Tulamben: Diving the Liberty
We stayed in Kuta for five days while John was on antibiotics—which cleared up his infection—and I tried (and failed) to become a surfer-girl. Then, with just three days of his holiday left, it was time to go diving.
The weather was so unreliable and we were so short of time that we gave up our original plan of heading to the Gilli Islands. Instead, we chose Tulamben, famed for the wreck of the USS ‘Liberty’ which sank in shallow water when Gunung Agung erupted in 1963. The ship had been beached near the village since WWII when it limped to shore after being struck by a Japanese torpedo. Nowadays, the wreck is thickly encrusted with life and home to hundreds of species of fish.
I felt reasonably confident about diving. Tulamben is probably the safest dive site in the region and I had had no further panic attacks in the past two weeks. If it wasn’t for John I would have been more hesitant, but we have dived together for years and taken part in enough drills to be completely confident with assisted ascends and rescue—BSAC training is strict, in accordance with the greater demands of cold-water diving. And yet, I did not feel completely comfortable during any of our four dives. Neither did John: visibility wasn’t great, he felt cold in his wetsuit while I struggled with my over-sized stab-jacket and we both had ill-fitting regulators. None of these little hickups would have mattered when we were diving in Scotland, but we were woefully out of practice. On all the dives, my un-ease passed soon enough, but I had to ask myself when I would actually give the signal to surface. Would I recognize the early signs of panic? Was there too much pride at stake?
As we entered the water for our first dive, our guide Actho (pronounced ‘at-schoo’) blew his O-ring which did little to allay my nerves. John was instantly upon him while Actho almost succeeded in turning off the bottle himself, reaching behind his neck. He only lost 30-odd bars of air and was entirely unperturbed. Within minutes he had replaced the O-ring and we were ‘go’.
As soon as we reached the wreck, my unease evaporated as I became engrossed in a study of jewel-like stalked tunicates among the mass of encrusting organisms. Actho pointed out nudibranches and a scorpion fish, which would have been invisible to the inexperienced eye. While we drifted leisurely along the structure, occasionally peeking around broken-up sections of the ship or peering into barrel sponges big enough to climb into, we were accompanied by hundreds of fish, including several spectacular emperor angelfish which pestered Actho for the bananas he’d taken along. There were some big fish too: he pointed out a napoleon wrasse in the distance, John claimed he saw a barracuda and we all spotted a blacktip reefshark which hovered motionless against the backdrop of the wreck. It seemed docile enough.
Every now and then we passed through invisible clouds of stinging nematocysts released by encrusting hydroids and a massive anemone which Actho couldn’t resist teasing, although it was big enough to engulf his entire forearm. Under his guidance, we spent our 6m deco-stop in the company of spotted garden eels which swayed in the slow current like seaweed. John was convinced they were seaweed. Time for a new contact lens prescription for that boy.
Actho had not believed me when I told him that I required 10kg of lead—he had fitted 8 kg to my weight belt and I hadn’t counted the weights, with the result that with my near-empty tank I had trouble controlling my buoyancy above 6m. The slope to the beach was so gentle that we still had a while to go and a hasty ascend would look undignified. But Actho gave me the right idea when he grabbed two stones. I hastily followed suit. Of course, he had no problem with his buoyancy (despite carrying only 2kg of weights): he banged the stones sharply together just above the ground and an irrate mantis shrimp (Gonodactylus chiagra?) instantly appeared at the opening of its burrow, ready to deliver a karate-blow with its supercharged claw.
We dived the ‘Liberty’ again the following afternoon. This time there was no reef shark, but on our return a surprise awaited us in the shallows. Sprawled across the dark sand and grey stones were the vivid ochre-brown and black striped arms of what I at first took to be a brittle star. But these arms were smooth and they encircled a body that unmistakably belonged to an octopus. I had never seen anything like it before. Apparently few zoologists have, because consulting the 1996 edition of Gosliner et al.’s Coral Reef Animals of the Indo-Pacific revealed that this species is unclassified and simply noted as ‘Octopus sp. 7’. That is unlikely to still be the case, but nevertheless I felt the thrilling tingle of discovery.
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Denni