Clown fish in an anemone.
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The diving off Irain Jaya is great, at least where I went. There's marine life everywhere. Schools of fish swirl around. Every surface is covered by corals and other invertebrates. If you look closely, there are millions of little critters crawling around. It's spectacular.
Clown fish in an anemone.
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The water is warm. After all, Kri is almost exactly on the equator. My GPS always read something like "0-10N 145-10E". Zero degrees north is on the equator, just in case you were wondering what the numbers mean. The currents rip through there. My dive guide, Nic Son, would often tell me that we couldn't dive at the location the boat stopped by because of the currents. The guy has no fear, so I wondered what he was talking about. I found out later, on my last dive off Cape Kri. That was a scary dive.
Anyway, we dove the channel between Kri and Waigeo islands and we also dove off Wai and Gam. Where's that, you ask? Well, look on a map and find Australia. From Australia's go north and the next big island is New Guinea. The north-west end of New Guinea has a city on it called "Sorong". See it? Well, Waigeo is the island north and a little west of Sorong, and the other islands mentioned are just south of Waigeo.
Propeller of a WWII P-47 "Thunderbolt" off the island Wai.
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Nic Son is the son of a diver. His dad, Yusef, dove for pearls without any sort of certification, dive tables or depth guage. One day, he ran out of air. That sort of thing will happen to you when you're diving without an air pressure guage to tell you how much air your tank has left. Naturally, because he had no depth guage, he has no idea how deep he was when he had to swim for the surface. After he got up he got hit by the bends. The nitrogen in his bloodstream bubbled up and prevented the normal circulation of blood. Part of his central nervous system starved for oxygen and the part of his spinal cord that carried nerve impulses to his legs died. He became paralyzed from the waist down. In an advanced society, he would have been rushed to a hyperbaric chamber and the damage might have been prevented. However, there was no way to airlift him to a chamber in time, so he's a paraplegic. Yusef lives in a thatched house on Wai, which is unpaved sand. Even if he had a wheelchair there's be no way to roll it through the sand, but he does pretty well scooting around on his rear end across the sand to get here and there.
This looks like a relative to the Moorish Idol or bannerfish.
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You'd think that Nic Son would be a cautious diver. He's not. Like most dive guides, he uses very little air, so I'd run low first. I'd give him a sign, saying "I have 500 psi left in my tank". A cautious dive guide would lead an ascent when any one of his divers got down to 500 psi, which is under 20% of the tank left. Nic Son, knowing that I'm a hard-core diver, would keep swimming. I'd stay close, because I might need to use Nic Son's air for the ascent. As my tank got lower, we'd surface.
We also dove into decompression regularly. In a decompression dive, you can't go to the surface right away: You have to "hang" at a depth of 10' or deeper until the nitrogen in your bloodstream has a chance to dissolve out without fizzing up and giving you the bends. The nitrogen leaves your system the same way it got there, through your breathing. It's serious business, this deco diving, but Nic Son treated it as routine.
Emperor Angel. This shot doesn't come close to showing how pretty these fish are.
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Our dive computers know how long we've been down and how deep we get. They calculate decompression times on the fly. Dive computers are really handy for that. Well, on my last dive, Nic Son and I looked all over for a dive site that didn't have a blazing current ripping through it. We went to a couple of spots and Nic Son shook his head, saying "bad current". We ended up off Cape Kri, which is offshore of the reef that protects Camp Kri. The reef is a wall that drops off to about 150 feet. We were pretty deep, with a decompression obligation of 10-15 minutes when the current picked up.
We tried, at first, to swim across the current, paralell to the reef. The flow kept getting stronger and stronger. After a while, I was hanging on to a piece fo coral and flapping in the current like a flag on a pole. Nic Son was in a similar situation. When the current didn't die down, Nic Son used hand signals to ask me if I wanted to let go and swim with the current. He was using one hand for this, since he was using his other hand to anchor himself to the reef. We couldn't just hang on for ever because we had a limited supply of air and we had to hang for our decompression time. So, I used my free hand to signal "Ok, let's go".
I've heard these called "Spadefish" or "Batfish". Nic Son swims in the background.
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When we released our grip on the reef the current blew us over the reef at high speed. It was like being a jet plane, flying low over a ridge of mountians. I kept expecting to crash into the reef, but we just zoomed over. Since I had a decompression "ceiling" of 20 feet, I didn't want to let the current carry me up too close to the surface, but I was Ok. Once we got to the protected side of the reef, we resumed our dive.
The current on the inside of the reef was moving paralell to the wall, so we drifted along with it for a while. As my air started to get low, the current reversed and we began to drift back over the same part of the reef that we'd already seen, so we decided to end the dive. By this time, since we'd spent several minutes at a shallow depth, my decompression ceiling had moved up to 10' and I had enough air to complete the decompression requirement without using any air from Nic Son's tank. We moved up to our deco stops: Mine at 10' and Nic Son's at 20' or 6 meters on his computer. He's spent more time deep so he needed a longer stop, beginning at a deeper depth. That's cool, because he probably had a lot of air left.
