Scuba Conversational - Issue #56
The Four Kings - paradise on Earth and underwater
This Christmas and New Year, we will be back in Northeast Indonesia, among the multi-coloured reefs and emerald, forested rocks of the area off the northwest tip of the island of New Guinea commonly known as Raja Ampat (Four Kings in Indonesian). The four kings are the four major islands of Waigeo, Salawati, Batanta and Misool, and this region is ground zero for biodiversity and the dive destination by which all others are assessed.
But it wasn’t always this way.
Raja Ampat is a network of national marine protected areas (MPAs). The first was not established until 2004 and the most recent only in 2019.
You can find out more about the Raja Ampat MPAs here.
It’s a destination that, in fewer than 20 years, has attained legendary status among travelling scuba divers. It is on everyone’s bucket list, even people who have already been here several times! After all, you do not just do Raja Ampat in one trip and tick it off. Since the discovery of this astonishing marine oasis, the number of known dive sites in the region has exploded…
…and continues to expand. New places are being opened up to adventurous divers all the time. And the natural attractions are not all submarine. The landscapes are as spectacular as the seascapes.
But, as I said, it is all relatively new. In the early days of eastern Indonesia diving, the island of Biak to the east was the focal point and the base for Indonesia’s first year-round dive liveaboard operation long before any divers had ever heard of Raja Ampat. The Garuda flight from the west coast of the USA flew via Hawaii and Biak, landing on the former Japanese airstrip, on its way to Bali and it brought enough divers with it to keep the Tropical Princess liveaboard, based in Biak, solidly booked. Japanese and American divers were the clientele and business was good.
Raja Ampat - Waigeo on my map, top left, was too far for the Tropical Princess to sail to. Besides, there was plenty of excellent diving around Biak and the small islands to the north.
Then the routes changed and the diving world moved on. The Tropical Princess was abandoned and lay for years as a rusting hulk off Sanur in Bali.
Then, in the mid-1990s, a few pioneers started to explore the region more widely. They discovered the vast amalgamations of fish, superb coral reefs and extraordinarily diverse ecosystem that exists among these islands, set up resorts and built liveaboards to attract other divers.
In Kal Muller’s Diving Indonesia Guide, published in 1999, you can see that dive tourism in Raja Ampat was still in its infancy then. It gets no mention at all until page 241 of 275 and even then, we just see accounts of Edi Frommenwiler and his Pindito phinisi operating liveaboard diving in the East Banda Sea close by, and Max and Anita Ammer and their company Irian Diving (later Papua Diving) running ten trips a year out of four dive bases in Manokwari, Sorong, Wai and Kri.
In Kri, they were planning to build a few bungalows.
Here is the Pindito today, still sailing and still exploring. This will be our ride around Raja Ampat in two weeks’ time.
And here is the dive base at Kri, where the few bungalows planned in 1999 turned into the state-of-the-art Kri Eco Resort
These pioneers and others recognized the importance of protecting the marine treasures they had found and, together with local people and conservation agencies, that is how the MPAs came about.
Funding for these comes partly from the money that visitors pay for their annual permits.
What does Raja Ampat look like? Here is a little glimpse.
And what is the diving like?
Below is just one dive site description taken from our Diving & Snorkeling Guide to Raja Ampat & Northeast Indonesia.
The picture above, copied from the guide, was taken by Tim at Mike’s Point.
Just one point of light
This site is next to one of the tiniest of the Dampier Straits islands and, as legend has it, was made even smaller by American bombing during the Second World War. But, below the surface, this unremarkable rock turns into a coral wonderland. You know when you visit a large aquarium and the designers have piled every type of coral they could get their hands on into the space available and you think,
“Yeah, right, as if that’s how it is in the real world!”
Well, at Mike’s Point, that’s how it is.
The hard and soft coral growth on the top ledge at depths from 10ft (3m) to 40ft (12m) is truly phenomenal. And the small fish appreciate it, gathering there in their multiple-thousands. Now if this sounds as if Mike’s Point is a quiet little bimble through nature, think again. You are in the Dampier Straits and current is always a feature. So expect a million fusiliers flying past you as you enjoy the view and expect to be buffeted about as you poke your head out beyond the sheltered quiet zone (there always is a quiet spot and smart guides will drop you in the middle of it.)
