Two Fish Divers Lembeh — Small PADI 5 Star Dive Resort on a Private Beach in the Lembeh Strait

Two Fish Divers Lembeh is the Lembeh Strait outpost of Two Fish Divers, a PADI 5 Star operator that has been running in Indonesia for 25 years and also has centres in Amed, Nusa Penida, Sanur and on Bunaken. The resort sits on a private beach on Lembeh Island, in the middle of the strait, so most dive sites are within 20 minutes by boat and dives can run up to 75 minutes.

It is deliberately small: six wooden ocean-view Superior Cottages and two Garden Rooms, a maximum of 16 divers, full board at the resort's own restaurant and no more than four divers per guide. The guides are critter specialists, finding mimic octopus, hairy frogfish, pygmy seahorses, blue-ringed octopus, flamboyant cuttlefish, wonderpus and Rhinopias on the black-sand slopes, with up to four dives a day including dusk and night dives. At Lembeh the team runs fun diving, the PADI Open Water and Advanced Open Water courses and house-reef snorkelling; Discover Scuba, Rescue and specialty courses are taught at the Bunaken resort, and the Walls & Muck Safari combines the two.

At the time of writing, two boat dives cost from IDR 1,650,000, Garden Rooms start at IDR 805,000 per person per night full board, and dive-and-stay packages start at IDR 5,940,000 per person for three nights with four boat dives. Nitrox is available. The resort is reached by a two-hour drive from Manado airport to Bitung, then a 15-minute boat ride, and the calmest conditions are usually March to June and September to November.