Sipadan Island - Being there, Part 2

by B. N. Sullivan

Yesterday, I began to tell about what it was like to stay at Sipadan Island in 1993. These days, staying on Sipadan Island is not allowed. Following a 2004 decision by the Malaysian government, lodging facilities on the island were closed down in an effort to preserve Sipadan's fragile ecosystem. Divers can still visit the dramatic walls and lush reefs of Sipadan on day trips, but they must stay elsewhere. In 1993, however, there still were a few facilities on the little island where visiting divers and sport fishermen were accommodated. Those 'resorts' were only for the hardier breed of traveler, however.

We stayed at an establishment called the Pulau Sipadan Resort (PSR), which could accommodate about 25 to 30 guests at a time. The place was well run -- clean and organized, with a friendly and competent staff who did an amazingly good job, given what they had to work with.

The accommodations on Sipadan were adequate, but spare. As I mentioned yesterday, the island was (and is still) without electricity and other utilities. Each of the lodging facilities had its own generator to produce electricity for its own use.

All supplies used on the island -- fuel for the boats and generators, foods, beverages, cleaning supplies, and so on -- had to be imported by boat from mainland Borneo. Potable water was regularly delivered to the island this way as well, arriving in large plastic bladders. Potable water was a precious commodity on the island, and it was carefully rationed.

Lodging consisted of small thatch-roofed huts, with virtually no amenities, save for beds and some plain wooden shelves. The huts had no running water -- much less bathrooms.

Aside from the resorts, there have been no permanent human settlements on the island, in part because there is no reliable source of fresh water on Pulau Sipadan. When the resorts were established a system was devised to tap into a brackish water source in the island's interior. That water was unsuitable for drinking or cooking, but good enough for bathing and cleaning.

Bathing on Sipadan entailed a ritual that became a part of the adventure of the place. PSR had a single bath house for everyone to use. It was an oblong structure made of concrete blocks. Inside, a row of stalls lined each side, and at the end of the corridor between the rows of stalls were a few sinks. The toilet stalls were on one side of the building, and on the opposite side were the shower stalls. As best we can recall, there were six toilet stalls, and six shower stalls. Nothing too unusual so far.

The bathing ritual began outside the bath house where prospective bathers lined up at designated hours, carrying their towels, robes, soap, and shampoo. Alongside the path leading to the bath house was a stack of plastic pails. Each bather was instructed to pick up a pail.

Near the door to the bath house, a few PSR staff manned a charcoal fire over which a very large cast iron kettle was suspended. In the kettle, fresh water simmered, warmed by the charcoal fire. Just before entering the bath house, each bather held out his or her pail, and the staff used a large metal dipper to fill the pail with warm, fresh water.

Each of the shower stalls had a pipe -- no shower head -- that emitted lukewarm brackish water. We soaped up and washed with the brackish water, and then poured the fresh water from the plastic pails over ourselves to rinse.

By the way, we were never alone in the shower stalls: several pairs of eyes always watched us as we bathed. The eyes belonged to creatures from the island's dense jungle behind the bath house. The creatures -- mostly large Monitor Lizards, and the occasional Coconut Crab -- liked to hang out in the bath house.

The lizards, which were between one and two feet long with a hefty girth, liked to walk along the tops of the partitions between the stalls, and from that vantage point, they 'monitored' the bathers. This was a bit unsettling at first, but it soon became apparent that they only wanted to watch, and by day three, we just ignored them.

The big crabs were more difficult to ignore. If they felt challenged, they would rear up, holding out their rather large pincers in a threat display. Those pincers are capable of cracking open coconuts -- hence the name 'Coconut Crab' -- so when one appeared in a shower stall where we were standing naked, we were inclined to behave in a way we hoped the crab would not perceive as unfriendly.

Of all the aspects of the Sipadan bathing ritual, though, the thing that became legend among the guests was that big iron kettle of water simmering over the fire outside the bath house door. The daily allotment of warm, fresh rinse water was welcome, of course, but that big pot also evoked cartoon-inspired images of cannibal tribes. After all, this was Borneo. We all joked that, should we see sliced carrots and onions floating in that kettle one day, we would know we were about to become soup!

Next, for Wordless Wednesday, we will post a photo of one of Sipadan's reef creatures. After that, we have a few more stories to tell about Pulau Sipadan.