Blacktip sharks cruise about and if you venture deeper you will come across a succession of overhangs and undercuts, below the deepest of which are a pile of rocks where the sweetlips usually converge to escape the fast water. This will take you down well beyond 100ft (30m) and probably involve a bit of a heart-thumping roller coaster ride to get there.
Sometimes there are a whole host of sweetlips, and sometimes comparatively few, but you won’t know ‘til you go! The fascinating undersea topography around Mike’s Point extends beyond the immediate vicinity of the island itself. There are further ridges across a valley, which look ripe for exploration if you ever drop in and find yourself with unusually quiet water and substantial visibility.
Our Raja Ampat Guide on Amazon
And a short “look inside” at what we say about The Passage. The diver is Yoko Higashide.
Finally, this is our Guide to the best dives in Indonesia, quite a few of which are in Raja Ampat
Hard-covers
As we are leading up to Christmas, I thought this might be an appropriate time to bring up - in a shameless piece of self-promotion - the subject of my hard-cover books, which are perfectly suited for gifts for your favourite dive buddies/partners/colleagues - hint, hint!
There’s even one for non-divers.
Kindle Direct Publishing, which I use as the main distributor for pretty much all my books, except a few translations, recently started to offer hardback versions and these have proven quite popular. We have a reseller in Europe who placed an order for some books a few months back. I asked them:
“Do you want to try a couple of hardbacks, instead of just paperbacks?”
“No thanks.”
“They look really nice.”
“No, it’s OK.”
“I’ll send you a couple anyway. They only cost a few more Euros than the paperback. My treat. See what you think.”
The reseller hasn’t bought any paperbacks since - but has bought plenty of hardbacks.
I asked why.
“People like the way they feel,” was the reply.
It’s interesting that today when we consume so much digitally, including this newsletter, we can still get joy from something tangible.
These are the books I currently have on sale in hardback.
And here is a lady in Belgium reading her copy of May the People Know I’m Here? with a seasonal background, dog lying at her feet and everything.
And finally on the subject of books, here is one that has nothing to do with scuba diving, but is relevant to our current home base in Taiwan, and still fits into the theme of Scuba Conversational because Orchid Island is one of the top places - if not the very best place - to visit on any dive trip to Taiwan - and there is SO much else to see and do on this unique island.
Here is a short review I wrote to give you an idea of what it’s all about.
“This is a series of beautifully written short stories recounting the experiences of a foreigner who had the rare fortune to spend a year in the company of the Tao people of Taiwan's Orchid Island in the 1970s. The rich descriptions of the island and its people are still relevant today. Gaze down from the hills, see the rock formation that looks like a warship and the two lions which face each other at the edge of the ocean, and the years slide away. Orchid Island today is still the place the author knew and the islanders are still its people. An essential read for a prospective visitor or anyone dreaming about escaping to a different world from the one they know and immersing themselves in a culture where magic still reigns.
Song of Orchid Island on Amazon
Hip, Hip…Hooray
I don’t often write personal stuff in magazines, but Sofie encouraged me to make an exception and share some of the details of my rehabilitation from a hip replacement operation I had in Hong Kong last year.
The perfect place for the story seemed to be my X-Ray magazine column, which has been pretty eclectic in content over the years. Gunild and Peter agreed so that is where we published it.
The link to the article online is here.
Hip,Hip...Hooray in X Ray Magazine
Pics are mostly by Tim Rock.
It begins…
“It was not a lifetime of diving that wore out the cartilage around my right hip joint. It was three or four football matches a week, from my early teens up to about the age of 40. The pain arrived about 20 years after my last match. It did not stop me diving, but it made it uncomfortable. I adapted my finning technique to favour my “good” leg, I made sure I did not have to walk with a tank on my back for longer than was necessary, and I led with my left leg when climbing boat ladders.
Towards the end of the downtime bestowed on us all recently by the pandemic, I decided to talk to a surgeon about having a hip replacement operation. I had been hesitating over it for a while, but during Covid, hikes in Hong Kong’s hills had replaced diving as my regular form of exercise, and it would take a good three days after a hike before I stopped hobbling. This could not continue. Something had to be done. So, I sought the advice of Jason Brockwell, Hong Kong’s top hip surgeon and a keen diver himself.
He told me not to wait and that I should have had the operation several yesterdays before. He also introduced me to Yvonne, a marine biologist who had had the operation a year earlier. She was very positive and described the operation as a “new lease of life.”
