Snorkeling with a Whale Shark!

I had another three day dive weekend planned for last weekend, but Indo got the best of me and kept me cooped up in my house next to the toilet for three straight days. I missed one day of work, which I didn’t mind too much because I easily rescheduled my classes by sending a few text messages and then spent the rest of the day catching up on Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives. But when I had to back out of two days of diving, I was devastated. Diving in Gorontalo is something I feel extremely passionately about and I didn’t want to miss a single moment of it. Fortunately, I was feeling well enough to go out on Sunday and even more fortunately, managed to see another whale shark! Rantje declared me to be a lucky charm and joked that I’m going to start expecting to see whale sharks every weekend. Seeing whale sharks is not at all common and the fact that I saw one on two diving weekends in a row is pretty remarkable.

The funny thing about this encounter was that it happened after the diving and snorkeling for the day were over and we were headed back to the dock. It had been a great morning already – Alexa is newly certified and on her first ever dive in Gorontalo we saw a pygmy manta ray at Mirabella! Then Sarah and I snorkeled for a bit off Molotabu Beach, playing around with my underwater camera. I was happy to have a chance to use it because I can’t take it diving with me since it’s only waterproof to 10 m. Here’s a picture Sarah took of me getting a close look at some coral while modeling my brand new wetsuit that I got in Jakarta the weekend before:

Half an hour or so later, I got the chance to take pictures of my most exciting subject yet!

In the boat on the way back in, we were looking at pictures on my camera, chatting and laughing when all of the sudden, someone noticed a fin. The fin kept popping up at different spots. Sarah called out excitedly that she saw something behind the boat. We cut the motors and navigated carefully. Then someone cried out, ‘Whale shark!” and the next thing I knew, the familiar white-spotted giant fish was right next to the boat!

The next few minutes were a flurry of activity while we all scrambled to get our snorkeling gear on as quickly as possible and jump overboard. ‘Fins! Where are my fins?” someone shouted. “Grab your camera!” shouted someone else. Rantje was the first back in the water, followed by Dave from Makassar, who shot an amazing video that I hope to upload soon. Then I jumped in, then Sarah and Alexa and then the dive staff. Everyone jumped in except for the guy manning the boat. In the movies, you always see people running out of the water when a shark is spotted, but here we all jumped in the water with the shark instead!

And what an experience it was! The whale shark was curious about us and stayed in the area for a good 10 or 15 minutes. It circled around us lazily, taking a good long look. And we looked right back. We were all so close we could have reached out and touched it multiple times. Rantje estimated it was about 5 m long, which is on the small side for whale sharks, but it was still a wonder to behold! Here's a picture I took with Dave in the background, to help you judge the size of this fish!

After it swam off, we climbed back on the boat with huge smiles on our faces. We had all just experienced something so extraordinary, so remarkable and so beautiful that I’m sure it will forever remain one of our fondest memories of Indonesia. How many people can say they’ve been snorkeling with a whale shark?

Miguel's Diving Blog

I’m thrilled that our encounter with the whale shark got a brief mention on the blog for Miguel’s Diving! Check it out! It’s the post titled “What’s big and spotted and swims by slowly?”

You can also check out lots of other cool posts about diving in Gorontalo here. I recommend the post called “Facebook for Nemo” for its numerous high quality pictures on Facebook of the unusual undersea creatures in Gorontalo.

Someday I hope to get either a diving camera or a housing for my current camera and then I’ll be able to post my own pics. Sorry there’s no pictorial proof of the whale shark!

Encounter with a Whale Shark!

Last weekend, Rantje and I spent two dives purposely looking for whale sharks and didn’t see any. But this weekend we were very lucky! We weren’t even expecting it and suddenly there it was.

After determining that I had only been to one site west of the river, Rantje took me to White Point today, a new site for the 2009-2010 dive season. I loved it right away - we descended over a vibrant reef of dazzling, tightly-packed corals that plunged dramatically to a steep coral wall. At the edge of the reef, I saw several large, colorful steephead parrotfish. Then we descended along the wall until we reached white point – a jetty of white sand sticking out from the wall. We hovered at around 20-25 meters looking at the big fish – tuna, deep sea snapper, and a school of bigeye trevally. Ranjte told me later that two big dogtooth tuna were swimming right by my fins! I didn’t notice them at all, but I did notice the whale shark!

