https://photos.app.goo.gl/iT6GB2D6B3EinJqA9

Since Siladen couldn’t accommodate us for a full week, after four days packed with diving we moved to Siladen’s sister property, Coral Eye Resort. About a 2 hour boat ride east, Coral Eye is on Bangka island, known for colorful soft corals and unusual critters.

The transfer process couldn’t have been better - they loaded our luggage onto a dive boat, brought along our dive guide, Stenley, another pair of divers, and we did two dives along the way!

On the boat, our fellow divers were excitedly discussing what they hoped to see on their day trip. They were extra optimistic because we had Stenley with us, one of the best spotters on staff. Some word like “rhino-pee-us” kept getting tossed about, which sounded like maybe a rare nudibranch (since those have prominent features called “rhinophores”). We furtively flipped through the several hundred pages of the “Indo-Pacific Nudibranch and Sea Slug identification” tome on Andrew’s phone with no luck, then the “Tropical Pacific Reef Creatures” book. Just when we were about to admit ignorance and ask what on earth they were talking about, Vera happened to skim the Author’s note of the Reef Creatures book. This is a book about everything that isn’t fish. But right there in the author’s note it says “A particularly weird fish … 

 …[are]… the holy grail of critters hunters and a rare species [the authors] had dreamed of finding for years.”

Okay then. Now we knew how to spell this thing, and that we needed our third digital book, “Tropical Pacific Reef 

Identification”. Our hopes weren’t high of actually seeing a Rhinopias underwater since most divers never see one, but it would be fun to look!

The transfer dives turned out to be some of the 

dives of the trip, with Stenley finding fascinating and rare critters for us while we kept spotting mantis shrimps left and right. Learn more about these awesome guys here: 

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp

The amazing peacock mantis shrimp! This is a female with thousands of tiny red eggs, something we'd never seen before.

Before the dive, Stenley mentioned the possibility of finding a blue-ringed octopus. We’ve long been interested in seeing these little guys. They are famous in Australia for being incredibly deadly - their pocketsize bodies house enough poison to kill you - but are non-aggressive and beautiful. They are covered in bright blue circles when provoked. What we didn’t know then is that there are actually multiple species of blue ring octopus, and scientists are only beginning to map out the complexity of their genus 

. Nor that there’s a whole other species in a different genus with exactly two blue spots that is even more rare to see - the Poison Ocellate Octopus, or 

What did Stenley find for us? Not one, but 

Mototi with Stenley's dive pointer for scale (about the diameter of a chopstick).

Same mototi showing different coloration.

Later in the trip we got to dive with a very experienced Aussie photographer. He's logged thousands of dives over decades and has dozens of underwater photography awards to his name, and from his stories it felt like he had seen it all. But when we showed him the first mototi picture, he was visibly startled. Our dive advisor Fabian summed it up well: “you are very lucky, Mototis are incredibly rare.”

After we bid goodbye to Stenley and the transfer boat, our four days of diving at Coral Eye were excellent as well. Our guide, Rendy, was wonderful and did find us that “holy grail of critter hunters”, the Rhinopias!

On a night dive we saw some cool squid, as well as more decorator hermit crabs. Diving during the day was a great mix of beautiful soft corals and interesting fishes like the Pontohi pygmy seahorse, robust ghost pipefish, adorable juvenile boxfish and huge schools of snapper.

The tiny Pontohi seahorse grows to only 1.5cm long, so we definitely needed a sharp-eyed guide to find this guy! This one was quite camera-shy.

A pygmy pipe horse, about the size of a golf pencil.

One of several cuttlefish we saw. These relatives of octopus and squid can change color rapidly to camouflage or signal.

A fabulous nudibranch called a flabellina.

The folks staying at Coral Eye were also incredibly nice. Most were Americans and Europeans, with visitors from Austria, Switzerland, France and Norway. There were also two very serious snorkelers from Germany who were very friendly and gushed about dive sites and critters like the most avid divers. They loved above-water creatures too and cheerfully shared their find of a 

When we told one of the fellow Americans, Lisa, that we were going to Japan later in the trip, her eyes lit up and she started gushing about her time living there. The next day she approached Vera at breakfast with a double-sided paper full of handwritten notes with tips and suggestions, so sweet.

We wrapped up the trip with Vera’s 300th dive. Her highlight was spotting the secretive 

, though unfortunately it didn’t stay visible long enough for Andrew to see it or grab a photo.

Bangka, Indonesia