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Komodo National Park
December 2001
We stocked up in Bali on fine food
and incredible culture exploring volcanoes, visiting temples, attending
cremations and watching ceremonies all over the island with the women
in their beautiful silk sarongs balancing incredible pyramids of
fruit on their head - offerings to the gods. There
were essential projects that needed completion during this short
stop, work on installing our newly donated desalinator and some tinkering
with the main engine. We
also collected Abigail Alling, President of PCRF, and Mark van Thillo,
Chief Operations Officer who were joining us for two weeks with one
major objective - to dive and dive and dive some more.
Dec 14 depart
Bali Marina (240
miles)
Dec 17 arrive
Rinjja 08ƒ46.64íS 119ƒ39.46íE
A stunning three days at sea. The tidal swells just outside the entrance disappeared as
soon as we hit the open sea and a lake spread before us. On the first day, the dolphins came to play in the bioluminescence
at night and the spinner dolphins leapt to either side of us during the day. The
stars reflected in the still water. On
our second day at sea, three whales surfaced about a mile from the
boat in the pink glow of sunset. On
the third day we drop a length of anchor chain and dive in the solid
blue. And on the morning
of arrival at Rinjja we are surrounded by sperm whales. They
blow and breach and flick up their tails as they dive. There
are babies with their mothers. They
are feeding. And amongst
them, a pod of dolphins. We
slowly enter the channel that runs between Rinjja and Nusa Kode from
the east. We drop our anchor, turn off the main engine and breathe in
the sounds and smells of this magical place.
We dive for a week, endlessly
and constantly. The
water feels cold (between 26 and 28 degrees) because of the
upwelling
from below. Combined
with the very strong currents in places this results in reefs that
are bursting with the intense shades of soft corals. There
are hard corals too in places, but not a great deal of them. But
every inch of substrate is covered with life - corals, tunicates,
sponges, invertebrates - all aflame. There
are species here that required searching through the books after
a dive, always a thrill to find something new. And
the fish are plentiful although there are few pelagics in this channel
apart from two of the biggest jacks we have ever seen. We
sight bamboo sharks at two of the sites and a couple of healthy whitetip
reef sharks. The reefs
around the southern area of Komodo have suffered little damage from
dynamite fishing and we relish these dives on practically perfect
sites. Itís very hard
to tear ourselves away from this anchorage. We
have partied on its beaches, watched its resident dolphins cruise
by us daily and even returned to the open sea in the small boat to
search for the sperm whales again.
Dec 23 Move
to Komodo Island 08ƒ34.32íS 119ƒ30.17íE
Komodo was established as a National
Park in 1980 to protect its high marine biodiversity, its forests
and of course the Komodo dragon, the largest living lizard in the
world - Varanasus komodoensis. Itís
basically a giant monitor lizard and can reach up to 2.5 metres and
125 kilos. We had watched
them from a distance on the beaches of Rinjja but the greatest concentration
of them is on Komodo island itself, around 2000 of them. So
between Christmas feasts we took turns to walk the island under the
leadership of one of the rangers from the station there. They
showed us the old dragons that have settled around their compound
then led us through the forest to meet the dragons in the wild. They
were incredibly astute in sighting the dragons from a great distance. One
was pinned by his tail so that we could all, nervously, approach
and feel the thick plates of scale. The
forest was fascinating, teeming with many species of butterflies
and birds including the fire bird that we could hear but never saw
and wild chickens. The
wild boar galloped around, carrying its huge weight on spindly legs
and deer darted away on our approach.
Our cue to leave Komodo was the arrival
of Qamar Schuyler, a researcher working with Phil Dustan at the University
of Charleston and her assistant, Anne Blair. They
had arrived from the USA loaded with 110 kilos of scientific equipment
- high-spec GPS systems, computers, underwater video cameras and
satellite images of our next science study site - Karang Kapota,
an atoll in South Sulawesi.
Dec 26 Move
to Labuang Bajo, Flores
08ƒ26.66íS 119ƒ51.77íE
We made a pit-stop at Labuang Bajo to
stock up for the upcoming two weeks in Karang Kapota and to send
off Abigail and Mark who would return to PCRF headquarters in Santa
Fe renewed and refreshed by their underwater and land adventures. Intensive
preparations began for the upcoming science study which was going
to enable us to ground-truth a satellite image of a coral reef, to
truly understand the information it contained and to take one step
further in our mission to map and monitor coral reefs from space.
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