Sipadan Island - Being there, Part 1

by B. N. Sullivan

In the previous two posts, we told the story of our first trip to Sipadan Island, also known as Pulau Sipadan, a remote oceanic island off the coast of Borneo. It was a long and complicated journey, and we arrived on the little island in a dazed and disheveled state.

Because of its physical remoteness, one had to exert considerable effort just to get there: Pulau Sipadan is not on the way to or from anywhere else. As someone we know described it, "Sipadan is not exactly at the end of the Earth, but you can see it from there."

The island is a nature preserve, and a nesting ground for sea turtles. At the time we first went there (1993), the island had three resorts (I use the term loosely) catering primarily to divers and sport fishermen. Then, in 2004, the Malaysian government ordered the operators of tourist facilities on Pulau Sipadan to vacate the island. As a result, it is no longer possible to stay on Pulau Sipadan, although several companies still run boat trips to the island so that divers can still visit Sipadan's underwater wonders.

Pulau Sipadan is remote by its physical location, and it also is figuratively remote from the mainstream of human civilization by several orders of magnitude. Although we concluded that it definitely was a worthwhile thing to do, staying there entailed quite a few improvisations.

Those improvisations began with the accommodations on Pulau Sipadan. The operators of the visitor facilities on the island called them 'resorts' but they really were more like semi-permanent camps. Guests were lodged in 'chalets' that actually were little huts on stilts, with thatched roofs. The one in the second photo on this page was where we slept during our ten days on Pulau Sipadan.

The huts each had two beds -- mattresses on metal frames. The beds did have linens, and each hut had one wooden shelf, but there were no other furnishings. The huts were wired for electricity, sort of. Each had one electric light in the form of a bare light bulb suspended from the center of the roof on a wire. That was it. There was no running water in the huts, so there were no bathrooms -- not even a sink or a tap. (More on this a bit later.)

Pulau Sipadan is quite distant from mainland Borneo, and there are no underwater cables between the two. When we stayed there, the island had no regular telephone or electric service. Each facility on the island generated its own electricity, and a radio telephone -- also run on a portable generator -- was the primary means of communication with the rest of the world.

Electricity from the generators ran everything on the island during the day. Fuel for the generators had to be imported by sea, so it was expensive. Shortly after sunset, the generators were switched off as a conservation measure. As a result, life on the island matched the rising and setting of the sun. We rose with the first rays of light, and, since there was no light source after sunset, save for our flashlights, everyone retired early.

Next - more details about daily life for visitors to Pulau Sipadan, including the most 'interesting' bathing facilities we have ever encountered.

Sipadan Island - Getting there, Part 2

by B. N. Sullivan

This is Part 2 of a story I began to tell yesterday -- the story of our first journey to Pulau Sipadan, a tiny island off the coast of Borneo. The story so far: we flew first to Kuala Lumpur, then to Kota Kinabalu, and then to Tawau. From Tawau we traveled by car up the coast to Semporna. This episode picks up at Semporna, where we began the final leg of our very long journey.

By prearrangement with the folks who managed the place where we would stay on Sipadan, a smallish motorboat was dispatched to ferry us to the little island. Since our flight to Tawau had arrived late, we had missed the mini-bus to Semporna. We traveled to Semporna by taxi instead, and we were running a bit late, so we were relieved to find the boat waiting for us at the fishing pier in Semporna when we arrived there.

Our friends who had preceded us on this journey had warned us about this final stage. They told us that the trip would be made in an open boat that went very fast and created a lot of spray. They said we should be prepared to get wet during the boat ride, and advised us to dress accordingly. They were not kidding!

Our boatman loaded all of our things into the stern of the little vessel, and indicated that we should sit on some bench seats beneath a tarpaulin sunshade. We cast off from the pier, and gently motored through the harbor. Near the outer edge of the harbor, we passed by numerous clusters of houses built on stilts over the water, and then by a few tiny islets. As soon as we got to the open water, the boatman increased speed. A lot!

Once we left Semporna and the islets behind, there were no more landmarks at all -- nothing but the glistening surface of the Celebes Sea in every direction. Later we discussed how we both felt a bit leery at that point, heading straight out to sea at a high rate of speed in a small open boat, hoping against hope that the boat driver actually knew how to find Sipadan. At the time, though, it was impossible to discuss this or anything else. The noise from the boat's motors was very loud, and we were traveling so fast across the water that we couldn't even turn toward each other for fear of having our sunglasses blown right off our faces. All we could do was hold on tightly to the edge of our seats, and, squinting against the bright sunlight reflected from the sea surface, pray that we would eventually make it to Sipadan.

