wrecked

Sal started today looking and sounding as if she was at death's door. I offered to can my diving so I could look after the kids but she insisted that I go. To be fair, I would have looked after the kids but there would be a teeny weeny risk of me getting my grump on...so after grabbing a million and a half rupiah from a nearby ATM to help Sal get through the day I buggered off.

There was a bit of drama collecting one of the divers that I'll not bore you with. Suffice it to say we left Seminyak almost an hour later than expected, we being 3 dive guides/staff and 4 diver - me, a middle aged woman from Calgary and 2 lads from Leeds who were about to do their first open water dives.

My first open water dives were not really open water at all, so let me call them dives-not-in-a-pool. They were in the pit at Gildenburgh about 20 years ago. These lads were about to dive on one of the best wreck/shores dives anywhere in the world (allegedly.) Good on them. Anyway, we had this chat in Booster Coffee, a half decent coffee shop just out of Denpasar. Maybe, I don't really know. It's late and I can't be arsed to look it up on a map.

We were off to dive the USS (or USAT, depending on where you look. Sometimes USAT/USS) Liberty. In short - US military cargo ship, built 1918, torpedoed off Lombok by the Japanese in 1942, towed to Bali but took on too much water so beached at Tulamben, where it stayed until 1963 when the Mount Agung volcano erupted, it fell on its side and slid into the ocean. Which is where you can now find it - pretty beaten up, but a recognizable bow and stern and some superstructure still intact. It sits on a sloping sand/silt floor about 30m off shore. The top is in about 5m and the bottom around 30m, making it a dive for everyone.

The one real downside is that is it a 3 hour drive from Seminyak, but hey, I got to see a bit more of Bali and that is no bad thing. Already quite comfortable in the knowledge that Bali traffic works on a system of everyone trusting everyone else and no one getting angry, I settled in trying to ignore the overtaking uphill on blind corners in the rain. Did I mention the weather was more like wet than dry season?

I could and should describe more about the countryside but it's late and I'm tired so I won't. We got to Tulamben Paradise Resort from where we'd be diving. It is right on the water's edge a couple of hundred metres from the wreck. As there were only a few of us today I was buddied up wiht a dive guide and no one else. Happy days! Having been given a few dive options back in the cafe I'd already stated my preference - 2 dive on the wreck.

The two dives were really one with a bit of a break in the middle I suppose. After an inelegant waddle over the pebbles and into the water we dropped to the bottom and made our way to the deepest section of the wreck and then slowly back up again. Dive 2 was broadly similar, only we went to about 22m and did a bit more in and out of the mid section that still has some super structure and swim throughs.

I figure that any non-divers reading will be getting a bit bored already, and any divers will already be off looking at other people's pictures - I didn't take my camera. So I'll just rattle off a few things we saw. Bump Head Parrot Fish, garden eels (that are a lot larger than I expected) Ribbon eels (that were a lot smaller than I expected), mantis shrimp and mimic octopus. Given the number of divers on the wreck, my guide - whose name I have obviously forgotten - did a great job of avoiding them and for the first 30m of each dive it was almost as if we had the wreck to ourselves. Very nice diving indeed, and I can imagine that on a better day with bright sun overhead it would really pop. Go google USS Liberty Bali and hit images.

Right, that's it for now. I'm just back from watching Australia draw with Belgium in the world cup. I drank shite beer and I'm tired. Maybe I'll fill in the gaps a bit later.