Wakatobi Dive Resort's House Reef

The three best house reefs I've experienced are Murex's Bangka Island reef, Pulisan Jungle Resort's reef and now Wakatobi's 3 1/2 mile house reef. I think they're roughly equal in quality but the expanse of the Wakatobi reef and the house reef taxi available from morning till nightfall put it in a special class. The submission description above references James Watt who, I believe, died just this week. He definitely wasn't alone in finding Wakatobi the world's best! The Wakatobi dock goes out to the reef edge where turtle grass and lightly coral-dotted shallows drop off vertically into deep blue. It's amazing what can be seen off this dock alone throughout the course of a week. The varieties of morays we didn't see, hunt it at dawn and dusk, sometimes jumping a foot in the area to dislodge crabs from the dock. The last day we were there, baby batfish that eluded our photographic attempts all week were swimming casually right near our boat. The house reef is mainly a wall, but it has a couple great critter-hunting bays within it such as Dunia Baru that are a full dive in themselves, as well as good size caverns with overhanging soft coral, glassy sweepers, scorpionfish and a good assortment of nudibranchs. A great one could be reached by a short back swim from our bungalow. Currents here can be swift and only instructor-status divers with pony bottles are allowed to solo. One night six of us hit the water and the current ripped off several masks, one never reappearing. We had to kick hard to get on the wall and ended up a long ways away in the easily found exit point called the second gully where the dive boats are moored at low tide. This scoured out sandy canyon held octopi, frogfish, scorpionfish, lots of hermit crab, hunting filefish, several big lionfish and all sorts of other little gems. Though I would not want to miss the terrific boat dives to seamounts, ridges and walls like Roma, Blade and Lorenz's Delight, I can definitely see how some divers are simply content to dive the Wakatobi house reef time after time. We found dozens of fish, invertebrates, crinoids, hard and soft coral, ascidians, and fans that were new to us every time we dove there . In conclusion, I highly recommend this reef in particular and Wakatobi itself as a destination. Add on a stop-off at Bali with its own terrific shore and boat diving and you've found a bit of paradise.