Muck Diving in Maumere

We spent a couple of days at Ankermi Happy Dive Resort in northern Flores diving their world-famous muck sites. Lucky finds included: mimic octopus, long-arm octopus, a dazzling variety of nudibranchs, cuttlefish, yellow and black seahorses, an adult painted frogfish, 4 large harlequin ghost pipefish... it's like a muck diving miracle. If you see something swimming by in the video which looks like an underwater Far Side cartoon creature wearing horn-rimmed glasses, that would be the mimic octopus. There were also several extremely small animals we had never seen before such as bizarrely tiny pipefish and micro-nudibranchs. These animals were so small that we actually dove with a magnifying glass. Filming during muck dives is always a challenge as, unlike the mimic octopus, we don't have the ability to mimic our surroundings. Despite the challenges, of all our dive videos, this just might be one of our favorites.