About 3.5km off Jialeshui (佳樂水), a village near Taiwan's southern tip, we popped back up to the ocean's surface in clusters. Each of us was floating smack in the middle of the broad Pacific with only a buddy in reach and a boat, our ride home, still some distance away.
Our only other company was two meters of the projecting bow of the Amorgos, the Greek freighter that ran aground on Jan. 14. Early season typhoons had since torn the ship apart. Now the bow was vertically planted in the sea floor and well over 1km away from the stern, which also showed above the water line. The ship's middle section, meanwhile, was somewhere below water, probably dashed and buried wherever the storms had seen fit.
In June the Coast Guard Administration had finally abandoned its cordon over the wreckage, which was no longer an environmental threat as the ship's oil had long been pumped off and its cargo of 60,000 tonnes of iron ore declared lost. Before our group of five explored the spot, no one in the Kenting diving community had heard of anyone diving the wreck. For all we could tell, we were the first.
Five days before the dive, however, I'd never so much as worn a scuba tank into the water. That was when I began my scuba instruction, sitting in the passenger's seat of Marcus Peterson's van.
Peterson is a scuba instructor and general know-it-all when it comes to diving in southern Taiwan, where he's been scouting around the waters for over six years. As we drove to Kenting, the premier diving town in southern Taiwan, he was having me read the 250-page Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) manual. PADI is an international scuba certification system that's standard in Taiwan as it is in most of the world.
The practical part of the course started a day later in a Kenting swimming pool. Peterson went over basic skills: assembling the equipment, breathing through a regulator, achieving buoyancy, and equalizing one's ears as the pressure doubles and triples in the course of a decent. There were also a few major safety considerations -- like that if I forgot to exhale while surfacing, the air in my lungs would expand until my lungs exploded.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MARCUS PETERSON
Besides a burst lung, diving's other major theoretical danger is decompression sickness, which results from the body's inability to adjust to the rapid internal and external pressure changes. Usually, the condition is caused by surfacing too quickly from too deep a depth.
As it turns out, divers talk about decompression sickness and lung overexpansion all the time. And when they do, they're usually making jokes -- like Bart Deely, who insisted, "the thing that really sucks about decompression sickness is having to pay all the money to go sit in the Kaohsiung decompression chamber."
Deely, a commercial diver and former US Navy rescue swimmer with over 3,200 hours of underwater experience, was also with us when we dove the
Amorgos wreck. He's been in the Kaohsiung decompression chamber once, and even if he sounds cavalier when he's talking about it, he's not. Like most divers, he keeps bringing up the dangers to reinforce good habits in both his diving pals and himself. In diving, it's common knowledge that if you do things by the book, the sport is no more dangerous than anything else.
"In all my time underwater," said Deely, "I've only had one close call, not counting the two times I got electrocuted. The time I'm talking about was when I was doing some commercial diving, not scuba. I was breathing air through a tube when suddenly the air went off. But even that wasn't really a close call, because I wasn't very deep, so I just came up. What happened was the guy at the air pump fell asleep, and then the pump had run out of gas. So I just went up there and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing."
After two "controlled-water" dives in the pool, Peterson took me out for several shore dives, where we swam out over reefs that stretched along the coast. The first day we were at Houbihu (
Houbihu is still teeming with small fish though -- butterfly fish, forceps fish, angel fish and lots of other reef fish Peterson couldn't name. A short distance from shore, the coral is also in better condition. The reef there winds in labyrinths and canyons, in places resembling the coils of some weird, aqueous brain. During the day, the water was a gelatinous pale blue and visibility was about 7m or 8m, which Peterson considered poor.
"It's been raining lately, which brings sediment into the water near the shore," he said, wading back across the reef and up to the beach.
"When it's clear, you can see for 50m. But most of the best diving is farther out, where the runoff doesn't affect anything. For those places, you need a boat to get there."
Our first boat dive didn't come until two days later, after I'd completed more skills training on a shore dive over the reef at Banana Bay (
As things stand, the captains Peterson won't use far outnumber those he will. His prime bad example is the captain who in 1998 abandoned a group of divers in the water at Seven Sisters (
The accident, still a stain on the Kenting's safety record, came as a combination of incompetence on the part of the boat driver, who turned into shore without picking up his full load, and the dive leaders, who scheduled the dive on a day of unmanageably strong currents.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MARCUS PETERSON
Peterson has been to Seven Sisters several times, and rates the area as one of the most beautiful diving spots in southern Taiwan. "Last time I was there, it was perfect. We saw some giant tuna, as big as a person. And down at 42m, the water was so clear, we'd look up at the surface and it seemed like you could almost touch it." That said, he's also well aware of the dangers involved, namely the extreme ocean currents the area is known for.
