The past week has been hellish, the fact that I have only 5 working days or so to my FC has finally settled and I have been trying to clear all the outstanding work. However, this post shall be focused on my dive trip over the weekend.
This trip was to Aur, one of the little islands off the Eastern Coast of Malaysia, the only other notable island in the area being Tioman. Left Singapore at around 8pm on Friday night, reached Mersing around midnight and the little island of Pulau Aur around 4am. The island looks pretty nice from far, but is sorely lacking in amenities. Dubious plumbing, dangerous railing and damp beds were some of the problems we encountered on our first night. Anyway, to the resort's credit, all the problems were solved after the second day when we got back from diving. As usual, being the small Singapore, our roommate was the brother to a friend of Jef and ES, plus one of the DMs was Jef's primary school classmate.
On Saturday morning, woke up at 7:30am for breakfast at 8:30am. Would have woken later if not for one of the DM's knocking on people's doors waking them up. Some miscommunication problems there. The first dive was at Kaduk, of which I don't remember much, and my dive log is silent. The only details of that dive are that it lasted 37min and the maximum depth was 14.3m. I guess there wasn't anything worthwhile in the dive. After that dive, we went back to the resort for lunch and embarked on our 2nd dive at Pulau Lang at 2:45pm. This dive was testing us on navigation while the previous dive tested us on attaining optimal bouyancy. There was a little more to see on this dive with 1 turtle, 2 cuttlefish and plenty of triggerfish. Got a little disoriented during the navigation but eventually found my way back to the start point.
Had a 2 hour break with donuts back at the resort before heading out again for the deep dive. The venue for the deep dive was Dayang Tip and it was utterly boring, the corals were mostly dead. All we did was dive to 30m, stay there for a while and come back up. The dive planner was totally useless after this dive though, the length of time we stayed under was beyond the limit given in the chart; not that we use it much since the DMs all had dive computers.
The last dive of the day was the night dive at Crocodile rock. The only highlight of the dive was the 01 x Barracuda. There was also a parrotfish sleeping in a crevase in the coral and loads of shrimps in the coral. They have red eyes which reflect the torchlight and the coral appears to sparkle with them. But one must really dive in close to see the shrimps in detail. This dive was cut short after 31 minutes due to the strong down current. We went down to 12m before the dive was ended. After the dive, had dinner and a talk cock session with the other divers till midnight. Then it was sleep time for a couple more dives the next day.
We awoke the next morning and had our first dive at Telok Jawa, another unmemorable dive. The best dive of the trip was the last dive at Captain's Point. We saw loads on that dive. There was a turtle which swam straight towards me, after Xavier steered it towards us. At it's closest, it was only 20cm from my hands. After that we saw cuttlefish again, two of them passively swimming near some coral formation. I believe there was a school of barraccuda in this dive as well. We were stuck near this rock formation for quite some time as Xavier and Ken tried to tease out a couple of lobsters from their cave. At the same time, there was a trigger fish just wallowing in a sandpit beside us. I think those with cameras caught lots of good pics on that dive.
After that dive it was back to the resort to wash up, pack up and go back home. We were delayed for quite a while waiting for the boat to pick us up. Hence dinner in JB was cancelled and we had Ramly Burgers for dinner instead. Wonder if my next dive will be in April or June.
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