It has been a long journey getting the Seaborne up and ready to operate.
Fully refurbished with everything replaced including a new fridge, new TV, new cutlery, new tanks and new dive gear. Everything else has been renovated, replaced and/or overhauled.
So you can imagine it was an exciting first trip to Riau, Indonesia with some great diving too.
Francis even completed 4 dives on Saturday, the first time he has done that in a long time.
We took the 6.30pm fast ferry from Singapore’s Tanah Merah Ferry Terminal and then a bus to the Seaborne at Nonsga Point Marina.
This process takes about an hour including immigration. Simple process with no hassles. We had dinner onboard and headed off to a place on the southern side of Batam for the night.
We completed 5 dives Saturday and 1 Sunday before heading back to catch the 4.30pm ferry. This had us back in Singapore at 6pm. Using the ferry to and from Singapore means no long journeys or late night arrivals. We even had 30 minutes to relax on the Seaborne before heading to the ferry terminal.
During the dives we saw an amazing array of soft and hard coral all untouched and not broken. Sea fans were covered in colourful feather stars. They were everywhere and there were so many, it was just unbelievable. We also saw a number of nudibranchs of all colours, flat worms swimming and crawling and thousands of small fish of different varieties.
The best dive for sure was at a site I named a couple years back as “Soft Coral Round-About”. It’s a small island that you can just about make it all the way around in 60 minutes. This site, as the name suggests, is littered with soft coral of every colour with sea fans too.
But the highlight were the many bamboo sharks, and blue spotted ribbon tail rays. We also had a school of trevally and a schooling barracuda. Thousands of fusiliers covered the entire site. Just amazing fish life.
The visibility was ok to good, at around 6-10 metres. The night dive was good with crabs and a massive puffer fish.
Enjoy the video taken on the weekend by Jo using her GoPro with a red lens filter.
Cheers, Gary Savins
Video edited by Gary Savins
Additional Photos can be viewed on the GS-Diving FaceBook Page – here