Day 3

Up early today to one heck of a full day of diving!  The plan is to dive, dive, and dive some more:  three day dives and one night dive.  Matt and his group of intrepid souls head out to Makawidey Pier and Pantai Perigi for the morning with seahorses, flambouyant cuttlefish, coconut octopus, and a Randalls frogfish as the highlights of two 75 minute dives.  Mike and the “Mimic” gang head to Makawidey 2 with the usual show of seahorses, mantis shrimp, and not one but two giant frogfish as well as Tanjung Kubur with more seahorses and cuttlefish to be found.  The afternoon started with a great lunch of Beef Rendang followed by a lesson about Adobe Lightroom cataloguing and importing by Matt.  The afternoon dives had coconut octopus and the colour purple:  a purple seahorse as well as a purple Ambon scorpionfish, very cool.  After a brief snack of pisang goreng at the resort we all headed back out on a night dive where we saw several frogfish, octopus, flambouyant frogfish, and of course a cute little bobtail squid.  Once again we had a great dinner around the famous NAD Lembeh longtable with the meal consisting of a local favourite of Soto Ayam (chicken noodle soup) and fresh fish.  The meal arrangement at NAD is one of my favourite features of the resort, they set up all of their smaller tables into one long table so that everyone who is staying at the resort has the chance to sit and chat to everyone else.  It truly is a very sociable affair as the guests are constantly sitting beside a different person at each meal and meeting new friends from all over the world.  After the meal Mike launched into an interesting 40 minute discussion/slideshow about “Playing with Light” where he discussed unorthodox lighting and how to make both macro and wide angle photos stand out from the crowd by simply thinking more about the use of light.  Not long after this lecture the tired troops hit the sack after almost five hours of underwater time for the day!  Until tomorrow…