You never know what to expect when you dive. During a dive in Indonesia I suddenly saw a sponge spawning. The event only lasted for a few minutes, but I was able to capture some images. It was the first time I ever saw this with my own eyes.

In September/October of 2007 Julie and I went to Indonesia on a long trip through the Banda Sea. We visited some very remote islands, some of which have a very notorious history. Especially the Banda Islands themselves were fascinating. These islands are known as the spice islands, and many sea battles were fought over its riches in the 16/17/18th century.

I wrote a 4 page story about the trip which can be read in Duiken Magazine, and will be available as a pdf in a few weeks with this article.

What is even cooler is that Julie got the cover of the January issue with a nice image of 2 boys coming to pose underwater.

Julie won a second place in the Underwater Art section of the new contest by Australasia Scuba Diver magazine. She won a nice liveaboard price with an image of a pipe fish shot in Indonesia.

Julie has the cover of Scuba Diver Australasia for issue 4 of 2007. It’s an image of a kid in Indonesia playing with us under water. Julie also has a portfolio in the same issue.

Julie and I just returned from the Bahamas trip with Eric Cheng. We had an amazing time diving with Tiger Sharks, countless Lemon Sharks, and Dolphins. Read our trip report of this trip. I also added two trip reports of our previous trips to Indonesia visiting Raja Ampat and Komodo.

We have put another gallery online, this time with our photo’s from our last trip to Raja Ampat and Komodo. It was a very long trip, starting in Indonesian Guinea, through the Banda Sea, down to Flores, and from there to Komodo and finally to Bali. It took almost 4 weeks, but it was an extremely fun and productive trip.

We saw many critters that we’d not seen before, including a lot of nudibranchs, juvenile batfish, hairy octopus, and many more. The area around Komodo now ranks as our favorite dive destination.

You can see these and other images in our galleries section.

Julie and I joined Fathoms on a trip from Raja Ampat, through the Banda Sea, to Flores. On paper this trip sounded really nice, and mostly it was very nice diving. What we had not realised was the amount of steaming we had to do, which greatly reduced our number of possible dives. We had 3 full days of steaming, and many 10+ hour voyages.

Not only was there a lot of moving, the boat also had a lot of trouble. On day three the nitrox failed because the main generator died. So now we’re not only limited in the number of dives, but also in bottom time. Since a lot of the dives are done in the 50-80 feet range, this really impacted our diving.

Visiting the Banda Islands was quite nice though, and so was snake island, an island that is home to thousands of sea snakes.