BOAT LIFE: Living On The Ocean In Remote Indonesia

Just been absolutely mind-blowing. All secure. Oh look at that. Gonna be epic, let's get in there. One of the types of seaweeds you can actually eat, they're actually pretty good. I think I've spotted something here. Here's the remains of these turtle eggs. This would be a tail track. See they've been digging in there, trying to get to the eggs. Good morning and welcome back to a new episode from my new favourite place in the world. This group of islands is absolutely magic. Like the big limestone cliffs covered in jungle that come down to crystal clear waters and the diving has just been absolutely mind-blowing. Now there's a lot of other special places in the world that I've been to but I've always been thinking like man I wish I was here 20 or 30 years ago before it was overexploited and overdeveloped. Whereas here there is zero development. It is absolutely pristine and I just feel so grateful to be visiting it right now when it's in its natural beauty and I hope it can remain like this for years to come. But unfortunately all good things must come to an end. So we've got to wave goodbye to this group of islands and continue on. Continue on to find some new ones through this beautiful area that is remote Indonesia. I'm just gonna have one last drone fly as we're leaving here and actually in close there the water is so calm it's like drone snorkeling. It's one of my favourite things so let's see what we can find. There's an awesome bommie here and that is a Maori sea perch on top of the bommie. One of our favourite fish. Having this bird's eye view where the fish isn't spooked. This is epic. Now we are supposed to be heading south back that way from these remote islands of Indonesia back to Australia. That's the game plan. But something exciting happened last night which has caused us to flip this entire plan on its head and we're now heading north. Basically we spotted on the charts there's a remote atoll that sits rather lonely out here in the middle of nowhere and it's an opportunity that we all couldn't pass up. So we've flipped the plan around. We're like we've got to go and check it out. Due to its remoteness we really don't know what we're in for. There's no reports of whether the anchorages are safe. Whether the diving's good but it's that adventure into the unknown which gets us really excited. So it's a couple of days steam to get there. I just really really hope that it's worth the effort you know. But for now we're just cruising along the coast here hoping to have a dive as a to sort of break up the day and then we're going to keep steaming on to this remote atoll. As we're cruising through this passage here there's hundreds if not probably thousands of islands like this that just look absolutely incredible. It'd almost be an injustice not to jump in and check a few of them out. So we're going to put a mask on and drift down this reef edge here. It's going to be epic. Let's get in there. So there's just miles and miles of that fringing reef around this island. You could explore it for a lifetime and still not see it all but interesting thing at that site there was a lot of these sea grapes which are one of the types of seaweeds you can actually eat. They're actually pretty good. I'll save a bit of these for lunch. While we're trolling through this passage we do have a line out in case Wahoo or a Spanish mackerel or something like that wants to jump on. We're in actually in need of some more fish. We got some tuna jumping straight up ahead. They're jumping all the way out of the water. The ocean here is just so alive. It's like bubbling at certain areas we come through with fish on the surface and here's dolphins over here. Oh there's a pod of small dolphins. There's tuna jumping there and then there's dolphins feeding there. All those tuna are going crazy now. Look at that. All the birds are onto them as well. They're only a little yellowfin by the looks of it but they're jumping all the way out of the water. If we would catch one of these it'd be perfect sashimi. No luck with that tuna school unfortunately but we've had the drone in the air. We're checking out these islands we're approaching and they look absolutely out of this world. There's a couple of isolated rocks on the other side of them where we're hoping to have a scuba dive. These isolated rocks seem to be a real hot spot for fish life so fingers crossed it's something like we've dove in last episode because that was absolutely epic with all those sharks aggregating. We might get something similar over here. Oh look at that. We're gonna have to go and explore that. There's this little white sandy beach that goes across to the other side of the island. Out here there's like a steep drop-off. Beautiful, beautiful water. This place is incredible. So this isolated rock here is the one we've got our eyes on. Basically the current is ripping through here. You can see where that calm water meets choppy water. That's where all the bait fish are going to be stacked and that's