Soleman’s Colemans

Quality dive guides are essential at a location such as Maluku Divers where so many subjects can be found, it can make for a photographer’s dream trip. Recognizing Ambon’s rise to the top of the ‘must visit’ list of Indonesia critter and muck diving, Maluku Divers has focused on assembling a dedicated and experienced team.

One of the members of the team, Mr Soleman, is a very popular guide at the resort. His years of experience diving in Lembeh, mean he is well suited to searching out and identifying the habitats of the premium critters.

Upon check in at Maluku Divers, our divers are all encouraged to suggest a list of particular species that they like to see during their stay, this quite often results in a mini competition within the guide team to find the best critters, often with very impressive results. 

This week Mr Soleman was set a challenge by Mr Tilo, a guest who had popped over from Singapore for a few days diving over the Idul Fitri public holidays. “Find me a Coleman shrimp”! Tilo was the one remaining guest of a dive group who had been searching the shores of Laha and the world famous Twilight Zone, and despite seeing an abundance of critters, three different rhinopias, countless ghostpipefish, frogfish, nudibranchs and octopi during their stay, one specimen remained elusive. The normally guaranteed Coleman shrimp (Periclimenes colemani) was playing hard to get. 

So, it came to the last dive of Mr Tilo’s stay and with the pressure of the shrimp hunt on his shoulders, Soleman was offered additional incentive of a nice new 5mm wetsuit as a reward! Having searched numerous fire urchins, the Coleman shrimp’s only habitat, at every site across Ambon bay, Soleman decided to try one last time at the dive site Kampung Baru, as it is usually home to a large numbers of fire urchins. With the pressure on and the dive nearing the hour mark, finally, success! A solitary Coleman was then followed up with a pair. After much excitement and some great photos, it seems that Mr Soleman will be snug in his new wetsuit throughout this critter season. If this becomes a regular occurrence, then the team at Maluku Divers may start to get a bit suspicious of the new equipment being sported by the MD guides!

See Mr Tilo’s Coleman shot here, (as well as the rhinopias and ghostpipefish above)  he dedicates the image to Miss Nuria and Mr Ramiro with the quote – “you should have stayed longer!”

As the new season gets under way, Maluku Divers welcomes back an old friend to the dive team, Nus Fadirsair, one of founding members of the team at MD when the company first opened in 2004. Nus’ experience and dedication to finding unique critters in Ambon, fully compliments the other members of the resort’s dedicated dive team.

So why not drop us a line to arrange your stay at Maluku Divers, the guys are waiting your wish list.