String 17 Posted November 28, 2019 (edited) Thought i'd posted this before but i don't think i did. A slightly-too-long compilation of 3 days of Oceanic Mantas at Black Rock in the Mergui Archipelago, Myanmar. Very unusual trip in that (i) lots of mantas there and (ii) the visibility wasnt 5m of green for once! Underwater shot with a Canon EOS70D with and without a magic filter. I know there are frame rate stutter issues in places. No sound track as i dont actually have any music stored locally to put onto the footage. Edited November 28, 2019 by String 4 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Placebo365 16 Posted November 28, 2019 Really enjoyed that String. Nice one. You can never get tired of seeing Mantas hey. Black Rock is a trip Ive wanted to do for years now but I work Ko Lanta, so our high season runs the same as yours and I can never get away. You got some great underside ID shots there too, do you upload them to Manta Matcher? I'm sure these Mantas travel between here (Hin Daeng/Hin Muang) and Black Rock but who knows. Anyway, sounds like an amazing trip. I'll make it there one day! Sent from my CLT-L29 using Tapatalk Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
String 17 Posted November 28, 2019 (edited) 1 hour ago, Placebo365 said: Really enjoyed that String. Nice one. You can never get tired of seeing Mantas hey. Black Rock is a trip Ive wanted to do for years now but I work Ko Lanta, so our high season runs the same as yours and I can never get away. You got some great underside ID shots there too, do you upload them to Manta Matcher? I'm sure these Mantas travel between here (Hin Daeng/Hin Muang) and Black Rock but who knows. Anyway, sounds like an amazing trip. I'll make it there one day! Sent from my CLT-L29 using Tapatalk We go there roughly once a month (OK less this year due to the crazy myanmar visa price and new $1000 per boat fee they've introduced!). Myanmar can be highly variable. Typically 3-5m vis and green, sometimes the Mantas are around Black rock (and the Twins), sometimes not. Once a year in roughly February they seem to congregate for a few days in large numbers then vanish (this video was shot over a period of 3 days/12 dives - normally we do 1 day at black rock but customers kept voting to stay so we did). As far as IDs go, we had 50 different individual mantas on this particular trip and yes, I submit to Manta Matcher). Unusually the vis was 15m+ and blue water as opposed to 5m of green as well. The following year we only had 1 day of Manta madness there but got 20 different IDs over 4 dives, the next day there they'd all gone. This time though they were breaching, sometimes as 1s, sometimes as pairs so behaviour was completely different. What was interesting is both seasons we didn't have the same manta on more than 1 dive so that hints there's a very large number of them moving through the area. A lot of the Manta IDs came back as new but several had been seen at Koh Bon / Similans several years previously. Also some of the ones we get in the Similans come back as being at Black Rock and further north so they clearly move around a lot over several years. Edited November 28, 2019 by String 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