By chance, around the same time, I also bumped into Steve, a Hong Kong course director I used to work with, whom I had not seen for 30 years. We went for a coffee in the Landmark Starbucks and, as he sat down opposite me, I noticed that he flexed his right leg out and back again. I joked that it looked like he was doing a hip exercise—I had been checking out YouTube videos—and he told me that was exactly what he was doing. He had had his hip replaced three months before.”
You can download a PDF of the article from the link above and you can download the whole magazine here
Good to know
Another article that appeared in the last couple of weeks was a piece on shallow water blackouts published by EZDIVE, the dual-language magazine with its headquarters in Taipei.
It’s in my regular training column and discusses this poorly understood concept, a deadly phenomenon that has an impact mostly on freedivers and rebreather divers.
It's a topic that comes up in conversation again and again with non-divers and divers alike. The idea that at times a diver is safe while they are deep underwater, but at risk of dying when they are close to the surface flies in the face of all logic and is a hard idea to get one's head around, but it's an important thing to be aware of.
The subject was at the forefront of my mind following the recent tragic death of a young diver collecting food for a family dinner in Eastern Taiwan, and also the experience of watching competition freedivers pass out on a regular basis in the movie The Deepest Breath.
If you are interested in reading more about Shallow Water Blackout, there’s a whole chapter on the subject in my Scuba Exceptional book.
Climate change in the Marshall Islands
Last but certainly not least in this issue, Lorenzo Moscia has sent me links to his video channel, specifically to a film he had made in the Marshall Islands in eastern Micronesia - a country that is one of the most threatened on the planet from rising seas.
Ebadon Island, Marshalls Islands. July 2023,
The Republic of the Marshall Islands is a remote Pacific atoll nation already seeing the impact of climate change. It is considered to be the front line and rising sea levels could make the country disappear. The impact is expected to get a lot worse for them within the next twenty years. Worsening storms, drought, and sea level rise may force the Marshallese to leave soon.
In July of 2023, a small group of engineers, teachers, and scientists travelled to Ebadon, a very small Marshallese island at the northwest tip of Kwajalein Atoll.
They were there to build, with the Marshallese, a climate security research station. This is one more step in enriching a partnership that is helping the Marshallese learn about climate adaptation ideas from around the globe and helping the visitors learn the depth and richness of a Marshallese culture that has been sustainably present in these islands for 3,000 years.
Ebadon, Marshall Islands by Lorenzo Moscia
As you can see from his channel Lorenzo Moscia on YouTube, the films are getting noticed. The Ebadon movie has had 55,000 views.
Before I close, I thought you might like to see another short movie he made about local spearfishermen that really caught my attention.
It reminded me of the book I wrote about the life of Francis Toribiong - The Diver Who Fell from the Sky. When Francis was a child, to feed the family, his mother grew taro and his father caught fish with a spear. When I was doing my research for the chapter on Francis’s upbringing, trying to understand what life was like in 1950s Palau, I came across a book by ichthyologist Eugenie Clark called Lady with a Spear, published following a visit to Palau in 1949. She wrote about the Palauan spear fisherman who accompanied her on her fish-collecting trips, but the description could equally have applied to Francis’s father. (Co-incidentally, Francis and Eugenie were inducted together into the Scuba Diving Hall of Fame!)
This is what she said.
A small red loincloth and homemade goggles formed Siakong’s diving outfit. His spears were his main equipment. They had metal heads and bamboo handles and were deftly balanced so that you could maneuver them underwater with ease. Some of them were 12 feet in length. And they were just light enough for the bamboo end to float so you could recover them easily. He also had several shorter-handled, four-pronged spears for catching small fish.
He would find a reef well populated with fish and then dive down to 10 to 20 feet, sometimes weighting himself with a rock so he could sink without swimming. He’d get a firm grip on the reef with his legs or free arm, poise his spear in readiness and then wait for the fish to come to him! He dived and lay motionless on the reef, like an animal about to spring on its prey. His brown body and red loincloth blended in with the kaleidoscope of colors on the surrounding reef. The fish began to regard him as part of the corals and came very close.
When you watch the video that Lorenzo made in the 2020s, you see how, in some parts of the world, life has changed little in the last 70 years or more. For the Marshallese, change is coming soon
Right, that’s it from me for this issue.
Chat with you again in a few weeks in Scuba Conversational #57.