Banda Sea

• Banda Islands ISRA Factsheet (2024), IUCN SSC Shark Specialist Group
• Rapid coral colonization of a recent lava flow following a volcanic eruption, Banda Islands, Indonesia (Tomascik, van Woesik & Mah 1996), Coral Reefs 15: 169-175
• Report on Banda Api (Indonesia) — June 1988, Smithsonian Institution Global Volcanism Program
• Response of the Banda Sea to the southeast monsoon (Moore, Marra & Alkatiri 2003), Marine Ecology Progress Series 261: 41-49
• Scalloped Hammerhead (Sphyrna lewini) movement behavior toward diver in Banda waters, Maluku (Mukharror & Ibrahim 2022), IOP Conf. Series: Earth and Environmental Science 1119
• Banda Islands, Wikipedia
• Manuk (island), Banda Sea, Wikipedia
• Gunungapi Wetar, Wikipedia
• Banda Sea Liveaboard Diving Trips, Indonesia, Dive The World
• The Arenui — Schedule & Rates, The Arenui
• Best Dive Sites Banda Sea, Neptune Liveaboards
• How to plan a Banda Sea liveaboard holiday, The Midnight Blue Elephant
• Liveaboards in Banda Sea, Indonesia, LiveAboard.com
• Taman Wisata Perairan Laut Banda, Wikipedia (Indonesian)
• Banda Sea water temperature, seatemperature.info
• Pattimura Airport, Ambon, Wikipedia
• Bandanaira Airport, Wikipedia

Note on the data: Load-bearing claims are primary-sourced: the hammerhead aggregations, their size and the mid-September to early-December window come from the IUCN SSC Shark Specialist Group's 2024 Banda Islands ISRA factsheet, which also flags that the factsheet's own window rests partly on a dive-operator personal communication and that the aggregations remain 'undefined' scientifically. The Lava Flow coral figures are from Tomascik, van Woesik & Mah (1996) in Coral Reefs; the 1988 eruption from the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program; the monsoon and upwelling pattern from Moore et al. (2003) and Iskandar (2010) as cited in the ISRA factsheet. Weaker areas: operating months, crossing durations and prices come from operator schedules and booking sites only, and a few boats do advertise into early December, which is why 12 is left out of the operating season rather than included. Operator hammerhead encounter rates of 70-90% are unverified marketing figures and are not reflected in the species coding. Site coordinates are island-level positions, not surveyed dive-site GPS; Suanggi, Pulau Koon and Nil Desperandum are the least precise. One naming trap worth knowing: 'Gunung Api' here is Banda Api, the 641m active volcano beside Banda Neira that produced the 1988 lava flow — a different island from Gunungapi Wetar (6°38'S 126°39'E), the isolated Banda Sea volcano also marketed as a sea-snake island and only reached on long Forgotten Islands routes. Sea-snake species identity was checked deliberately: the animals in numbers are banded sea kraits (Laticauda colubrina), not the olive sea snake (Aipysurus laevis) that dive marketing often names. No per-diver marine park fee was found for Taman Wisata Perairan Laut Banda from the managing ministry. Water temperatures are interpolated, not measured monthly at Banda. Water temperature: Interpolated from regional sea-surface averages and the monsoon cycle rather than a per-month gauge at Banda: the northwest monsoon (December-March) is the warm end and the southeast monsoon with its large-scale upwelling (June-September) the cool end, a seasonal swing of roughly 3°C. The minC values in the cooler months also carry the thermoclines divers actually meet on the seamounts, which operators and divers commonly report at 25-26°C during the September-November window. Access: Fly a domestic leg from Jakarta, Makassar or Bali into Ambon (AMQ, no longer an international airport), then about an hour by road to the harbour; from there the diving is reached by repeated overnight open-ocean crossings, the longest regular legs running roughly 12-18 hours, and one-way itineraries finishing in Saumlaki or Sorong add a second domestic flight home. Independently verified 2026-08-28: the two-window season is real but was cut a month short — three operators (LiveAboard.com, Explorer Ventures and others) run departures into December, so operatingSeasonMonths now includes it and the hammerhead peak extends to December. The ISRA factsheet support for the Sep-Dec hammerhead aggregation is genuine and already cited. Sea-krait aggregation confirmed real, but the per-dive counts (8-25 typical, 40-50 peak) rest only on operator sources, so the tradeoff now says 'dozens' rather than 'hundreds'.