Text by Mary L. Peachin with photos by Bill Kimball, Dave Lovitt, and Cam Azad
July, 2014 Vol. 18, No. 10
Muck what? Scuba diving, you’ve got to be kidding. Typically, the underwater world is praised for endless vistas with tropical and pelagic fish swimming amidst colorful corals. It’s a magical, weightless drift in warm gentle currents following interesting overhangs or swim-through reef walls.
Why would anyone descend to a shallow depth of twenty to thirty feet in yucky water filled with stinging hydroids, and God knows what else, to scan a bottom covered with junk and scattered trash, a dozen varieties of empty beer bottles, old fish nets and bamboo traps, and discarded rice bags? Scuba diving in murky water sounds like an oxymoron. Surely, this wouldn’t appeal to any wall cruisin’ big animal loving diver, especially one like me.
The truth is that muck diving is one scuba photographers favorite adventures. Experts flock to Indonesia’s Raja Ampat, West Papua and Sulawesi’s Lembeh Strait, the latter renown for its silt black lava sand, and low viz diving. They go to discover species they have never seen, some of which have not yet been identified.
Muck diving can be simply defined as exploring a landfill filled with the world’s most incredible, critters. These sites might be considered the muck capital of the underwater world. In a single dive, a person can epiphanize that this is as fascinating as diving can be.
About thirty years ago, dive icon Bob Halstead coined the phase after diving Papua New Guinea’s Milne Bay. Exploring shallow depths while burning off his nitrogen-loaded body chemistry accumulated from deeper reef dives, Halstead begin to discover weird critters.
Muck first attracted photographers, and as more species were discovered, it became the rage. Mile-wide Lembeh Strait, which lacks the deep reefs of other dive destinations, put muck diving on the international map. The most jaded diver, one who has “been there and seen that underwater” will agree that critters in the muck can just plain “knocked your dive booties off.”
I had no idea of the diversity and variety of diving in this part of the world surrounding the gateway of Sorong in West Papua (formerly Irian Jaya).
Mating flamboyant cuttlefish were oblivious to the eighteen voyeuristic scuba divers back rolling into Laha Bay, a harbor which, coincidentally, serves as Ambon City’s garbage dump. While muck diving is frequently done in a “land-fill” underwater environment, the amount of floating surface garbage was disgusting. Putting aside that thought and trying not to swallow any water, beneath the surface, the variety and number of critters was amazing.
Similar to Lembeh Strait’s renowned muck diving, Ambon’s tepid 84 degree water temperature offers better visibility with depths averaging around 50 to 75 feet. Soft and hard corals attach themselves to underwear, tires, shoes, bottles, batteries, and other garbage. Part of the visual overload included devilfish, waspfish, leaf scorpionfish, many species of lion fish, sea moths, colorful nudibranch and octopus of various sizes and species, plus schools of upright swimming razorfish. Instead of appearing for their typical dusk mating ritual behind coral outcroppings, colorful mandarin fish swam in open water. The nook of a boulder served as a nest for transparent juvenile flounder. Amorous snowflake eels intertwined. A diver could easily fill pages of a log book, there was that much to see on just one dive.
The year before, I had visited North Sulawesi’s Kungkungan Bay Resort, which can be considered one of Indonesia’s “muck headquarters.” Until 1990, the Resort was a coconut plantation. When America’s Supercuts heiress Kathryn Ecenbarger cruised through the strait, she found the place so beautiful, she mentioned to ship Captain Billy Matindas that the bay should be developed as a resort. He offered to help arrange for her to buy the land.
In 1991, Ecenbarger sent her son, Mark, a contractor, to build a resort. Mark was a diver, but after one look at the muck and poor visibility, he was not motivated to get wet. As time passed, his frustration grew while waiting for building materials to arrive. He descended into the Strait and began discovering critters he couldn’t identify in any book. The realization hit him that Lembeh diving was unique. Three years later, a simple resort became a first class dive operation, a destination attracting worldwide experts.
At one dive site, flamboyant pygmy cuttlefish camouflaged themselves in gorgonians. A newborn, recognizable only by its shape and color changes, clung to a soft coral. Talk about underwater sensory overload! And, there was much, much more.
On one dive, we saw a longfin waspfish, spiny devilfish, leaf scorpionfish, an ugly sand-buried reticulated stargazer, plus a variety of living shells.
Several times, our group took advantage of nighttime explorations to see fully exposed flat-headed stargazers, the frizzy “bad hair day” bright orange hirsute hairy frogfish, and other nocturnal critters. Another night it was a crab fest: an orange and purple decorator crab carrying a live urchin. Even a red octopus showed itself.
Yellow-headed, big snouted, creamy brown-finned, and a small pink eel were not like your ordinary moray eel. Mouthing their jaws in unison, they frequently shared crevices. Other uncommon species included the minor, barbed fin, white-eyed, snowflake, and the blacksaddle snake eel that poked his head out of the sand.
We also learned a whole new underwater sign language. A curled index finger signaled a seahorse, or a curled pinky indicated a pygmy seahorse. Two-handed index finger wiggles meant a fingered dragonet. It was “Scuba 101″ or fish identification for experienced divers.
Frog fish have different color phases during their life. We saw yellow, white, green, orange, pink combined with brown, and black. Some of them were as small as a lime, others as big as a football. A pregnant female, her belly bulging, hung near her mate on an abandoned anchor line. Like a piece of a sculpture, a chartreuse frog fish clandestinely fished from the stem of an elephant ear-shaped leather coral. In a split second, a black frogfish, tucked in a bommie, consumed unwitting cardinal fish with its long out-in-a-flash tongue.
Juvenile batfish glided in and out of bommies. A brown cockatoo waspfish could easily have been mistaken for a leaf. Different sizes and colors of zebra, dwarf, spotfin, deepwater, weedy, and demon lionfish tucked under corals, rested on the sand, or drifted slowly in the gentle current.
Scorpionfish were plentiful and included the long mustached Ambon with horny growths above its eyes. Marked by white algae and sponge-like calcification, the humpback was equally weird. A brilliant yellow-fringed weedy version drifted like an autumn leaf. To everyone’s delight, the sand and rubble brought several sightings of the purple weedy Rhinopeous.
Fire urchins used their two white-fronted legs to march like an army battalion in unison along the sandy bottom. This was certainly not a good place to lose control of your buoyancy. Spiny devilfish, sea moths, and fingered dragonet’s were so ugly; one wondered who would prey upon them?
An octopus took refuge in an empty bottle. Striped zebra crabs fed on dead urchins. Two Pegasus seamoths crawled along the black sand. Banded coral shrimp scurried about openly. Golden bristle fire worms crawled through the sand, file soft-shelled clams used banded tentacles for swimming. The long spines of the Venus Comb murex shell were stunning.
Malibi nudibranchs floated like plastic bags. A paradise mantis shrimp wasn’t shy, while a pair of sailfish gobies ducked into holes. An orange juvenile puffer hung with a white frogfish. Whiskered eel catfish stirred up the muck as they fed in a school in the sand.
Never thought I’d say this, but Indonesia’s muck diving offered a unique highlight to my three decades of underwater adventures.