At one point, while glancing towards Rantje, I saw something odd behind him. It looked striped and blurry, like when fish are pooping or stirring up sand. I kept looking at it wondering what it could be. Suddenly, I saw the unmistakable white dot pattern on the back of a very large fish. Whale shark! I had been looking into its mouth! Elated, I looked towards Rantje to see if he had noticed but he wasn’t showing the slightest bit of interest. He was looking down at the bottom. I screamed excitedly into my regulator to get his attention. When he finally looked up at me, I flailed my arms and pointed behind him. He turned around quickly and backed up, startled. He was only about a meter away from the whale shark! I was about two meters away and the huge shark was exactly at our depth level. We watched it glide by and then high-fived each other underwater.

Continuing the dive, we also saw blue headed tilefish that are endemic to Indonesia, rings of yellow nudibranch eggs, numerous Salvador Dali sponges, emperor snapper, black and white convict blenny, stem anemone, coral cod, foxtail colonial tunicates, egg cowries eating leather coral, and much, much more. What a way to mark my 30^th dive!

For those of you who don’t know, whale sharks are completely harmless plankton feeders. So, even though I encountered the biggest shark there is, I wasn’t in any danger. I just leaned back and marveled at the sight. It was one big fish! When I surfaced, I excitedly told Yunis what we had seen. He asked how big it was and I estimated that it was about the length of the benches inside the boat. He guessed that meant 6 or 7 meters. When Rantje came onboard, I asked his opinion and he also said 7 meters. So there you go, I came within 2 meters of a 7 meter whale shark! It was exhilarating.

After the dive, we spent our surface interval at a small cove called Hidden Beach. It was breathtakingly beautiful – emerald water, limestone cliffs and towering palm trees. The beach was deserted except for a couple of traditional wooden fishing boats, a small hut and a lone fisherman. We all hopped out of the boat and went ashore. The place was alive with the buzz of cicadas and large birds swooping from tree to tree. Ranjte said that they often see large hairy hogs and water monitor lizards here as well. Sure enough, Yunis called out that he had spotted a monitor lizard at the far end of the beach. Unfortunately, it was too far away for me to see. This is the same type of creature that Sarah and Alexa unexpectedly found in their house several weeks ago! It is also directly related to the Komodo dragon.

The second dive of the day was at Three Corners with Yunis. We were on a quest to find Denise pygmy seahorses. And of course, being the expert he is, Yunis found several of them on two different sea fans. The day before I had seen two common seahorses at a site Rantje playfully called "Julianne's Sand Box" because we didn't actually reach our goal of Deserted Castle. They were about 20 centimeters long. By contrast, these Denise pygmy seahorses were only about 15 mm!! They were so tiny and they blended right in with the pink coral fans they had wrapped their tails around. Macro underwater photographers travel great distances to see these tiny treasures and here they are in my backyard. In one day I saw the biggest and one of the smallest sought-after creatures of the sea. How lucky can one girl get? And did I mention that this was another private charter just for me? I wonder what my next dive will bring!

"Going Around the World with Culture"

For one night only, my students ditched their jilbabs, conservative clothing and university jackets to model different fashions from around the world at UNG’s second annual cultural show, which marked the culmination of a semester of CCU classes. My co-teacher, who taught the final 8 weeks of Cross Cultural Understanding, supervised the production of this magnificent all-day event. The first part of the day was filled with a lunchtime sampling of international foods from Indonesia, America, Korea, Japan, India and Saudi Arabia while the second part of the day consisted of wonderfully choreographed and costumed song and dance numbers. I was invited to watch the performances and was even given my own costume for the night – a traditional Gorontalese wedding dress!

A real highlight for me was seeing some of my most conservative students break out into a choreographed hip-hop routine to the Black Eyed Peas’ song Boom Boom Pow. It was a fun surprise to see Mary, a shy, jilbab wearing girl who sweetly smiles at me in class, suddenly standing on stage in a tracksuit, wearing a sideways twisted baseball cap and a hardened “don’t mess with me” look on her face. There were also some great martial arts displays by students dressed as Japanese ninjas. They did a couple of very technical numbers and then, in the middle of one number, the music suddenly changed to that old 80s one-hit-wonder, “Hey Mickey”, and the ninjas started pirouetting and doing other flouncy, girly dances. It was great!

Here's a picture of me with the "Indonesia" food group. Notice how most are wearing their batik!

And here's a picture of me in my Gorontalese wedding dress. To my right are students modeling other wedding dresses from Java, Sumatra and South Sulawesi.

Post-show, my ninjas struck a pose just for me!

It was a really fun night. I may have been horrified by my CCU students’ writing skills, but they are wonderful, funny, and kind people and I really look forward to having them for another semester. Plus, I’ll have them for Writing III, so I plan to set a few things straight!