Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Bali Diving Day 2- Padang bai

So the next day was basically the same, except where we were diving, at this place called Padang Bai (yes, they spell it B-A-I, not
B-A-Y, strange, right?). Again, I woke up to find myself in a completely different place. This time, I realized that I was at a place that resembled a fishing village, but with relatively fancy cafés instead of people selling fish, and diving boats instead of fishing boats. Again, I geared up, walked across the beach to the boat, tried and failed to shake all the sand stuck in my boots and wetsuit out, got in the boat, and when everybody else was in the boat, we were ready to start diving!

the dive site itself was a little disappointing, just a 20 meter sandy bottom dive site, but as we went deeper down, I was amazed, there was actually a wreck there, originally, I thought it was just a rock, or some dark coral, but there was WAY more than that...So everything was like an average dive, but we did see a load of new things. The morning dive we did, was especially interesting. It was relaxing, we just floated on top of these abandoned fishing traps (more like homes now) that looked like nets with HUGE holes in them, and they were all stiff, not just waving about. pictures should give you a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about. so as we glided along, we finally spotted something really cool- a few lion fish, cruising just below, our dive instructor took a few moments to snap a few pictures, and that's when we spotted ANOTHER lion fish swimming upside-down, not far from the first.

After that, interesting things just get spotted, on after the other, like we're in some crazy slide show with the speed set to 100! Immediately after the lion fish, we spotted a cuttlefish, lazily swimming around a piece of coral (was he searching for food?) unfortunately, it also spotted us, and tried to put some distance between itself and the divers pursuing it (meaning us), we attempted to follow, but hastily backed away when we saw it put itself in a position we knew to be agressive. following that, we came across a porcupine fish (puffer fish with SPIKED ALL OVER ITS BODY), which was also too quick for us to hang around it, except to take some pictures. And, to add to all that, we saw a small moray eel sticking its head out of a rock.

The second dive wasn't altogether interesting, but we did see a fair few eels, including a black ribbon eel, quite a few nudibranch, and a scorpionfish, and that was basically it for day 2 of diving.The pictures I include should give a pretty good idea of what everything looks likes..