No, they don’t bite. Diving with Manta Rays is super exciting and during the briefing, we will give you loads of information on the dive, the site and of course also on the mantas. Well for starters Manta Rays don’t have teeth so even if they would try you wouldn’t get an awesome bitemark to show to your friends. Manta rays are filter feeders and feed on zooplankton, so they have no use for a shiny row of teeth. Manta rays can also be very social and curious and will go into flight mode before they would go for a fight. Manta rays are very fast and can reach speeds up to 25km/h (15mph) and because they are so fast they have only a few natural predators. Social and curious behavior can be seen while diving with these amazing giants. When you as a diver stay calm and relaxed the manta rays can come very close, checking you out.

With lots of Manta Rays, we started this week with Isabelle from Canada for 3 dives in Nusa Penida. Isabelle was fresh out of her Open Water Diver Course. We started at Manta Point, followed by Crystal Bay and ended our dive day with a comfy drift dive in Nusa Penida.

The following day Mohammed from Egypt was joining us to dive in Nusa Penida. We were lucky with beautiful conditions, manta rays, turtles, and a beautiful calm dive in Toyah Pakeh to end the day.

Also diving with us last week was Justin from the USA who joined us first for a day to Penida and was so excited about the beautiful dive sites in Bali that he booked an extra day to Padang Bai. In Padang Bai, we went to look for the curious and weird at the Jetty and managed to find a few frogfish, cuttlefish, octopus, and nudibranchs. The second dive in Bias Tugal was comfy and calm, nice and warm water and loaded with cuttlefish for some reason. No problem for us, we love cuttlefish!

Andy from Scotland joined us for two days, starting his dive trip off in Candidasa where we saw a massive shark in the distance! Because we love sharks we visited Gili Tepekong next where there is a shark nursery. The three baby sharks were swimming around in their cavern, beautiful! To finish a great day we went from the really big fish to the really small and enjoyed a dive at the jetty with a flying guinard, pipefish, blue dragons, and many more.

The following day Stephanie from Indonesia joined us to Nusa Penida. At Manta Point we were unfortunate to not spot any manta rays, but we were lucky to spot a beautiful bamboo shark! Crystal Bay and Toyah Pakeh were dive two and three where we spotted GT, Napoleon wrasse and enjoyed the beautiful crystal clear waters.

Thank you, everyone, for diving with us, it was a pleasure to meet you and I hope to dive with you again someday!