Mesmerised by Merawang

Merawang was a fascinating wonderland of things I've never seen before. Wondrous things of all sorts of shapes, sizes and colours that defy description with mere words cover the sea floor and it's nearly impossible to go for much distance without accidentally crunching or squishing something underfoot. It was a landscape dotted with masses of corals both soft and hard and of all colours imaginable, intersperced with many brilliant red sea fans with pretty white polyps, with their tiny symbionts nearly too small to see even on film with the macro lens on. The hydroids were around, as I'd been warned, and Alvin spotted 2 sea spiders on a clump! :) Massive synaptid sea cucumbers were curled around rocks all over the place. Fishes were darting around, mostly too quick for me to see beyond a flash of colour darting under a rock. There were slower ones too. One of the early spots for me this morning was a gigantic toadfish over 20cm long. It ambled around for awhile before making a beeline for a crevice under a rock and after that no amount of prodding would get it out. We spotted 2 seahorses today. It was quite a magical feeling watching them swim around. They were quite big, and really beautiful, and very active. The first one was a yellow fellow with brown stripes. It didn't really like the camera but provided much lovely footage as it swam around trying to escape the lens. The second was black with yellow stripes, which was spotted later on by Alvin but as it turns out I'd gotten a glimpse of it earlier by sheer luck when trying to shoot the yellow one. It was wandering about in the background just inches away but we only spotted it while reviewing the tape (Doh! I did it again!). It was really pretty. Too pretty for words. (Ria, please do feel free to supplement this post with appropriate pictures. ;) The highlight of the day was an amazing anemone that had 5 anemone fishes swimming around in it. Got the most amazing footage of the Nemos (mostly false clownfish, from what I could see) frolicking around after lying there on the spiky ground for a really long time, trying to hold my breath and watch the screen while keeping the camera trained on the anemone (Woo! Got lucky today! The water cleared up at the exact same moment when a fish decided to be nice and peer out of the anemone, holding still for a few critical seconds... :). There were sobering moments too, in this mystical place in the middle of the sea. Lining both coasts surrounding it were many factories with smoking chimneys stretching out into the horizon. We found a recently deceased parrotfish, dead of who-knows-what causes, a sobering reminder of what could happen if we don't protect our natural heritage carefully. Left Merawang feeling strangely peaceful, and eagerly awaiting our next morning trip. Who knows what else we'll find?