On the road to Bali

     There have been relatively few blogs lately because we have been very busy getting ready to go to Bali.  there has been an inordinate amount of house cleaning and gardening.  And a lot of my free time has been taken up studying the fish and invertebrates of Indonesia. 

Yellowtail Coris Male, Kahalu'u October 2017

    Earlier this week we did get in one snorkel.  It was a rough day at Kahaluu and we were joined by Kim Davison from the Methodist Church.  Kim has proved rough and ready and did quite well in the current and slosh at Kahalu'u.  Unlike my previous outing there, and in spite of the rougher conditions, there were more fish.  Specifically there were rockmovers and yellowtail coris in significant numbers.  This was the first time Kim had seen these larger wrasses turning over stones to look for lunch.  She was lucky enough to see a big male yellowtail coris busting up a sea urchin against the rocks and devouring the goodies inside.

   As you can see,  I was lucky enough to get a picture of the big brute, perhaps the best picture I have of a male yellowtail coris.

White Belly Damsel  A. leucogaster  Lipah Bay, Bali  2014

   Sandra is still recovering from her eye surgery, so she didn't go swimming.  We will be in Bali in just a couple days and she is planning on getting in the water then.  On this day, she stayed ashore watching the tourists and, in the process, nabbed a couple pictures of me and the lovely Ms. Davison struggling out of the water looking like a couple of Syrian refugees.  Not the sort of pictures one wants to advertise.

   One of the tools I have used to study for the upcoming trip has been to review the pictures taken on my last trip to Bali.  We have been there three times already and one might have thought that I would have been looking at the photos from 2008 and 2009 as well as the ones from 2014.  Certainly I have been working with the lists from those years.  Somewhere in between, rugged (hence

Diana's Hogfish  B. diana   Tulamben 2014

waterproof) point and shoot cameras became available and my pictures went from crude efforts to photographs of sufficient quality that I could really study the underwater subjects.

   I was surprised that I had not worked those 2014 pictures over with more vigour, for in the process I unearthed at least four life fish and a couple more for our Bali list.  I'm including a few pictures of those new life fish here.

     In some cases these fish were difficult to identify due to misleading pictures in the field guide,  Reef Fish Identification/ Tropical Pacific by Gerald Allen, et al.  The Diana's hogfish for example, looks little like their picture, but the three white dots are unmistakable.

    In other cases, like the Indian doublebar  goatfish (which I'm told tastes very good in a tikki masala) the fish just doesn't seem to have interested me enough to pursue.  But, my goodness, the

Blackstreak Surgeonfish,  A. nigricaudus  Tulamben

picture was right there, dormant for three years.   In any event, we pledge to try even harder this time around. 

   Of course, you will be treated over the next three weeks to pictures of the marine life of Bali.  Who knows what adventures will make it into the blog.  Mt Agung, the looming volcano, has shown signs of life over the last month.  With luck, the blogging will not include any life threatening situations.

   You may notice that a couple of those fish were seen at Tulamben.  This is a very hot spot to see reef fish and includes the wreck of the Liberty.  the Liberty was a US cargo ship. Torpedoed by the Japanese, the ship was run aground at Tulamben.  During an eruption of Mt Agung in 1963, the wreck slid into the sea.  Thus, the sightly wreck became a world class dive site.  No surprise, the resort area is right in the path of a lahar, a pyroclastic landslide.  Our original plan was to stay three nights at the Liberty Dive Resort, but we cancelled those reservations as Mt Agung became more active.  this was really a no brainer as the

Four Line Wrasse  St. trilineata   Jemeluk  2014

entire area was evacuated and Tulamben became a ghost town.  I can almost here Gordon Lightfoot singing.   The volcanic activity has subsided over the last week or so and we are now told that the
resort has re-opened.  We'll let you know if we make it to LDR.

    As a personal aside, in October of 1944 my father was on an LST (landing ship- tank)  which was hit by a Kamaikaze in the battle of Leyte Gulf.  The skipper of his LST ran the ship aground, on or near Luzon in the Philippines.  If one thinks about it, this seems to be a reasonable thing to do if the boat is sinking and you are near a suitable beach. The LST sat there for a week until the battle ended and help arrived.  As far as I know, the boat was re-floated and did not become a home for tropical reef fish, sponges and the like. In spite of the loss of the LST, the Battle of Leyte gulf was a major victory for the combined forces of the American and

The Battle of Leyte Gulf

Australian navies;  the Imperial Japanese Navy never sailed in force after this battle.  Perhaps this is why we see so many Aussie youths living it up on the beaches near Tulamben.  Not to mention that the governor of these Very Sandwich Islands is Japanese.

     Clearly geopolitics is not the strong suit of this blog.





    Well, in the words of my dear, departed compañero, Mike Van Ronzelen,  "You can't stay home all the time."  Mike managed to stay one step ahead of trouble as he toured the world and we will do our best to emulate those salubrious efforts.  And you guys try to stay out of trouble, as well.

Sandra posing in front of a smoking Mt. Agung, Tulamben 2014