Thursday 4 September Wori Bay, Manado

Wori bay is 7 miles north of Manado on the north east end of Sulawesi and gateway to some of the best diving in the coral triangle. Wori bay is also very deep with a steep to fringing reef. Depths come up from 30m to 2m very quickly.

When we arrived here on Monday morning we didn't find a happy place to anchor where it was less than 30m deep and where we wouldn't swing onto either shallows or small fishing platforms so picked up a local mooring as a temporary measure. In the end we stayed on this mooring for three nights until this morning when stronger winds caused us to drag out to sea albeit at a slow rate. Now with better knowledge of the currents and swing in the bay we were able to anchor in a spot with 27m depth and also stay safe from hard objects.

That kept Jackster boat happy. To keep us happy there is a dive resort,

many dive sites around Manado

Cocotinos, which has made us most welcome to use their jetty for the dinghy, take our rubbish, log on to their wi-fi and to use the swimming pool if we wish. We would have liked to use their dive services for a day trip over to Bunaken marine park, 5 miles offshore, but the cost was beyond (our) cruiser's budget.

juvenile sweet lips

However, Wori bay and the reef outside the bay are a haven for muck, or macro diving. Muck diving is almost a misnomer. It's a place where the coral might not be 5 star but you might find the small, and rare critters like seahorses, frog fish or nudibranchs.

We've loved the diving in and around Wori bay. In Wori bay, just 200m from Jackster there's a sweet spot of white sand slope between the swathes of black volcanic sand. The coral covers from 2m down to 15m. Beyond this it's sand. In the coral zone we were finding cute juvenile sweet lips which swim with bottoms wagging like excited puppy dogs, many and varied anemones, colourful shrimps, lobsters, nudibranchs and flatworms and fish we've never seen before. All of this is warm, shallow water with no current.

Outside the bay, on the reefs facing to open sea it was the same good diving, great visibility and beautiful, healthy hard and soft corals. We must have passed over seahorses and frogfish without being able to pick their camouflage from the background.

Our idea perfect diving – high reward for minimal effort.