Boy, am I behind!

2015 was an incredible year of ups and downs. I had back surgery in January and that started me off with a lot of down time and a lot of recovery time. I was able to get the first phase of the website set up but then I didn't get back to it much after that. I have tried to do a bit of the Blue Water Images Facebook page but even that’s been inconsistent. For 2016, I’m going to make a concerted effort to blog more often and post regular pictures on Facebook (and Twitter) – I hope you’ll like my FB page and join in on the discussions there!

As for my blog here, I'm going to start with a few "trip reports" as we're just on our way home from an absolutely incredible trip in Indonesia. I did 66 dives over 19 diving days with an average bottom time slightly over 70 minutes and a total of 4660 minutes underwater. That put me in the water for over 77.5 hours searching for critters! And critter searching we did. But, this is a quick report, more critter details in a future post(s).

The trip had two parts – part 1 was on land at the Lembeh Resort (diving with Critters@Lembeh) and was all about muck in the Lembeh Strait. As for the muck diving in Lembeh... WOW! I've posted a few pictures on the Blue Water Images Facebook page and for now, there's tons of info on the Lembeh Resort site. But, suffice it to say that we WILL be back (both for the diving AND the resort); it was absolutely incredibly fantastically wonderful! Check out the view from our room... stunning!

Part 2 was on our favorite liveaboard the Dewi Nusantara where we boarded in Sorong and headed to south Raja Ampat around Misool, then on to Kofiau and finally, Batanta on our way back to Sorong. If you're interested in seeing a bit more about the islands of Raja, check out the wikipedia page here. I tried to do a good job using my GPS when I took photos above water but I wasn't as consistent as I would have liked. But, here are a few places where we spent a bunch of time (the numbers represent how many photos I took there - again, above water). And, I didn't really take all that many above water shots so these numbers may seem very small but they still give you an idea of where we were wandering about:

Lightroom's GPS map from our South Raja trip

Above all, I want to give a HUGE thanks to our wonderful trip leaders for our Raja trip with Our Beloved Seas. It was our 3rd trip with the somewhat newly-formed partnership of Dr. Richard Smith and "cruise director" / divemaster-extraordinaire Wendy Brown and as ALWAYS, it did not disappoint. Richard will have a trip report posted on his site: http://www.oceanrealmimages.com and you can read the general trip details here. He also posted a couple of photos of our wacky group here. This photo was taken on our very last morning after we packed our bags and while we were waiting in the Sorong harbor in the heat with no diving to cool us down. And, it was HOT! A few of our group had already left but we still managed to wrangle folks up to the bow (in the direct / hot sun, no less) for one more shot:

So, that's it for now. We still have 4 flights to go... And, I have quite the backlog of trip reports so I’m going to work to get back to those, reliving our trips through photos and the blog posts.

Finally, thanks for your continued reading of my blog! I hope you're off to a good start for 2016!

Cheers,
Kimberly