Magic Mountain (Misool)

What is the Misool marine reserve?

Southern Misool is a 1,220 km2 no-take marine reserve, managed with the villages that own the waters and the resort on Batbitim, inside the Raja Ampat marine park, which covers 1,657,000 hectares, 70% of the archipelago's waters. Sharks, turtles and mantas have their place here, and the cleaning stations of Magic Mountain, Four Kings and Andiamo are its showcase; the park permit funds the patrols. The area is far from everything: no dive village, no day-trip dive center, only liveaboards and the resort, which closes during the southern monsoon.

What will you see on Magic Mountain, terrace by terrace?

You jump onto the coral garden on top, at 6 m, into the school of yellow snappers; very often, a manta passes within the first minutes. You then descend from terrace to terrace along the ridge to 25 m, scanning the walls for pygmy seahorses and shrimp, then head toward the end of the ridge, where the current speeds up: barracuda, fusiliers, surgeonfish, tuna and gray reef sharks in the blue, Napoleon wrasse and trevally hunting above. On the way back, you climb the terraces to the shallow cleaning station, and the safety stop is spent watching the mantas circle above the boulders, when they're there; otherwise, the batfish, the groupers and the school of snappers fill the wait.

What other dive sites are in southern Misool?

Liveaboards devote several days to southern Misool. Four Kings, east of Pele Island, is a chain of pinnacles linked by a ridge and covered in soft corals, with its own cleaning station. Boo Windows owes its name to two windows in the rock below the surface, which you swim through among the fusiliers. Fiabacet and its soft coral walls, Andiamo and its yellowtail barracuda, Nudi Rock and its walls for macro round out a week where every dive matches the last.