Chris88, the SPS weren't browned out at all. I just don't have a strobe light to bring out the colours, and you're never going to see a reef like Lobsterboy's tank. My closeups with the flash you can see colour, but some of the SPS are brown, it's just that you won't see them brought into an aquarium store, just like a boring coloured fish. A lot of the corals you see are soft corals too, which are usually a brown colour. I never saw any dead coral anywhere which was amazing, especially considering there was garbage floating everywhere on the surface.
All of the dives around Bunaken were cliff dives and we would go down to about 100ft. I actually liked it when we were first decending or re-surfacing and on top of the reef as the colours were brighter and the coral usually thicker. If I had more time, I would have done a dive and just stayed on top of the reef instead of going along the cliff. The muck diving at Lembeh was always about 22m max. Really poor visibility and not a real "reef", although you would see a lot of goniopora, some elegence coral and all different anenomes and the odd brain, hammer/frogspawn or soft coral. It was mainly just for the critters.
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