Tuesday 11 November – snorkelling and kayaking

In the morning we headed out for a snorkel, we decided to explore the waters on the right going out of our bay, it was a similar landscape although more open sea. Rowan is always in the water before me, it takes him a second to jump in, while I faff around with ear plugs, and ensuring my mask won’t fog up. He hadn’t been in 5 seconds and he was out again, he had encountered loads of jelly fish. There are box jelly fish here so we definitely want to avoid them There are plenty of smaller stingy things about. Sadly there was a lot of rubbish in the water too, so we decided to go and snorkel out to the left of the bay. We did two very long snorkels. The coral was magnificent, with a sheer drop off in many places. The walls were so colourful with a purple and yellow tubular sea squirt being creating very colourful walls of underwater life, so sad we don’t have the Go Pro or the drone for that matter, it would be amazing here. The fish life was not abundant like we have seen further north in Raja Ampat, but the coral was really impressive. Just so sad about the rubbish in these remote areas, the poor Manta rays must scoop up so much rubbish and plastic into their mouths.

We went for a little explore in JeldiJeldi after our snorkel out the other side where the fishing camp is. To our amazement we found two enormous Motor Cats tied up together. They must be privately owned and Chinese judging by the people we saw on the tenders. We passed so many dramatic limestone islands. The photos will do better justice than my descriptions.

We had a little kayak late afternoon as the tide was up which meant we could get into the various shallow areas. We attempted going out into the more open sea, but with the tide roaring, it was way too unstable for me. We managed to go into the little pool behind PolePole, so surprising to see great coral there too and an enormous school of fish. We went over to Jim’s boat for a drink in the evening, we took our own booze as the thought of Palm wine was not too appealing! He was very proud of his steel boat, just seems so incredibly lonely, but he does not seem at all bothered by being alone. He heads off to Sorong in a couple of days when the wind turns, we will head further west along the chain of Misool islands tomorrow.