Exploration team were on the hunt this week in South Lombok for a new dive site. Myself, Jay, Moon and Edi were out on the boat trying to lock down the location of a new dive site that Jay had stumbled across just last week. Jay had been telling us tales of a dive site that resembled the Belongas area with huge untouched soft corals, sharks, barracudas and some cool topography.
The first attempt started with Jay and the boat captain carefully positioning the boat in the current for a blue water decent on to the dive site, we all got ready and on three we went for a negative decent. We descended through the blue in to a pretty strong current down to 18 meters only narrowly missing the dive site, myself and Jay attempted to fight the current for about 5 mins while Edi and Moon split from us as they were not up for the fight. After 5 mins of fighting the current we decided to just go with it and see what else we could find.
As we drifted along the sand and spots of soft corals we were suddenly faced with a huge swim through on a rocky ridge, as we navigated through and along the ridge with some big cracks opening up making for a wild ride navigating through them in the current and surprising a few barracudas along the way. All in all it was an awesome dive and definitely one for those who enjoy a bit of a adrenaline.
For the second attempt we decided to make sure we couldn’t miss it and dropped 200 meters in to the current down again on to a sandy bottom at around 20 meters. We drifted slowly along the bottom, where we were suddenly met with a huge pinnacle and a small swim through.
As we went through the swim through we were met first met with a bit of a washing machine which spun us in the water and on to an amazing soft coral reef hidden in the water by the pinnacle and a ridge on the other side, the shear amount and size of the coral there was incredible, as we swam over them a group of yellow barracudas all over 1 meter long swam in to say hello. As we explored further we found a wall, some more swim throughs, some small over hangs, more beautiful corals and a huge whitetip reef shark.
What an amazing dive, just a shame we had used a lot of our no deco time up already and had to cut our dive short. We will be back again. All that’s left to do now is to come up with a name!!
Wish i was there