Scuba Conversational - Issue #55
Exploration
Some things take time - but they are well worthwhile.
Over a decade ago, Tim Rock and I started writing some Indonesian scuba guidebooks, basing our approach on a template he had used successfully for books on diving in Micronesia and elsewhere.
First, we released an update to his Bali guide. That was the easy bit. Sofie and I were living there at the time and just needed to throw our gear into the car now and then and head off around the coast.
Then we decided to work on a guide to Northeast Indonesia, including Raja Ampat, Triton Bay, Cendrawasih Bay, Biak and Halmahera. Triton Bay had just appeared on the dive map, the whale sharks had just been found under the fishing bagans of Cendrawasih Bay, and Halmahera was virtually unknown, but highly promising, just by its very location, at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
This book took a lot more work and involved a lot of exploration, as we were visiting areas that had previously rarely been dived or, in the case of Biak, had not been visited for decades and had never been written about.
We worked with some excellent folk who shared our interest in finding great new places to dive or visiting known sites, but “out of season”, as it were.
I should note here that often in Indonesia, diving seasons are dictated not by the weather or by the quality of the diving but by liveaboard schedules, which, in the past, tended to revolve around the need to be in Komodo in mid-year and Raja Ampat at the end of each year.
But Alberto Reija with Damai and Uwe Gunther with Tambora were happy to break that template. They had their own ideas, were also very happy to listen to ours, and they helped us to explore parts of Indonesia that lay out of the reach of standard liveaboard schedules and far away from any land-based dive centres.
And, a few years later, in 2016, we published our Diving and Snorkeling Guide to Raja Ampat & Northeast Indonesia. (It was updated in 2019.)
Once that was done, our next step was to begin work on what we - ambitiously - thought of as a “Central Indonesia” guide. It didn’t take long before we realised that this was an enormous project and it was going to take more than one book - maybe three - to cover this enormous region.
But the scattergun approach we used in the first couple of years of this endeavour was not entirely wasted, as it gave us plenty of material for our 50 Best Dives in Indonesia book, which should probably have been called “Some Great Indonesian Dives” - but a little hyperbole and a nice round number always helps sell books. Just ask the authors of Fifty Places to Dive Before You Die! or 100 Dives of a Lifetime.
So, we had to tighten our focus a little and decided that the first volume of the Central Indonesia trilogy - as it will eventually become - should concentrate on an area which which was poorly known to divers but seemed extremely promising, the Banda Sea.
Here it is, with East Timor (and Northern Australia beyond) to the south, the island of Papua to the east and Halmahera to the north. Banda is not only a paradise for scuba divers but it is also a place rich in history as the home of the fabled Spice Islands, the search for which led to the period of the European voyages of discovery that shaped the world we live in today.
Plenty of material for a book then.
So, as of 2019, we were pretty much ready. We had made a good number of trips to the area, assembled lots of dive site and topside information, photos and stories and were almost ready to go. But not quite. The southern set of Banda Sea islands was still mostly a mystery to us. We had dived Alor in the west and we had visited and done a little diving on Yamdena and around Babar to the east, but everything in between was still a complete mystery. Very few liveaboard dive boats had ever visited the region and even then, they had only dipped their toe in the water before moving on to the “hammerhead rocks” in the inner ring of islands, Teun, Nila, Serua, Manuk etc.
Whole groups of islands - Wetar, Kisar, the Leti group, the Sermata group and more - were virtually unknown. And no liveaboard boats had these on their itinerary.
Then we met up with Cecile and Brian.
A brief digression…
Something that often happens with dive operations - floating or static - is that when they start up, they want to differentiate themselves from others, and are open to new ideas and a little exploration. Typically, once they have a good clientele and a fixed schedule, the focus shifts from novelty to maintenance, that is - keep doing what you do and do it well.
It was the same when I opened my dive shop in Guam. I was the first dive operator in Micronesia to offer training in helium-based gases, deep planned decompression diving, organised wreck penetration and rebreathers, so I needed deep sites and new places where my divers would not get in the way of regular sport-diving operations and they would not be distracted by what we were doing.
We would be doing dives with long multi-gas hangs on lines and decompression stations with support divers, emergency gas supplies and topside supervision. If a boat full of 30 single tank divers turned up and dropped in on top of us, we would get in the way of what they were doing and they would often disrupt our plans. We found this out the hard way, of course…
So we developed sites in the south of Agat Bay beyond Black Coral Kingdom and in a canyon just south of Anae Island just for this purpose. We would also do complex penetrations inside the harbour wrecks and super-long 100m / 300ft plus dives along the Orote peninsula in the afternoons when nobody else was around.
