Week 5

Day 41-42: Independence Day (observed), coral ID & pygmy devil ray!!!

We had a free day since Indonesia’s Independence Day was on the 17th but celebrated on the 18th. Most people joined the games our coordinator had organised, but I was still feeling a bit wiped out from being sick. Instead, I stayed in, worked on some assignments, and, of course, took a long nap.

The next day was way more eventful. We went for two coral ID dives, something I was really looking forward to. Each of us had a slate with coral names, and our instructor would point at one underwater, we had to identify the genus. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I got quite a few right and felt really proud of myself. It helped that I studied corals during my master’s, though this time we had to ID 35 different genera, both hard and soft, with a few “imposters” thrown in.

The best part came during our safety stop. Out of nowhere, two pygmy devil rays swam right beside and underneath us. I’ve never been this close before, I was literally screaming into my regulator.

Day 43-44: Long day, long dives and BRUV

We had two big dives today: coral restoration and an open water refresher.

For coral restoration, we worked on moving coral “buds” that had grown large enough in the nursery over to the restoration site. The system here uses ropes with buds attached, so we basically transferred them and cleaned the ropes. That dive ended up being 86 minutes, my longest dive ever!

In the afternoon, I helped with the refresher dive for new interns. We demonstrated basic open water skills for them to copy. Honestly, I had forgotten some of the steps since it had been four weeks, but overall I think I managed okay. That dive was another 75 minutes. By the end of the day I was exhausted.

Finally got to do my first BRUV (Baited Remote Underwater Video). It’s basically a GoPro set up on a frame with a bait box attached, designed to record which species come by: sharks, turtles, big fish, sometimes even mantas or morays. I was leading the dive, and everyone had a task in setting it up. Before we even finished, two sharks showed up: a blacktip reef shark and a massive grey reef shark, almost 2 meters long. On our second dive, we saw another grey reef shark being chased by a blacktip half its size. Never knew blacktips had that much attitude.

The highlight, though, was a hawksbill turtle that completely made my day. Instead of swimming away like green sea turtles always do, this one came right up to me, almost like it was saying hi. It just hovered around, looking straight at me for a solid five minutes. Hawksbills are known to be very curious creatures, so it's really cool to be able to have these kind of encounters with sea turtles.

Day 45–46: Coral Gardening + AOW Assistance

We spent the day working in the coral nurseries, brushing algae off the ropes where the coral fragments are attached. It’s repetitive work, but kind of meditative in its own way. Just hanging underwater, focused on cleaning and giving the corals a better chance to grow. It was a long dive again, but satisfying.

The next day we had a simulation for Advanced Open Water assistance. Since none of the current interns needed to do their AOW, we split into groups where some of us acted as new students while others took on the assistant role. It was actually really fun, I got lucky because the “student” I was paired with didn’t make things too difficult for me. Others weren’t so lucky and had to deal with very “realistic” troublemakers.