“Stories don’t have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.” Steven Spielberg.

Jack Connick, proprietor of Seattle’s Ocean Optical Sales takes us on an illustrated tour of Indonesia’s Forgotten Islands. Also known as the Southeast Moluccas (Maluku Tenggara) these are not a single destination, but rather a 1,000 km long chain of archipelagos stretching from Timor to West Papua on the island of New Guinea. Traveling on board Damai 1, Jack and his party embarked at Ambon and “island hopped” through the area, before disembarking 10 days later at Alor.

Jack describes the fantastic variety of the diving: “The next several days were spent island hopping, diving along colorful walls, reefs, and slopes. Tranquil blue waters loaded with life both small and large — on many dives we saw huge tuna swim by. Visibility was up and down, sometimes a bit murky for photography, but always good diving. Most of these islands and sites see divers only a few times a year — if that. Remote, isolated and “forgotten,” hundreds of miles away from any inhabited places, they aren’t even seen by local fishermen. It was a real adventure to dive, and know we saw places that other divers rarely, if ever, see.”