Wallpaper December 2008

I know this comes quite late, but I completely forgot about this while on holidays and busy diving.

This month’s wallpaper is underwater again. It’s a wide angle shot from a dive site called Lion’s head or Batu Pendata in Northern Sulawesi. The Pulisan area is still quite off the beaten track if you compare to it’s busy neighbours : Bunaken NP and Lembeh Strait.

What I personally like in this shot is that the rock in the background has almost the same shape than the sponge, like a shadow.

Upon entering the water we were surrounded by zillions of schooling fish. A huge Napolean wrasse took a glimpse at us before he disappeared in the blue…

Only one word to resume it all : BAGUS

Here are the links to download :

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1600 x 1200

Northern Sulawesi – Part One

diving, Travels, underwater

it has been a week since we arrived at Cocotinos, a lovely dive resort in the Manado area on Northern Sulawesi. After the huge wave of SMS’s and mails we got concerning the earthquake, peace came back to our daily schedule. In fact none of us noticed the quake on Sunday night. After a great breakfast in the morning we left for a 3 tank day dive. I have been to Bunaken before but have never dived the “mainland” dive sites around Manado. So it really came as a surprise to me to find critters such as BRO, Ambon scorpion fish and pontohi seahorses, only to name a few.

Pontohi seahorse

orange eyed mantis

On Wednesday we went on an extended day trip to the Bangka area and paradise pier. That meant wide angle shots. Huge seafans and schooling yellow snappers welcomed us on our first dive. Taking pictures can be tricky as currents might get strong…

Colourful reef

schooling around

Paradise jetty is located at Paradise Resort a huge ugly (at least to my taste) building which stands in the middle of nowhere, empty, waiting for the new owner to open the place again.

paradise jetty

We definitley have fun

LOL

More to come from Lembeh.

Wallpaper September

Wallpapers

Sometimes the greatest encounters are the unexpected ones. We all went on a late afternoon dive in Alona to watch the mandarin fish mating. I spent quite a while lying on old broken corals watching these colourful little fish. The dive then became a night dive and suddenly on the reef I came across this scene. This little yellow fish was hiding in a dark red crinoid. In the end it was my favourite picture of this mandarin fish dive!

I hope you enjoy.

BTW : only 75 days to go to get into a plane with destination Singapore-Manado