I realised that I hadn’t really posted much about the wreck itself. Getting there was very convenient. It required a short walk to the beach from the dive centre. We didn’t even need to take our full gear with us, just fins and mask, as the porters would carry our tanks and BCDs out to the beach. On the pebble beach itself, we put on our BCDs then waded into the sea to a suitable depth before leaning back and putting on our fins. When we were all ready, it was time to descend and fin out slowly to the wreck, just a few tens of metres away. Even though the focal point was the wreck, there was still plenty to see along the way. Some days we saw the resident barracuda swim past, other days we saw large schools of fish gathering till they formed a group large enough to provide safety in numbers, like these yellow streak fusiliers. There were so many of them that they cast a dark shadow over the pebbles below.
There wasn’t a great deal of actual wreck to see. Most of the ship is so broken up that it’s hard to find an end, let alone tell which end is bow and which stern. The best I saw was a gun turret sticking out from under a mess of plates overgrown with coral.
At other parts, the wreck simply formed a pretty frame for the coral to grow on. It was obvious that no natural scape would look like this, overrun with coral or not. It was lovely to catch a poor of moorish idols swimming idyllically through the crevices.
Before leaving, we had to take a group shot. There’s Wayan next to me, then Janine and Howard, the couple from Australia; and Gordon, the Scottish photographer who spend a month a Tulamben just to take award-winning photos. Hard core.
Then it was time to say goodbye and head to my next spot in Bali.
eat. drink. cook. travel. 