Diving with Vincent Dives: Day 2
We awoke to our first dive of the whole trip, morning was overcast, mostly cloudy day with little sun. But man! were we ever ready to get into the water!!
Our first dive was pretty technical, coz we were taking our advanced divers course. We didn’t see much since we were doing stuff on improving our bouyancy as well as underwater navigation. All this done on the deck of a sunken BULK CARRIER SHIP!
The Wreck is an italian ship which sunk in indonesian waters in 1973. It was called IGARA. Apparently it struck some rocks on its maiden voyage (and got quite a lot of insurance from it!) and travelled a little further till it arrived and sunk at errr.. that location.. (No GPS, sorry)
Here is a drawing done by DrMike on the IGARA. He was also on the boat with us and he used a rebreather gear on the dive. Pretty cool stuff as he could stay at the bottom for 3-4 hours! (you can see more images of the IGARA wreck from DrMike’s website here)
The ship was at that time carrying iron ore, and part of the ship was salvaged. The salvage people blasted off part of the ship with the engine and propellor, then towed it back for salvage. The rest of the Ship lies today there. Good thing for us is that this wreck lies about on the seabed of about 42 metres, so its quite assessible to divers. Another good thing is that not many dive groups can go to this site to dive (due to some marine legal mumbo jumbo, only our White Manta boat could get there without incuring trouble), means its marine life is still relatively nice and untouched.
On our second dive on the wreck, we went to the stern of the ship, and there were plenty of fishes there. A whole school of Barracudas swam past us, and not only that, they circled around us for quite awhile. A School of Trevally also joined in… It was truly a surreal experience!! Too bad, none of us had any cameras… Hai, but its gonna stay here in my 486 memory chip!
Coming up from the 2nd dive, many of us blessed the fishes with our breakfast, all chewed and semi-digested. Including yours truly! haha!, but it really felt much better after hurling my breakfast! hahah! The water was just too choppy!
We did drift diving for our 3rd dive, and currents were really strong. This was the boulder that stuck out of the sea, and had lots of gulls and swallows flying around! (really quite an interesting sight) We did our drift dive here!! We saw lots of fan corals, some really big ones.
Of course we did a lot of relaxing and fun on board the White Manta, here are some shots of us (daryl) fooling around!
Us on the makan area just chatting
Us on Sundeck of boat
Here’s a cool shot of PKK, taken using a special camera filter to capture the sun. (Filter name: Okly510 filter, commonly known as Oakley Shades!! Heh heh!)
Sexy legs and choppy waves
We ended the day with our Night dive. Saw a sea turtle asleep under some corals! Really cool. Vince Q took a nice shot of it, Will share some of it here once he’s uploaded it! Also got to see cute little shrimp and a pair of Scorpionfish.
More shots will be uploaded at my multiply site