But, once we had completed our initial exploration and had the sites and schedules set up, we never looked any further - something I quite regret now, as even in a small place which gets hundreds of divers a day, there are always new, wonderful sites to find. Typically, everywhere in the world, dive operators take people to dive in the same old spots, day after day, year after year. Of course, this is because the sites are good and because sites become famous and they have to meet customer demand, but they are never the only places available.
Anyway, back to our Banda Sea plans…
Cecile and Brian were just launching a new liveaboard, the Carpe Diem phinisi. We knew Cecile, having met her on a Banda Sea crossing on the Tambora liveaboard years before. At that time, she wasn’t a professional dive person. Now she was. Brian was a former colleague of hers in a completely non-diving-related industry and they had teamed up to buy a beautiful dive boat and run dive operations- initially at least, with Brian in the office and Cecile on the boat. We explained that there was an area of the Banda Sea that we wanted to look at closely and, luckily for us, they were keen to add something new to their itinerary. Another bonus for us was that their lead dive guide was the talented Agus Wongkar, who we knew well from his days with both Damai and Tambora.
So, in late 2019, all our plans were in place for the following year.
And you know what happened next…
…
…
Four years later, in September we and friends Heidi, Dan, Sarah, Koen and Sue boarded the Carpe Diem in Kalabahi Bay in Alor and set off for Saumlaki on Yamdena via the southern outer Banda Sea ring of islands.
This was a spectacular journey. The diving in some areas was so good we stayed longer than planned. After all, if you have found somewhere world-class, why leave too quickly?
I make frequent notes on trips like this, as you might expect. Here is what I wrote after one particular afternoon dive.
We embarked on this exploratory trip across the very rarely dived southernmost islands of the Banda Sea with the Carpe Diem phinisi in the hope of discovering sites like this and being lucky enough to dive them when they were running with the adrenalin throttle wide open.
The dive we had at the site we have called Fishbowl was everything we dreamed of. About halfway along the north-facing beach, about a kilometre from the point, the wall turns 90 degrees and heads north for a while before resuming its usual east-to-west trajectory. Just after the wall turns, you will spot a large crevice guarded by a dozen huge barrel sponges. If the conditions are just right, the crevice will be full of a swirling mass of life, there will be schools circling in the depths below you and out to see, you will get glimpses of more vast aggregations.
At the time of this dive, the current was running east to west, and we found a shelf at about 17m, searched and found a bare patch of rock (it was not easy; the wall is almost completely covered in marine life), locked our reef hooks in and floated up to watch the action. It was simply staggering. The fish were schooling all around us, blocking out our vision at times and we started making a mental note of the different species we were looking at so we could write it all down later.
I ended by commenting…
“One of the dives of our lives – and we’ve had a few.”
The trip was wonderful. The boat was excellent and now Tim and I have to produce the book. (Much gratitude to Sarah, Cecile, Heidi and Sue for their help in providing images!)
If you want to find out more about Carpe Diem, check out their page here.
We will certainly be doing more trips with them and have put in an itinerary wish list. There is more exploring to be done.
Here is their mission statement. Pretty much sums it all up, doesn’t it?
Smart Dive Watches: A Computer Revolution?
In my book Scuba Physiological, I quote an expert as saying:
“Most recreational divers today use dive computers and trust them completely. However … the algorithms they use are far from perfect and even the most reliable computers still accept a probability of DCS ranging from 2 to 5% … Most recreational divers do not know this. Professionals in diving medicine and technology know that DCS is always possible, albeit rare.
The complex physiology of decompression involves not only gas pressures and virtual compartments or other models but also highly variable physiological parameters such as body temperature and hydration state. We believe that any major effort to improve decompression algorithms in recreational dive computers may be a costly and ultimately rather futile endeavour unless this is directed towards a personalised decompression algorithm that considers individual physiological parameters.
The reliability limit of existing dive computer validation protocols has been reached and the new frontier will be to further improve our ability to customise the conservatism levels in dive computers according to physiological variables. This could be based on … real-time sensor technology permitting a direct diver-to-dive computer interface.”
In my latest article in X-Ray magazine, I suggest that the arrival of direct diver to computer interfaces is closer than you might think. I talk about what’s happening here in Taiwan, a distant outpost of the international diving scene in tourism terms, but right at the hub of technological development. I cast my mind back to earlier in the year when we visited the Taiwan Dive Resort & Technology show.
“During the weekend, I spoke with the folks at the Atmos, Crest and Garmin stands and learnt that, over the past three years, a revolution had taken place in the Taiwan scuba market, which is youthful, open-minded and highly accepting of innovation. All three companies manufacture smart fitness watches, which have full dive computer functionality and monitor aspects of your physiological status all the time, not only while you are diving, but while you sleep, while you work, and while you play—basically whenever you are wearing them. They therefore also track what you are doing between dives.”