"The current is so bad at Seven Sisters, because you have the Taiwan Strait and the Pacific Ocean coming together right there. Those two bodies of water are on different tide schedules, so when the tides change, you have an incredible flow of water from one into the other. You can only dive Seven Sisters a couple times a month, when the tide difference is minimal. Either a high slack tide or a low slack tide is best."
Since the Seven Sisters accident, no other diving related fatalities have been reported in or around Kenting. But in talking to divers in the town, it seems like each has his or her own horror stories to tell. On my third day of diving, someone just walked up and told me one.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MARCUS PETERSON
It was just after finishing a day of diving while Peterson and I were unloading gear from a hired skiff in a small concrete harbor. Some local divers came up and described how earlier that afternoon a dive boat had run over a young woman, knocking her unconscious as its bow bounced down a wave and smashed her on the head. She had hit the boat's propeller, which was not turning, and begun sinking before other divers pulled her to the surface. They had had to use mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to get her breathing again. A couple of weeks later, Peterson learned that the young woman had fully recovered, though she'd subsequently been hospitalized for six days with a head wound.
It was a sobering story after a good day of diving. Earlier, we'd been at a place called "sunken island" a few kilometers offshore of South Bay. Sunken island is a massive natural spire or pillar of rock that projects off the sea floor from about 30m deep up to within about 5m of the surface. At places one can follow sheer walls straight down for almost the whole extent of the formation's height. Along the way, the wall's crags sprout giant fan corals, sea anemones with their resident clown fish and all kinds of other tropical sea life. Though visibility was a meter or two worse than the earlier dive at Houbihu, the geological architecture was enough to inspire natural reverence; it was almost as if one were swimming over an underwater cathedral.
Back on the boat, however, that awe translates into, "Hey, that was a pretty cool dive, yeah?" Then you talk about the fish you saw and where you're going to get dinner. Or maybe you talk about diving the Amorgos the next day.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MARCUS PETERSON
All our dives before that were in the relatively protected waters west of Taiwan's southern peninsula. The Amorgos, however, was to the east and out in the Pacific, which presented the problem of a slow but persistent current. To hit the wreckage without having to swim overly hard and use up lots of air, we had to time the drop correctly. We ended up having to circle the wreck three times before finally giant stepping into the water.
Reaching the hull fragment which is planted firmly into a 10m bottom of clay mixed with reef, the first thing we learned was that current was stronger than we'd thought. It was hardest to deal with near the sides of the wreck, especially where it bowed out and sped up as it flowed around the ship's contours. Moving around the freighter's carcass was best done by grabbing rails and metal edges and going hand over hand. In some places if you lost your grip, the current would whip you right off the ship before slowing down again a few meters away. As nearly every metal surface was covered with barnacles, slicing one's hands from time to time was inevitable.
The dive was spectacular. Deely squeezed himself through the ship's hole for the anchor chain, shimmying through from one side of the wreck to the other, just for fun. There were also plenty of fish to see, as the reef was fairly rich in that area.
After a half hour or so, Peterson gave the signal to surface. Just like that the dive was done. Topside, we found ourselves in the ocean's broad expanse, which was dark and blue in the late afternoon. It stretched from just under our bobbing chins and off to the rocky cliffs at Oulanbi (鵝鑾鼻), the southern cape where Taiwan's mountains hit the sea. The sky was pale blue and fading yellow into dusk, and then the dive boat spotted us and began the collection rounds.
A few minutes later as the boat began the sunset tour around the cape and back to the harbor at Maobitou (
Peterson passed a glance down at his own dive computer, which like all dive computers has no such function, and answered, "Mine says we have seven minutes."
With that, the boat rounded Taiwan's southernmost point and the sky was turning pink over the Third Nuclear Power Plant.
Some Kenting area scuba shops: Kenting Diving (墾丁潛水) 720 Nanwan Rd., Hengchuen (恆春鎮南灣路720號), tel (08) 889-7968; Cactus Hotel, 126 Dawan Rd., Kenting (墾丁大灣路126號), tel 0930-932-726; Fu Dog Surfing Gear, 232 Nanwan Rd., Hengchuen (恆春鎮南灣路232號), tel (08) 889-7141; Nanbei Diving (南北潛水), tel (08) 889-5350.
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