I choose to dive with local dive shops (Coron Divers in this case), not necessarily because they are usually cheaper but also to make sure more of the money I spend here stays in the local economy. The feeling is also very nice; we quickly make friends with them. The funny (!) thing about diving with local dive masters is that usually they do many things most western dive masters would warn you not to do. My dive guide in Bali, Ketut had tried really hard to make a puffer fish puff, poking it with his stick but later I learned that this fish can puff a couple of times in a whole lifetime and then it dies. So this is not a great thing to do; better not to touch things. Yesterday’s feat was the table-size giant clams which were quite reluctant to close up like the small ones but our guides managed to do it anyway.Another thing many western dive masters would think twice before doing was guiding us into those wrecks. Although we were 3 inexperienced divers (one first-timer) and two dive masters, some of the entries and exits were pretty scary. Our pipes and dangly parts got stuck several times but nothing serious happened because they were really carefully watching everybody’s moves and we were following each other closely. But next time I attempt a wreck dive I’ll ask for gloves; 60 year old rusty metal cuts are pretty irritating.
I can’t help it; when I’m inside a dead ship I think about the people who died there and think this place can also be my grave if I make just a couple of wrong moves. Although driving feels far more risky then diving, the chances of being rescued is greater and the time during which one can be saved is longer, whereas in diving it is a matter of seconds or minutes. In fact just the day before we took a sightseeing/snorkeling boat tour with 6 other people we just met. While we were snorkeling in our first stop, one of them, a 64 year old professor drowned. We tried to rescue her. We were fortunate to have a first aid instructor with us who knew CPR and emergency breathing and all that stuff but we were too late to save her. She just died snorkeling with a life vest on. Well it was surely her time but also it was just a few crucial minutes between saving her and not. Makes one reflect on how thin this string we are attached to life is.
Inside the wrecks is magic. Small doors opening in to big dark spaces where one looses the sense of direction (including up and down), little holes which let in rays of deep blue sunlight and families of fish around their chosen little cavities. I try in vain to find a bone or any sign of past human life but all I found was rusty metal and broken glass. We move from one hull to the other through narrow corridors of a capsized shipwreck and suddenly I realized a beautiful but deadly poisonous lionfish only one meter right in front of my face. We both have no space to back off; so I remember the no-panic principle and my encounters with snakes and keep floating with tiny beats of my fins. One of the guys in front of me step on the dusty bottom creating a big dust cloud in which we are lost once more. I hold on to a rusty door pane and wait a little to see what’s in front of me. We turn around and enter a big space with two gigantic metal circles which are perhaps engines or tanks. A big triggerfish is nesting in the bottom. I see once more how life springs from death of another thing and death is just the result of life.
At the end of each of my spacewalks in the ocean universe I get anxious to breath freely, be in my own habitat. I love the alien feeling and the no-gravity effect under water but once again the other place becomes a mirror and I learn the value of our nice and perfectly habitable sphere of existence. I give thanks, move on.
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I didn't take these photos ;)
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