Waisai

Organising (or lack thereof)

I had organised to do some diving through Mr Romy of Waiwo Dive Resort.  He was very non-committal about all information he had given, eg. whether there were other guests, price and whether I could only do two dives instead of three. It made it look like a dodgy outfit.

Apet, the hotel worker took me on the 20 min hilly ride to Waiwo Dive Resort after breakfast. I headed to the dive centre where I had hoped to find Romy. As it turned out, he is an office-person. To make it worse, Romy hadn’t told them of my intention to dive, but later when the divemasters rang him, he said to expect two people in my group! Arrgh!!!

On the other hand, everyone at the dive centre (all locals) were helpful and informative. My gear was all fitted out in no time. I had called for a medium-sized “Beh Che Deh” (BCD, pronounced according the Dutch/Indonesian alphabet), only to be told that in Indonesian it is still pronounced as “Bee See Dee”.

The dive experience

We set off at 0900 with a group of four friendly Indonesians of very mixed ages. Due to rough conditions near Waiwo, we had to go dive somewhere more sheltered.

• The first dive was at Perkuburan (Cemetery) which is off Pulau Kri; in fact I think it is actually Koranu Fyak’s house reef. Damn! That’s where I’m headed tomorrow to stay and for more diving the day after!
• The second dive was at Ransiwor.

Both dives were OK for me. For many people it would have been quite good (as I’ve been very spoilt with having relatively good access to Sipadan). The coral was great, the visibility not so at around 15m. There wasn’t so much fish to see except near the end of both dives where they were some small reef fish. Over the two dives, I did see a couple of good stonefish and one turtle (plus some macro stuff which I don’t care so much for).

The rest of the group did a third dive at Yenbuba. It turned out to be the best dive of the day with some sharks and barracudas. I mildly wished I had done this one instead but didn’t care that much.

In summary, Waiwo Dive Resort is quite a good place to dive with if you can avoid Mr Romy (+62 853 4451 5123) and speak to the dive centre directly. That may require you to make a special trip there a day in advance to sort things out.

Other snippets from the day

The day was lengthened slightly by one of the props hitting a floating coconut which bent the blade. We parked off an island while the carefully removed the prop, taking care not to lose the pin/screw in the water. Then they beat the prop back into shape with a dive weight!

As I returned to the resort, there were a couple of uniformed officials standing around. I wonder if they were checking for dive permits. As I acted local along with the others, they didn’t ask any questions. But I was secretly glad that I didn’t try to skip buying the permit as some people had suggested.