Today Markus and Nicole from Germany left NAD Lembeh Resort after a 20 days stay with us. And during that stay we found out really quickly that they have a strong preference for black sand muck dives and that Markus is absolutely crazy about frogfish. And frogfishes he got. They saw minimum 25 different individual frogfishes while they were staying at NAD Lembeh Resort. Among these frogfishes of various sizes were Painted Frogfish, Hairy Frogfish, Shaggy Frogfish, Warty Frogfish, Giant Frogfish, Scarlet Frogfish and Sargassum Frogfish. They were really happy with Stenley as their Dive Guide and our Chief Dive Guide Paulus replacing him on his days off. This picture shows one of two Painted Frogfish we found at Pulau Abadi. See you next year Nicole and Markus!

After posting many Posts about the marine life of Lembeh Strait in our Lembeh Blog we now have some updates from our garden (in which we right now – due to gardening projects – spend more time, than in the water). We are proud to announce that some of the Orchids, that we planted on the trees in our garden are flowering. The one on the picture is just in front of room number 5 and there are more coming in front of room number 7. Another Orchid on the path to the bungalows just finished flowering. And we also started to harvest various types of chilies: green and red Jalapenos, Twilights, Maldivian Chili and Rica Panjang. Besides that we now have a big stock of Basil, Rosemary, Dill and Mint. We are very happy to see that they plants are feeling well in our garden.

Our NAD-Lembeh BLOG is now running for about 4 months and reaches 100 posts with this post. We are very happy, that all you guys keep following our BLOG Posts – thank you very much. It is a fanstastic winter season here in Lembeh with many cool critters and good diving in the whole Strait. We are having great dives these days from California Dreaming all in the north to Madidir all in the south (this is also where i took this shot of this cute litle seahorse posing in the sand) – and we also found some new dive spots.
But we are also having a very productive period in our resort with a lot of improvement projects. We are changing a lot of furniture, making new garden paths, working on gardening, re-finishing bungalows, changing over to energy saving fridges and doing maintanance on one of our boats.

Yesterday we went to Madidir 1 – a black sand muckdive at the southern end of the Lembeh Strait. It is a dive site we preferrably dive from february to april and this was our first visit for this year. Besides several seahorses, pipehorses, octopus, shaggy frogfish and a black hairy frogfish we also found this beautiful Geographic Seahare (Syphonota geographica). Our Guest Markus, that  measures the quality of a dive exclusively on the amount of frogfishes seen is normally not interested in sea slugs at all – but this sea hare was his highlight of the day. Besides the attractive pattern it is also the size and the funny way of moving that makes these critters so cool. This was now the 4th species of seahare that i have seen this week – hope there are more to come.

Lembeh is a paradise for Nudibranch lovers – there is a immense variety of them around. And i pretty much like every single Nudi and Sea Slug around. But i specially like Sea Hares … they can be found in different variation here in Lembeh. Their head with its “ears” and the eye spots really give them a special character. So of course i was very delighted to find this specimen at TK3 – it had the size of a pack of cigarettes and was out in the middle of the day. Normally it is more likely to see them when night diving. But this one must have been restless and was cruising over the black sand at high speed … well, at least high speed for a Sea Hare.

Yesterday we had a terrific second morning dive. After a rather mediocre dive at “Hey Nus” we went to Teluk Kembahu for the second dive. There we found several seahorses, Coconut Octopus, Mimic Octopus, various cool nudibranchs and lots of other cool stuff. But the real highlight of the dive were these two wonderpus mating. Our guide Joni found them and his guests Kristine and Bruce were lucky enough to witness this very special moment. You can clearly see, that the male has a rather orange-brown pattern and the female a rather white-brown pattern. The male is just jumping on the female in this picture – thank you very much to Bruce for this cool shot.

One of the most attractive Nudibranchs of Lembeh Strait is without a doubt the Red-Lined Jorunna (Jorunna rubescens). It’s key features are its enormous size of up to 20cm and the head, that reminds of a Puppy – that’s why it’s also sometimes called the Puppy Nudibranch. Well and yesterday we found a Puppy of the Puppy Nudibranch: A tiny 2 cm long Baby Jorunna rubescens. It is much redder than the adult and does not yet have the dark spot on the nose that will give him the dog like appearance.

Adult version

A happy Valentines Day to all our Guests, future Guests, Divers, UW Photographers, UW Videographers, Critter Lovers, Fishes, Shrimps, Nudibranchs, Octopi, Cuttlefish – and of course to all Couples. Have a nice day – just like these two Anemonefishes.

At NAD Lembeh Resort not only the Dive Guides have good eyes – also the Boat Crew: On today’s morning dives our Boat Crew Aco and Direk spotted a Sargassum Frogfish (Histrio histrio) floating in a yoghurt cup right next to the boat. It was very close to shore and the beach was already full of debris – so obviously the frogfish would have washed up on the beach. They decided to take it out. So we kept it in a “professional seafish container” (a bucket) and brought it down on the second dive. After all our guest had a good look at it and took enough pictures we put it into a big piece of Sargassum seaweed. A much better home for him compared to a yoghurt cup. Sorry little frogfish, that we took you out of the sea for a while and we hope you are fine!

Today our guest Michael from Hong Kong has finished his Open Water Course with Serge and is now a proud and newly certified diver. And he is a very lucky Open Water Diver as well: On his last dive today Serge found him an extremely rare “Hairy Octopus”. Serge was very excited and started to call everyone over – so Michael kind of realized that this must be something special. But he also liked the Frogfish, Crocodilefishes, Scorpionfishes … basicly any fish. The only thing he did not really get friend with were the Pygmy Seahorses – he could not make out what Serge was pointing at

Anyway: we congratulate Michael to his Open Water Diver Certification and hope that he will keep his Mojo and see Whalesharks, Whales, Rhinopias and Dolphins on his next dive trips.