R4 Simply the best in Indo ?

[cetacean]

@Indah

I was literally just there 3 weeks ago (Kri Island, diving the surrounding area). The fish life was prolific (easily as good as it was uring our first trip 6 years ago).

We followed that with a LOB trip in Komodo, that seemed less fishy than our previous time there (and several sites have clearly been damaged due to fishing practices).

 

[stepfen]

I think @stepfen is referring to the Misool area in the south not central. We had a very similar experience in March. Really hoping it gets back to normal quickly!

FYI the dive safari covered the usual LoB route i.e. Dampier Straight and as far west as Piaynemo.

I am not saying that R4 was empty of fish. We saw a lot of interesting things including reef mantas in Manta Sandy and Manta Ridge, plenty of sharks (including grey reef shark), several eagle rays, wobbegongs, napoleonies, etc etc.

What I am saying is that there was an obvious decrease in the number of big schools of fish. eg the biggest baracuda group we saw in ~10days of diving had maybe 5 members. Also interestingly, during the whole 10 days we saw maybe 2-3 groups of sweetlips hanging behind corals. Other times I remember we could see at least few sweetlip groups per dive.

But I know, it is diving. Past performance is no guarantee of future results...

 

[cetacean]

@stepfen

Understood... what I was saying is after diving Kri Island (and the surrounding area) for ~9 days (3 weeks ago) we saw many large schools of fish, including groups of 20-30 sweetlips on a number of sites. At Sardines there was a school of barracuda of 20-30 that stayed around the entire dive. We also saw a fairly large school of bumphead parrotfish on a couple of dives.

Did you have strong currents? The currents tend to bring in the fish...