Located off the southeast coast of Bali, Nusa Lembongan is one of the three islands that make up the Nusa Pendida District. Home to only 5,000 permanent residents, the remote island boasts white sand beaches, crystal blue waters, and beautiful low limestone cliffs. After a ferry ride from the main island, we arrived in Mushroom Bay, where we set up home base for our days of discovering a new world underneath the surface of the icy blue waters.
As we we’re planning our trip, scuba diving in Indonesia’s coral triangle was something we were really excited about. Known as the underwater Amazon, it’s hard to put into words how beautiful the coral reefs and the fish, turtles, sharks, etc. are. This area of the world contains 75% of the worlds coral marine life, nearly 600 different species and over 3000 different types of fish!
As new divers, we didn’t really know what to expect on these dives, but here are some cool things we learned:
A few of our dives were drift dives, where you descended down into an underwater current and floated along the reef. We were shocked by how fast we moved, on one dive we drifted half a mile.
The Indian Ocean has some serious thermoclines (pockets of water that have drastically different water temperatures). Like heat waves bouncing off pavement in the summer, these thermoclines were visible in the water and got as cold as 63° Fahrenheit.
Our buoyancy control was much better on our dives here in Bali than our fresh water dives back home. Our dive instructor Chloe claims that we are more buoyant given salt water is more dense, but we like to think our improved dexterity can be attributed to our relentless film study (we watched Finding Nemo before our first dive).
Cool things we saw: Manta Ray, Sting Ray, Eel, Webegong Shark, Mola Mola, Octupus, Dolphins, Angel Fish, Clown Fish, Crab, Lobster, Jelly Fish, just to name a few.
Matt: Dive #2 in Manta Bay. We saw a hud of dolphins and a Manta that was gigantic. And a mola mola!
Erin: Dive #6: SD,a drift dive where we saw 7 sea turtles and I almost cried.
Scuba diving with Bali Hai Diving Adventures. Shout out our awesome dive masters Chloe and Nicole!! They were so patient with us as new divers and really maximized each dive so we felt like we didn’t miss a thing. It was even cooler that they shared in our excitement with each new species we got to see and every new place we dove.
