South Komodo on the Seven Seas

Trip Report by Sonia Goggel, Photos by David George

The gorgeous Seven Seas, hosting us for the 5th trip since July 2012, has become our floating home in Indonesia, and her exceptional Crew and Cruise Directors Karl and Linda our family.

Our destination this time was South Komodo, our second trip in a row, both organized by my dear friends, underwater cinematographer Tom Campbell and his partner Beth Davidow. It has been a privilege and very humbling to see them in action.

South Komodo is the perfect destination this time of year. The water is clear and warm, and all the other dive boats seem to be somewhere else: we were mostly all alone, moored in paradise-like, protected bays, surrounded by impressive scenery, with Komodo dragons, deer, wild pigs and monkeys patrolling the beaches and white-bellied sea eagles flying above our heads.

The weather was mostly sunny with occasional rainy and windy days, which did not bother our diving, and coloured the, normally brown and dry, scenery a lush green.

Half of us were fortunate to stay for two trips, relaxing in Labuan Bajo in between, swimming laps in the pool, catching up on emails and eating Italian Food. As soon as our friends arrived early morning with their luggage and 700 eggs, we set sail to Wainilu on Rinca Island for our check dive. The diving started out in style, with many mantis shrimps, three ribbon eels, cuttlefish, catfish, ringed pipefish and large schools of cardinalfish.

After the dive, we moored by Pulau Kaaba, from where we could observe hundreds of thousands of large fruit bats flying off in a long trail at sunset towards Flores Island, a truly impressive and unique sight.

Early morning on the next day, Captain Pai expertly manoeuvred us through the very narrow and currenty Molo Strait, between Rinca and Flores, and moored us by the island of Baleh for a day of stunning diving on Baleh Wall, Bommies and Ridge. All three dives were a beautiful introduction to typical South Komodo diving, with its dramatic topography of walls made out of huge rocks with shelves, cracks and overhangs, as well as groups of boulders spread out on the sea bed. All structures are covered very densely in soft corals of all colours and sizes, huge white, green and brown black coral bushes, whips, fans and sponges. Furthermore, every available space is inhabited by tunicates, anemones, crinoids, zooanthids and corallimorphs, leaving hardly a spot to put a stabilizing finger to have a closer look at the marine life, absolutely magnificent!! The character and sheer density of growth on the South Komodo walls, awash with cold water most of the year, reminded us of subtropical diving in places like New Zealand's glorious Poor Knights Islands.

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Testimonial

WETPIXEL on the Seven Seas

This month we have two back to back charters with the people from WETPIXEL. They are posting live (well, almost) photo reports, please check them at wetpixel.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=52302, and keep following!

Deep South Komodo - Availabilities

On our Deep South Komodo cruise from 3rd to 15th March we have one space left for a male diver sharing a cabin. Please send us a message if you are interested: [email protected].
After this we have more Deep South Komodo trips with available spaces in January and February 2015.

For our full availability chart please click here.

Deep South Komodo - More information

For more information about our Deep South Komodo cruises please follow this link: www.thesevenseas.net/destination-komodo-south.html