where the bigger fish are going to be as well. So once we get a good anchorage we're going to plan to come and dive this and try circumnavigate it and I reckon this one's going to be red hot. I've got high hopes for this. Just pulling into this little bay here to see if there's a safe spot to anchor the boat. It looks absolutely amazing. Once again there's like these little white sandy beaches where we'll be able to go ashore and have a bit of a look around. It's just a matter of finding a safe spot to anchor so we can swing around and not hit any of this reef. We've found a big sand patch here that we're dropping the anchor on and then we're going to sit back with a little bit of wind and tie a stern anchor which should hold us right in this middle of this kind of sandy lagoon with reef all around us. All right we're just reversing the stern line in now. Just secure the back of the catamaran hopefully away from all the reef and rocks. Just got my first look at the fringing reef here. It is absolutely beautiful quite clear as well. All right let's get ashore and tie it to that tree. All right all secured. Look at this little beach we're gonna have to come up here and explore. Look for nautilus shells later. Let's just finish anchoring the boat first. Mission success. The boat's sitting perfectly right on this like little sandy area. We're gonna have a bite to eat for lunch now and then we're gonna head offshore. I think we're gonna try and dive that rock we saw on the way in. That's what you want to find underwater a big cave like that. As we descend down to the bottom the vibrant coral colors immediately catch our eye. These are the areas where some pretty rare and crazy creatures live and hang out. But then we notice a heap of fish spilling out from a deep dark shadow. So we decide to follow them in there with our torches on and see where it leads. That was an amazing dive there. So when we came down just this huge cavern or huge cave opened up and there was so much fish life in it. We're able to kind of just hang there as all the fish were sitting in a bit of a current there. That was absolutely amazing. That's one I'll remember for a long time. Now I've just come back in and just casting the lure around a little bit seeing if we can catch something. All right this big purple bommie here looks very good. This is our best chance I reckon. If we don't catch anything here we'll give up and go to the beach. Nothing's feeding at the moment so I think we'll give up and head in and have an explore on the beach. Unfortunately what I thought was going to be this like little paradise beach when you look closely it's just covered in plastic and rubbish. This bay must kind of channel everything into this bay here. Look all through the shallows. Oh this is such a shame. Whole beach is just plastics and rubbish. We'll try to look past that and see if there's anything that's not rubbish here. Any treasures like nautilus shells or anything cool washed in. Nice coconut tree. There's a couple of nuts in that one but they're just too small unfortunately. Bit of a bush track here into the other side. Oh this is what I reckon I saw the other day underwater. I was unsure that was an aeroplane fuselage wreck or whether it's a most likely a big mooring or something like that. We've seen them a few times actually washed in. Look at this 10 pack of oysters on the back of this thong. It's so quiet and peaceful in here. It's amazing there's thousands of these islands but we haven't seen any villagers on any of these kind of scattered islands the last few days. So it must only kind of be people inhabiting certain areas and not these ones which is pretty cool to see. We don't often see this but these pandanus trees going right on the beach. These are my two favorite palms the pandanus and the coconut. They're so so pretty aren't they. There's a whole heap of arty heads bait fishing. That's what the bluefin trevally love coming up in the shallows and chasing those arty heads. I don't know how many of these masks are floating around the ocean. I think I've spotted something here. This here is plastic but this here... Down he goes. These guys are so cool how they bury themselves in the sand. Check this out. I'll give you a better look at him. Watch him go. That's a pretty cool disappearing act. Look at all this plastic here. It's overwhelming. I put the drone up in the air for a bit of a bird's eye view of the anchorage and to explore the bay. I spot something that looks like a cave and fly over for a closer look. I've read that the indigenous people that lived here thousands of years ago now would sometimes leave entire skeletons and artifacts in these types of caves. And then in more recent times say the 16 and 1700s European sailors in search of elusive spices would leave treasure or supplies in these types of caves if they were ever shipwrecked. Nothing obvious today but of course I'll continue to keep looking as we sail around. With it being so glassy calm it's a prime time for one of my favorite activities. Drone