Diving the Wall in Flores, Indonesia

        Breathing is not something you take for granted when you're under sixty feet of seawater. You hear every whisper and gurgle, you're aware of every breath, hiccup and urge to cough, sneeze or burp. And of course your nose itches every five minutes. But when you're floating, suspended an arm's length from an eighty foot high cliff covered with strange shapes of coral, when you're fifty feet from the top of the cliff and you look straight down and see nothing under you, then for just a second, your mind's not on breathing.

        I experienced these sensations while diving with my three children on a coral cliff, or "wall" in the crystal waters of Flores, a larger island in the Nusa Tenggara group, whose capital, Maumere is almost 2,000 km east of Jakarta. The island group was part of Indonesia until a few years ago, when a brief but violent war ended years of sporadic guerrilla raids and made East Timor an independent nation. Its native people share Portuguese language and Christian culture. The Indonesian military, stationed in Nusa Tenggara to "protect" the population from the guerrillas were all Moslem, and nearly all Javanese. This made them seem more like an occupiers than protectors.

        Everything is bathed in blue light at that depth because water, even this water which is clearer than most swimming pools, filters out red wavelengths, leaving the blue. Visibility varies from season to season. In the "bad" rainy season from December to February, it's around eighty feet. On good days, visibility is twice that. In Puget Sound, where I learned to dive, visibility of fifteen feet was good.

        The coral cliffs are loaded with caves, crevices and holes where fish and "things" can hide from predators and prey. We found a shallow cave about thirty feet across, fifteen feet high and about twenty feet deep - big enough for five divers to swim into abreast. The floor was sandy and a ledge ran along the back wall where a twenty pound grouper warily watched us from a deep crevice.

        Although the cave seemed brightly lit, a beam from the dive master’s light revealed fish hiding in shadows and holes that had been invisible. It also brought out the red coral colors that had filtered out of the sunlight. Several red snapper were in there, along with crabs and shrimp. The ceiling was covered with coral and sponges.

        Going into a cave, even such a shallow one as this, requires some adjustment of equipment and attitude. Today divers use a "buoyancy compensator", or "BC" which is a sleeveless jacket made of strong nylon over a tough inflatable plastic liner. A hose to the air tank with a button valve allows you to add or vent air. This adjusts your buoyancy and makes you tend to float or sink or remain neutral and hover as you like. It also has a heavy rigid plastic backpack sewn in with a strap to attach the air tank.

        When you jump out of the boat, you have a thirty-five pound tank and five or six pounds of other gear, and big clumsy fins on your feet. You think, "I'm wearing this heavy stuff while jumping into deep water?" So you inflate the BC and float while you get your gloves on, test your regulator and light and look around for your buddy. Then you vent enough air so you can sink slowly while you "clear" your ears. That is, you pinch your nose and blow to equalize the pressure in your inner ear with the pressure from the water outside. Otherwise, severe pain makes you stop your descent at about ten feet.

        BC's make going into a coral cave easy if you remember to make yourself negative so you tend to sink slightly. That way you don't have to worry about floating up into the roof and puncturing your noggin on a sharp piece of coral (or worse, the poisonous dorsal spine of a lion fish. They won't attack a diver, but they won't run away either, and they like to stay beneath overhangs.)

        We came upon a large sea fan coral that looked like a flat bush about three feet high and five feet across, shaped like (what else?) a Japanese fan. The stem and branches were black and the twigs were covered with what looked like small white cherry blossoms but were actually coral polyps feeding on plankton. The effect was stunning.

        I peeked into a vertical crevice about 2 feet wide, which angled back to the left into the cliff face so that I had to poke my head in to see. Protruding down into my face was a huge red dragon's tongue! It turned out to be a barrel sponge of a type I had seen before, but never as big and not growing down at an angle like that.

        As we swam in a line along the reef, my teenage daughter, just ahead of me turned to look back. All I could see in her mask were her eyes, as wide as saucers. One of the guides in the middle of the pack pointed back behind us. A four foot black tip shark headed toward us about thirty feet away. The dive master, trailing the group, swam toward it waving his arms. The shark turned and swam parallel to the cliff for the length of our group, investigating the noise, then headed back into the void. Thankfully, we never saw it again, but the incident made us opt to go sight seeing on land the next day.

See "Oil Patch" by Gary Gentry at www.amazon.com