Our second destination in our quest to find the green turtle foraging grounds was Raja Ampat. Some of the tracks of the GPS tagged turtles show foraging greens that travel all the way from Raja Ampat to Kalimantan. We were based at Kri with papua diving and did 2 short expeditions; 1 to Batanta & 1 to Wayag – Sayang. We planned our route using the aerial pictures of Max Ammer and the tips of his friendly staff. During the first trip we saw a dugong feeding at dusk on Enhalus leaves in front of the mangroves. The majority of the seagrass meadows were strips of multispecies (incl Enhalus) meadows in front of mangrove lined islands. Because we were the first foreigners to overnight in the village people did not know what to with us and we ended up sleeping in a empty information house on the jetty. In this area the fisherman are mostly Biak people that migrated here some decades ago. The Biak people explained us that green turtles are still hunted because of the tasty meat, in contrast to dugong meat that they did not like too much. Hence not too many foraging turtles, but a very nice trip. Here is a map of our trip and below it, you can see images of the trip.