snorkeling. So I fly across the bay to one of the shallow fringing reefs. The coral coverage here is out of this world but the movement of something then catches my eye. A big passion fruit trout. Pretty well camouflaged amongst the corals. And then I notice a second one. It's amazing to watch them go about their business completely unhindered by a diver from this view. And a third one pops out. Bloody amazing hey. These guys are one of the tastiest and most sought after fish in the ocean. I could watch this all day but I'm not sure the lovely people on YouTube would like to watch a 45 minute episode of three trout swimming around in circles. So after a magic night on board we're up and back into the action the next morning. We need a little bit of seafood so I'm going to jump in here and swim along this edge and try and spear something. Looks nice and clean let's get in there. The reef fish I'm searching for here can be very very cautious. And if you just swam down directly at them and tried to spear them you have literally zero chance of getting close enough. So to try and give yourself a better chance there's a whole bunch of different techniques you can try and use. The aim of the game is to try and be non-threatening or even hidden. Setting up for an ambush and then try and raise the fish's curiosity and bring them to you. I spot a beautiful long-nosed emperor from the surface. A great target species and make a dive. The flopper of the spear malfunctions. Tragically the fish escapes and swims straight into a shark's cave. I need to get down there quickly to try and secure this injured fish. But I'm just too late. It's this shark's lucky day. This is the beautiful little secluded beach that we saw as we were steaming past. So we're going to anchor the boat just off jump in for a bit of a swim and then go pull up ashore. Check this out what an awesome little beach. Pretty good eh dad? There is one constant on all these beaches. Rubbish. Devastated to lose that long-nosed emperor like that. They're really prized fish and actually quite cunning. Pretty tricky to hunt. Not sure what happened. The spear went the whole way through but the flopper just um for whatever reason didn't seem to open up. So such a shame. I thought I was still going to get him under that cave there but that wiped it. Reef shark got very lucky and got a very easy meal. Might get a chance to go for another spear a little bit later on. That's another little secluded bay up here. Let's go see what we can find at the high tide line. I'm always looking for treasure. Things like a nautilus shell or actual real treasure. You never know. What an awesome little campsite this would be. Check out the view from up here. Oh there's a turtle's nest. These depressions are where turtles have come up and laid their eggs. This would definitely be a turtle nest and then these smaller holes I reckon are goanna or a larger lizard that are getting into the holes to try and eat the turtle eggs. And this would be their tracks, their tail tracks. See they've been digging in there. Let's try get to the eggs. Here's the remains of these turtle eggs that the goannas have been into. It's a tough life being a turtle even if they manage to hatch. They've got to come down here and fight the obstacle course of plastic and rubbish before they get out to the sharks and the bigger fish. So yeah good on any turtle that makes it to become an adult because they have really got the odds stacked against them. It's massive. Oh it's too spiky for me. Come back. We've caught him red-handed the bugger. He's just taken off into the jungle. He's a big one. He's gone and hidden under that rock but that's the culprit a goanna or commonly called a monitor lizard. He's been into them. Yep these are the turtle eggs that the goanna's been into. Just the remains of them. Mum and dad just had a brilliant idea that we should create like a bit of a clearing here so the turtles have a bit of an easier time getting up and going down. There's all these driftwood logs and rubbish we'll clean it out of the way so the turtles have a clear path. A clear run up there. Welcome turtles. Make yourself at home. There's a few edibles around. This is like walking in a supermarket. There's lots of crabs like this. This guy's obviously dead and dried out but all these snails all over the rocks are good eating and if you look closely they're everywhere. You wouldn't go hungry here. These are all edible these ones. Nice size eating one eh? Yeah. There's a lot of them down there and some really big ones and some huge GTs and I think I saw some doggies in the distance as well. Seems pretty clear. Oh it's really nice at the moment. And that's the end of a magic day. Hopefully you enjoyed this one guys. Just a reminder that this episode today is part of a bigger series. It's going to be about a six-week trip from here remote Indonesia back to Australia. So subscribe to the channel if you'd like to see more and you can watch the whole series in order under the playlist section. Cheers guys see you next time.