In March 2024, underwater photographer Patrick Kranenbroek was visiting Saronde Island in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Here, Anke Andree, the managing director of Blue Bay Divers at Saronde Island Resort, told him that she also owned and operated a dive liveaboard for the past 14 years: KLM Sunshine. “We want to start exploring new dive areas south of Lembeh,” she said. “Would you like to join? We’re going all the way to Bolsel.” One year later, the time had come. The Lembeh – Bolsel – Lembeh trip began, and Patrick was on board.

When it comes to diving, Indonesia has no shortage of bucket-list worthy destinations, boasting some of the most biologically diverse tropical reefs and critter sites in the world. For the macro photographer, North Sulawesi’s Lembeh Strait is the proverbial Holy Grail. To the uninitiated, prowling a featureless expanse of sand may border on the unhinged, but critter enthusiasts will beg to differ, as Lembeh’s environs are home to a dizzying array of the weird and wonderful. Scott Bennett has the story.

Ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting! Someone, somewhere, had found something really exciting! One of the dive guides was tapping frantically on the side of his cylinder with his metal pointer. Ting-ting-ting replied my dive guide Opo, only to receive more frantic tapping in response. My pulse rate upped a few more levels in anticipation of yet another exciting find. Following Opo and the frantic tinging up the dark sand slope, we finally found its source—one of the other dive guides had found a beautiful flamboyant cuttlefish.

There are very few places in the world that remain unknown to the dive community. Let’s face it, scuba enthusiasts are nothing if not resourceful when it comes to finding new and uncharted waters to dive in. But chances are excellent that when you read the title of this article you asked yourself, “Buyat Bay? Where the heck is that?”

The world’s full of triangles. There’s the Love Triangle, the Golden Triangle, the Bermuda Triangle… and then of course, most relevant of all to us divers, there’s the Macrolife Triangle, that blissful figure made up by the Malaysian islands of Lankayan and Kapalai and—at the northern tip of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi—the Strait of Lembeh.