Group picture of February cruise with Peter Mous (free-diver), Jan Henning Steffen (UNESCO), Thomas und Gabi (NDR film crew) and other guests and crew. Photo by Margie Burks

I used to do a lot of kayaking in Komodo when I was still working there for The Nature Conservancy. It is an excellent way to appreciate the reef and mangroves: you get to places that are just too difficult to reach by outboard-powered tender, and the colors of very shallow reefs are just magnificent - vibrant purple, turquoise and light blue on a background of white sand and green sea-grasses. You get to see plenty of wildlife, such as small black-tip reef sharks, who like to hunt in one foot of water on shallow reefs, garfish hunting at the surface (sometimes bumping into the kayak in their eagerness to get to the prey), large giant trevally that come to check out the kayak, and even dolphins. I am not a birder myself, but I think that a kayak is also an excellent platform for bird-watching in mangroves and other coastal habitats. The quietness at sea is an experience by itself.

Raja Ampat is an excellent area for kayaking, and part of the charm of kayaking in Raja Ampat is the opportunity to explore. The crew of Seven Seas knows more than enough dive sites to fill a diving holiday, but the area is just so large and so diverse that there are still many places just waiting to be discovered. In South Waigeo, I kayaked into a mangrove forest that looked like a green wall from the shore, but after 20 m into the forest it opened up into an amazing lagoon. Some of the islands in Southwest Kofiau have large lagoons that can only be reached swimming or by kayak - the one I explored had a nice, meandering creek with overhanging mangrove trees that connected the island's fringing reef with its lagoon. The channel between Gam and Waigeo ("The Gap") is a well-known dive site, but I found that kayaking through it is at least as rewarding as as diving in it. The scenery and the atmosphere reminded me of the way Tolkien described Rivendell, the last stronghold of the elves, in the Lord of the Rings...

Wobbegong, Photo by Steve Esposito

During my daily expeditions, I was snorkeling and free-diving a lot, towing the kayak behind me on a 30 m line. You can get a very good impression of a large area in that way - you swim around for an hour, then paddle a bit, and look for another promising site to have a look. Currents are much easier to handle kayaking than swimming, so with the kayak you can also have a look at the up-current side of islands and reefs that usually have many more fish than the down-current side. Free-diving presents an opportunity to spend a lot of time looking at those fantastic reefs because you do not have to worry about decompression and surface intervals. Of course, you do not get to spend a long period at a time below surface, but even one minute is long enough to have a good look around. Furthermore, you actually get to listen to the reef because you do not have the constant noise of bubbles from your regulator. I usually hear large fish before I see them, because of the pressure waves they make with their tails when they launch an attack on a prey fish. You also hear snapping shrimp, and you hear parrot fish gnawing chunks of coral out of the reef. I got to see plenty of blacktip reef sharks and big nasty-looking sharks that might have been grey reefs, a group of Mobula rays, really large bumphead parrotfish, really, really large giant trevally, large groupers (nice to see that there are still a couple of them around!), schools of dogtooth tuna, the occasional Spanish mackerel, schools of bigeye trevally, schools of hunting Eastern little tuna, manta rays, wobbegong, etc. etc. I kind of missed out on all those small-but-spectacular, difficult-to-spot critters, but spectacular reefscapes and the occasional sights of large fish more than compensated for that.

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The Seven Seas - Kuta Poleng D7 - Jl. Setiabudi Simpang Siur - Kuta 80361 - Bali - Indonesia

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