The beautiful Reef Manta Rays can be spotted around the islands of Nusa Penida – Bali, where they are drawn to the cleaning stations. The cleaning stations are the spots where small cleaner-fish reside that clean the skin of the fish visiting the spots. During mating season we generally see more mantas around the cleaning stations, to look for appropriate mates. When a female is spotted the males form a train behind the female, they will follow her around for several days days up to weeks – stalker alert!
The female does not lay her eggs somewhere but they stay with her in the womb for about one year, until the baby manta ray is ready to hatch. When manta babies are born they measure up to 1 meter in diameter and during the first year of their life they can double in size! The manta babies are immediately independent from their mothers and don’t get any parental care.
This week we have visited Nusa Penida a couple of times to check out Manta Point and some of the other amazing dive sites in the area. With Christina we did two dives in Nusa Penida, starting at SD for a relaxing drift dive, and finishing the day with manta rays and an octopus (Christina’s big dream) at Manta Point.
With Sander we also visited the USAT Liberty wreck in Tulamben and discovered coral garden where we spotted groupers, a ribbon eel, garden eels and many more awesome reef fish. The following day we went to
Dive at the USAT Liberty wreck
Nusa Penida with Sander and with Russell and Thomas. We started at Manta Point to look for the Manta Rays, and even though the visibility was not amazing we managed to spot a whole lot of Mantas!
With our guests Fransiska and Chelsae we also visisted Manta Point and we dived the Mangroves. Fransiska dived with our divemaster Sam and Chelsae with Iris. Fransiska had just finished the Open Water diver course at Two Fish Bunaken and was very excited to be in the water again. Chelsae is planning on doing her Divemaster course soon! We wish you lots of fun and good luck on the course!!
And we finished the week with Robert from the UK and Rya from Canada. They were unlucky as the waves at manta point were too high and for safety reasons we had to divert to the other side of the island. We dived the pretty dive sites PED and SD which were a tad cold but we saw many turtles, a school of snappers, a million butterflyfish, an octopus and many more. Flying through these sites was lovely and it was a great day!
Want to visit the beautiful Manta Rays and fly through dive sites like superman/woman? Dive with us from our dive centre in Nusa Lembongan or book a daytrip through Two Fish Divers Sanur!
