162. Ambon

Kevin, Joni, and I arrived in Ambon, the largest city in the Indonesian province of Maluku, just in time to celebrate Joni’s 32nd birthday. Before arriving, I coordinated with a local dive shop to use their mooring ball in exchange for booking some dives. Ambon is world famous for its muck diving and what the dive sites lacked in visibility, they made up for in their biodiversity of small creatures. Ambon is famous for a rare kind of fish called a psychedelic frogfish that can only be found here.

I ended up doing two dives, one with Joni in the morning and one with Kevin in the afternoon since they had conflicting work schedules. For each dive, we shuttled our dive gear over in the dinghy to assemble onshore then descended into the water. I was surprised to find that the poor visibility only lasted the first 10 feet of the dive but revealed a surprising amount of coral and fish below. I was fascinated by the many types of juvenile fish that I hadn’t seen before, like the pinnate spadefish and barramundi. There seemed to be no shortage of interesting things to video during our dives.

Towards the end of the first dive, the dive guide started positioning some seagrass, making a kind of nest. Then he pulled out a water bottle from his pocket, and opened it up, squeezing out the contents. What came out was a tiny, psychedelic frogfish about the size of a quail egg. With its intricate red and white patterning, candy cane frogfish seemed like a more appropriate name.

The guide seemed to motion “Here it is, take some pictures” so I snapped a few videos but was disheartened as I saw him put it back in the bottle and place it securely in the reef. People came from all around the world to see this rare creature and now it was subject to a life in captivity, likely unable to grow to maturity and reproduce. Clearly, I was part of the problem but didn’t know how to approach the situation. The guide knew people would pay more to dive if he could guarantee seeing it and this is the only way he knew how.

Once we were finished with the diving and Kevin and Joni wrapped up work, we headed to shore to celebrate Joni’s birthday. Although we were aiming for a nice restaurant, the only thing we managed to find was a small stand on the side of the road selling local food. We assembled a plate of pre-made food and Kevin picked up the bill, a whopping $10 for three overflowing plates of fried rice, noodles, chicken, and curry.

We stayed in Ambon one more day to relax then pulled the lines to make for our next destination of Wakatobi National Park, another two-night passage. Joni took some seasickness medication in preparation for the trip and seemed to feel much better. Unlike the prior passage, there were no islands to protect us from the southerly swell, hitting us directly on the beam. Luckily, it seemed SV Kismet’s autopilot was much more robust than SV Sierra Wind’s and the boat had no problems getting rocked around.

Joni and I chatted on deck and said she could finally understand what I had been saying all along, that I loved cruising but hated sailing. Although her issues had been mostly sea sickness related, she could finally understand some of the difficulty I felt during a passage. How everything becomes infinitely more difficult and you seem to have all the time to do something but none of the energy to do it. After the two days of passage, we arrived at our destination just as the sun was rising.