I’ve been granted a sabbatical to study coral reefs, and three dive-travel agencies have set me up as their trip leader.  Great Destinations out of Sacramento and Ultimate Dive Travel from Chicago have joined forces and set up a live-aboard trip in the Spice Islands of the Banda Sea of eastern Indonesia and Weaver’s Dive and Travel from Boulder has two Caribbean trips set up – one in Saba and one in Cozumel.  My regular spring Indonesian trip is via a live-aboard to the eastern shores of Borneo (Kalimantan) with a side trip into Borneo’s interior tropical rain forest via riverboat.  The details of each of these four trips are attached.

I apologize in that a number of you receiving this are in some way associated with UCB and these trips are in conflict with university activities.  I want to keep you in contact with these annual spring diving adventures, and those trips in the future will not conflict.

Most of my diving for the last 14 years has been in Indonesia where Conservation International (CI) with a team of scientist in 2001 found Raja Ampat to have the most diverse coral reefs in the world.  In 2006, suspecting that this world-class biodiversity might be generally high in the Bird’s Head area of Papua, CI took the scientists southeast to the area of Fak Fak Regency and Triton Bay where they hit another bulls eye, finding the biodiversity to be even higher than Raja Ampat.  Dr. Gerald Allen, the world renowned ichthyologist, broke his own single-dive record of the most different fish species counted at 330 – he had counted 282 in Raja Ampat.  This area is very close to the area we will be diving in the Banda Sea.

If either of these two Indonesian trips piques your curiosity in the slightest way, note that they are each priced at under $5K.  This is a couple of thousand dollars less than other 10-day live-aboard dive trips to that part of the world.  Most of our dive group from last spring’s Komodo adventure has already booked on the Borneo trip, and there are only three spaces left.