We were hanging in the warm, clear water when the current picked up with a vengeance. We were drifting away from the reef, moving at a high rate of speed toward camp. Then the current started swirling up and down, also at a high rate of speed. I wanted no part of getting pushed up to the surface because I needed to stay down at 10' for about ten minutes. So, when the current was moving me up I'd swim like a fool for the bottom. Then the current would reverse. If I stayed too deep my deco obligation wouldn't decrease. If I went too deep the obligation would increase and I didn't have unlimited air to hang forever. Therefore, I swam for the surface when the current pushed me down, trying to stay under, but close to, my deco stop. I remember having so much current running down toward the bottom that I was swimming as hard as I could to stay reasonably shallow, and the bubbles I was exhaling were not going up toward the surface like they normally do: The current was actually carrying the bubbles down! I was kicking like crazy and using both hands to fight against the current. Using both hands meant I didn't have a hand free to watch my computer and track my depth as closely as I would have liked. It was quite a workout, for sure. And, a workout makes you breath harder. I was running low on air.
Butterfly fish come in all sorts of patterns.
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Well, Nic Son doesn't use air as quickly as I do, so I figured I'd use some of his. The problem with that scenario is that Nic Son was nowhere to be found. He had had the same problems with current that I had been experiencing, and with all the struggle to maintain depth we had gotten separated. I figured, "well, stay calm and make your air last as long as you can. You probably have enough air to clear deco. If not, deal with it. There's oxygen on the boat. That'll help. And, after all, all the heavy breathing you've been doing has got to clear nitrogen out of your system at an accelerated rate." You're damn right I was worried, but I had fifteen minutes to figure out a plan. At least I hoped that I had fifteen minutes worth of air.
Time ticked by, slowly. I was watching my depth guage, trying to stay as shallow as my decompression obligation would allow. Being shallow means that your deco time is minimized. If you stray to 15' when your deco stop is at 10', you need more time to clear deco. There was no way I had air for any longer than my obligation. I probably didn't have air to last until it was "safe" to surface.
My air was almost gone when I noticed that, off in the distance, Nic Son was visible. Even though I had almost cleared deco my relief was overwhelming. Nic Son was looking the other way and hadn't seen me. He was still at 20' about thirty yards away. The visibility in Irian is fantastic, so I was able to see him. In most places, underwater visibility is limited and I never would have seen him at all. I swam over and used sign language to tell him that I was low on air and wanted to breath off his secondary regulator. The change was noticeable: My tank was so low that I was having to work to pull air out of it.
Night dive off the Camp Kri pier.
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We were at 20', so the last few minutes of my deco took longer. Nic Son had to stay at 20', so I stayed with him. I ended up surfacing after about fifteen minutes at 15'. My obligation was finished before that, but I like to overstay my deco to increase the safety margin. I took a last look at Nic Son's guages: He had a little air left, but I couldn't figure out his computer so I didn't know how long he had to stay down. Alarmingly, the display was flashing on and off. That usually means that the diver has blown his deco by going too shallow or something like that.
Back on the boat, we waited. The crew understood virtually no english so without Nic Son I was left alone with my thoughts. I was left alone with my thoughts a lot longer than I wanted to be. Nic Son didn't have an unlimited supply of air. After all, I had used some of it. When I left he only had a few KPA of air left. I dive with a PSI-type guage and don't know exactly how many metric KPA Nic Son needed to clear deco, but when I looked at his pressure guage he was toward the bottom of the red zone. He was low on air and needed to stay down for an unknown period of time. I pointed to the air tanks on the boat and tried to make myself understood. Do any of these tanks have air? We had already used them on our first dive, so I knew that the tank that I had used was almost empty. Was there a spare? What about the tank that Nic Son had used for the earlier dive? That one might have some air left. The crew seemed to think that I wanted to do another dive! Then they started pointing to camp. They thought I wanted to leave Nic Son and go back! No, no, no, Nic Son! He's almost out of air! How do I use sign language to explain it? After a while, I started putting my gear on the tank. Finally, I got through and Thadeus strapped my tank on to bring some air to Nic Son.
They shared air for a while and I watched their bubbles breaking the surface. Then Thadeus surfaced with Nic Son's tank. That must mean that his tank was empty. Nic Son was using mine. He stayed down for a while longer and then came up. I was really happy to see him. I told him "selemat dantang", which is bahasa indonesia for "welcome". He looked happy to be aboard, too.
We went ashore. I was a little shaken up by the experience: Things could have gotten ugly. Then, Nic Son absolutely floored me by saying, and I'm not making this up, "we'll stay on the surface for an hour and get another dive in before it gets dark"! I couldn't believe it. We had both pushed our luck. We'd pushed it a lot, as a matter of fact. In an hour's time we'd still be carrying enough nitrogen so that my computer would require me to hang for multiple minutes of decompression for each minute I stayed down. Doing another dive would be a very courageous thing to do. It really wasn't worth the risk and I told Nic Son so. I was done diving in Irian Jaya. I might never be back, but even if I never dive there again I couldn't justify another dive.
Nic Son, God love him. The man knows no fear.
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