Here is the cover of X-Ray issue 121, together with a link where you can download the magazine as a PDF free of charge.
Or you can read the article online and just download an article PDF from this link
Smartwatch Dive Computer: A Safety Revolution?
Multi-purpose smartwatches like the offerings from Atmos, Crest and Garmin point the way forward. And if Garmin’s entry into the world of scuba diving computers was not game-changing enough, then the arrival of Apple and now Huawei on the diving scene should signal the beginning of the eventual end of single-purpose dive computers, at least for standard no-decompression-stop diving.
I talked about the Apple/Oceanic venture in an earlier issue of Scuba Conversational. This is their latest publicity blurb. Now you have the possibility of computer redundancy or your camera doubling as your dive computer (or vice versa).
“Now you can use your iPhone as both an underwater camera and dive computer! Your Oceanic+ Dive Housing allows you to take great photos with automatic colour correction on your iPhone when diving or during any water adventure, and now, with the Oceanic+ app and Dive Housing, your iPhone also becomes a fully functional dive computer.
One app, one subscription, two devices! With the Oceanic+ app, you can use the same subscription for both the Apple Watch Ultra and iPhone. This allows you to have two units sharing the same subscription to save you money. It also provides greater redundancy for diving with both the Apple Watch Ultra and iPhone with Oceanic+ Dive Housing. At the end of each dive, the primary computer will be selected for your dive data.”
Here’s the video
The combination of the Oceanic+ app and Dive Housing
And while I am on the subject, I mentioned the death knell sounding for specialist computers for regular scuba diving. I would be highly nervous if I was still involved in making technical diving computers too.
Here are just under sixty seconds of a diver using his Huawei smartwatch to track a helium-based mixed gas, multi-gas dive to 100m (330ft) in Dubai’s amazing deep, deep, deep pool. If you are in any doubt that the times they are a-changing, take a look at this.
Taking the Huawei Watch Ultimate to 100m (300ft)
Words of a Pioneer
I was delighted the other day to see that Joel Silverstein, one of the key pioneering divers and journalists in the early days of technical diving, had read my Technically Speaking book. He is certainly one of those individuals without whom it would never have happened and I am grateful for his kind words.
“Simon masterfully chronicles the tumultuous early days of technical diving. Drawing from interviews, magazine articles, reports, and firsthand accounts, he captures the birth and evolution of Technical Diving.
Despite its challenging beginnings marked by limited resources, close shaves, and numerous fatalities, technical diving transitioned from an obscure branch of recreational diving to a globally recognized practice. Central to its evolution was the introduction and widespread adoption of Oxygen Enriched Air (OEA), commonly known as NITROX. Initially met with controversy, its acceptance and incorporation into mainstream diving was hard-won through the dedication of many.
To me, this book is nostalgic, bringing back memories of relationships formed since 1988 and reminding me of my involvement in this transformative era. Pridmore chronicles the events of a wide community of men and women, goverment agencies, and small and large businesses with respect and finesse. He omits the petty disputes and rivalries and emphasizes the collective mission: pushing the boundaries of scuba for cave, wreck, and species exploration.
Whether you're a seasoned diver from that time or new to technical and rebreather diving, this book is a compelling read. While pioneers like Cousteau and Gagnan gave us the Aqualung, the trailblazers highlighted in this book elevated its use, leveraging alternative gases to expand underwater exploration.
Kudos to Simon for preserving these pivotal moments and stories in diving history.”
Technically Speaking : Talks on Technical Diving Volume 1: Genesis and Exodus
Thank you, Joel.
Rebreather Forum 4 Videos
To end on another technical note, but this time bang up to date, the Rebreather forum IV people have released more videos from the event on their website.
Of the recent releases, I particularly enjoyed John Clarke on CCR scrubber technology - MUCH more entertaining than you might imagine -Richie Kohler on Emergency Procedures and Keving Gur and Phil Short on Blue Sky Future CCR Technologies.
I highly recommend you catch these while you can. Experience suggests they won’t be up online forever and, if you have just a passing interest in technical diving, you will find them thought-provoking.
Here’s the page
Enjoy!!!
Right, that’s it from me for this issue. Chat with you again in a few weeks in Scuba Conversational #56.
Hi Milt, that would be cool to go back and live there. We will be passing through Guam for a few days next June. Keep us in touch with your movements. It would be great to catch up.
Cheers!
Dear Simon, Issue #55 remind us how beautifull our world of diving and memories from the trips.
This is a great issue as always. I wouldn’t want anything more than going diving with you guys.
Thank you