About an hour after we left Semporna, the boat driver slowed a smidgen, and pointed toward the horizon. A tiny tropical island appeared before us. From a distance, it looked just like Gilligan's Island. As we glided up to a sandy beach, the boat's engines were cut and a few men ran down to the shoreline to catch the mooring line. We were instructed to hop out -- which we did, into thigh-deep water -- and several staff from Pulau Sipadan Resort, where we were staying, waded out to fetch our belongings.

Once ashore we glanced around quickly and noticed a number of people sitting on a sort of deck, chuckling and grinning at us. It turned out that the arrival of new guests was one of the most amusing events of the day at Sipadan.

On each of the following ten days that we spent on the little island, we would join the group on the deck to watch the latest arrivals to Sipadan. They all looked like we did when we arrived: disoriented, wilted from the heat, totally drenched, wearing sunglasses nearly opaque with sea spray, hair frozen by salt in whatever way the wind had blown it during the boat ride. Everyone, it seemed, arrived at Sipadan somewhat dazed and looking a wreck.

Here's a link to a map of Sabah state on Borneo. If you like, you can use it to retrace our journey from Kota Kinabalu, to Tawau, to Semporna, to Pulau Sipadan.

Next (after Wordless Wednesday) - what it was like to stay on Sipadan Island in 1993.

Sipadan Island - Getting there, Part 1

by B. N. Sullivan

Often we are asked which is our favorite place to dive. While it is difficult to choose even one general area, let alone just one dive site, Sipadan Island certainly would be a top contender for "diver heaven."

We first learned about Pulau Sipadan, as it is called there, by asking that very question of someone else. In 1992, while we were on a Caribbean dive trip, we met and befriended a married couple who both were marine biologists and underwater photographers. They had traveled all over the world to dive, for recreation as well as for their work. Naturally, we asked them which place was their favorite. One of the places at the top of their list was Sipadan.

Listening to our new friends' vivid descriptions of Sipadan's underwater world, we decided we had to see this place for ourselves. They had mentioned that Sipadan was in a remote location, and told us that just getting there was an adventure. Once we set about to plan our first trip there, we realized that they were not kidding about the remoteness -- nor about the adventure of the journey.

Pulau Sipadan (pictured above) is an oceanic island in the Celebes Sea. It is located off the coast of Sabah State, on the Malaysian side of Borneo. Getting there took several days.

First, we flew to Malaysia's capital city, Kuala Lumpur -- a major trip in itself. We stayed there overnight, and then flew to Borneo, landing at Kota Kinabalu, a coastal city in Sabah state, situated on the South China Sea. We changed planes in Kota Kinabalu for our connecting flight to the port city of Tawau, on the opposite coast of Borneo.

The flight to Tawau was the final air leg of the journey to Sipadan, but Tawau was just a waypoint in the journey, not our destination. We still had an overland leg and a boat ride ahead of us.

We were supposed to travel next by mini-bus from Tawau to Semporna, a smaller fishing port up the coast. That was the plan, but as luck would have it, our flight arrived late in Tawau, and by the time we cleared through the airport, the mini-bus had left without us. We took a taxi into the center of town to find some lunch while we figured out what to do.

Our taxi driver spoke no English, but he understood our hand signals indicating that we wanted to find a place to eat. He dropped us at a small hotel that appeared to cater to local business travelers. They had a curry buffet for lunch, and that was welcome, since it excused us from having to choose items from a menu we couldn't understand.

Bellies full of fish curry, fresh fruit, and tea, we set off for a nearby square where we had seen a rank of parked taxis. The taxi drivers eyed us warily as we approached. We must have looked a sight -- travel-weary Westerners hauling what must have seemed an inordinate amount of luggage. In truth, we took very few clothes with us on that trip, but we had several cases full of dive gear and camera equipment.

While I parked myself at the curb with all of the luggage, Jerry sought out a driver who would be willing to ferry us up the coast to Semporna. After much sign language and pointing at maps, Jerry struck a deal with the driver of a reasonably intact Toyota, and off we went. After about an hour's drive on a road that passed through vast palm oil plantations, we arrived at Semporna. (That's Semporna in the second photo.)

