This week in Lembongan… Crazy manta encounters in Manta Point. The sea has gotten a bit murky on the south side of Nusa Penida where we have a popular cleaning station for the mantas. This made diving a bit surprising when the mantas came out of the muck. Russell was doing one of his dives of the PADI Rescue Diver course Nusa Lembongan here and while making sure his buddies Yayan and Karoline didn’t do any simulatored problems, when right in front of them a manta decided to almost ram them. We brief our divers not to get closer than 3 meters to the rays and not to startle them, but apparently nobody tells the mantas. This one was clearly much closer and caught the divers much by surprise. Even though the visibility was not the best we saw many mantas on our last few trips to Manta Point.
We have had quite a few courses going on this week. While Charlotte from Germany took her PADI Open Water Course, her friend Sarah decided to take the drift adventure dive, which will eventually lead up to her completing the PADI Advance Open Water Diver certification. Since she already did her deep adventure dive she has now only 3 more dives to go. John and Ashleigh, already had 2 adventure dives, and now that they have completed three more, they are officially PADI Advanced Open Water divers. So there are many different ways to improve your diving skills, even if it is one dive at a time.
Apart from the mantas we saw a few giant frogfish, cuttlefish, giant trevally, juvenile silver sweetlip, turtles, bamboo sharks and many other big and small reef fish in every color of the rainbow.
