Talita woke feeling ill again. We really are struggling with our health lately. We think it's because we haven't been getting enough wholesome foods so we got 200 multi-vitamins. We also had to go settle our diving bill (ouch!). This town only has three ATMs and two were out of service so the queue at the remaining one was
very very long. From what we could see, each person would do an average of three transactions. Very frustrating when you're at the back of the queue. We couldn't get enough cash (damn daily limit!) so we got what we could and decided to come back later with the other credit card. On the way back to our room we got some fruit for our vitamin starved bodies.
Back in our room we looked at the road ahead. We had planned to move on to Tawau this weekend. From that town we'll take a ferry into Indonesia, but before we do that we have to get visas. We realized that there's no point moving on this weekend because the Indonesian Embassy is only open during the week. We booked two more nights at the Dragon Inn then had a nap.
Later we went back to "the queue", this time armed with our Visa card, to get the rest of the cash. We only had fruit for lunch so we were starving. We also needed wi-fi so we got some roti at a very loud restaurant. We felt a little deaf after a while.
Today's highlights:
1. Walking
in the rain - the 5min cloud burst was amazing.
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Ali
Ali Watters
Love the dive shots :)
One of my favourite places in the world - happy travels.