Now we were about to embark on the final leg of the journey, which I'll tell about in the next post. Meanwhile, here's a link to a map of Sabah state on Borneo. If you are interested, you can use it to trace our journey from Kota Kinabalu, to Tawau, to Semporna, to Pulau Sipadan.

The Cave Where Turtles Die

by B. N. Sullivan

Back in the early 1980s, the famous ocean explorer Captain Jacques Yves Cousteau and his team made their first visit to Sipadan Island, off the coast of Borneo. They made a film about Sipadan, and one of the highlights in that film was an eerie cave in which they found many bones and skeletons of sea turtles. They had never before seen such a sight, and they were puzzled by it. At the time, they theorized that perhaps old sea turtles just went there to die.

About a decade after Cousteau's first visit to Sipadan, we went there to dive. We had heard about the legendary turtle cave, and it was one of the things at Sipadan that we wanted to see for ourselves. Since it's a potentially dangerous dive, the Sipadan Turtle Cave is restricted to experienced divers who have had appropriate training, and it is essential to go with a guide who knows the terrain inside the cave. Fortunately, we were able to make arrangements to dive the Sipadan Turtle Cave with a veteran guide who knew the cave well.

As underwater caves go, this one is not particularly deep. The entrance to the cave is in the side of a limestone wall that begins a few meters below the surface and plunges straight down to a depth of about 600 meters (about 2,000 ft.). The mouth of the cave, found at a depth of only 20 meters or so (about 65 ft.), is small and partly disguised by large soft corals.

Just inside the cave's narrow mouth is a fairly roomy chamber, where we paused to let our eyes begin to adjust to the darkness. Once we passed beyond this first chamber there was no ambient light at all, so of course the three of us -- the guide, Jerry, and I -- carried multiple lights with us on this dive.

What makes the dive tricky is the cave's interior terrain - an intricate maze of chambers connected by narrow tunnels. The tunnels are not straight: they curve this way and that -- not just left and right, but also up and down, as if the whole works had been built as a bed for a roller coaster.

The bottom of the entire cave system was covered in fine, silty sand, so we had to be extremely careful to stir it up as little as possible as we went along. Once fine sand gets stirred in small spaces like that, visibility is quickly reduced to zero.

We saw and photographed the famous turtle skeletons, which we came across in several of the cave's chambers. Some were no more than disorderly piles of bones, like the first photo on this page. Others were more complete skeletons, with half-disintegrated carapaces, and goofy looking turtle skulls, like the second photo. [Click on any of the photos to enlarge.]

While Cousteau and his group conjectured that old or sick turtles may have gone there intentionally to die, our guide told us that Cousteau's original notion had been replaced more recently by a more prosaic explanation: Turtles occasionally wander into the cave system, perhaps to rest, or to hide from a predator, or maybe just out of curiosity. Then they become lost in the dark, disorienting interior of the cave. When they need to surface for a breath of air, they can't find their way out, so they drown. This explanation, while not as romantic as Cousteau's, made sense to us.

Turtles are not the only air breathing animals to have drowned in that cave. In one of the cave's chambers our guide used his light to direct our attention to a rocky ledge. There was the complete skeleton of an unlucky dolphin, which had shared the fate of the hapless turtles.

Diving in the Sipadan Turtle Cave was one of the highlights of our time at that remarkable little island in the Celebes Sea. We recently unearthed a cache of photos from our first trip there -- not just underwater photos, but some taken on the journey there, and on the island. For the next several posts, we will share some of those photos, and the tales that go with them. Stay tuned.

Learning to dive, 1970 style

by B. N. Sullivan

From the moment I first put on a dive mask at the age of 10, I was hooked on seeing whatever there was to see under the surface of oceans and lakes. And from the time I knew there was such a thing as scuba diving, I wanted to learn how to do it. My chance to become a scuba diver came in 1970.

I was living in Greece at the time. In those days, most Americans living in Greece belonged to the American Club, a focal point for expat activities. The club was housed in a once majestic old hotel building in Kifissia, a suburb north of Athens. Among other amenities, its facilities included restaurants; a bar; a bookshop full of the latest American newspapers, magazines, and books; meeting rooms that were let out to members for various activities; and a very nice swimming pool. Every American I knew stopped by the American Club at least once a week for one reason or another.

One day in the spring of 1970, I dropped by the American Club and saw a hand-lettered notice on a bulletin board there. It advertised an upcoming scuba diving class. I couldn't believe my eyes. I was ecstatic!

The scuba diving classes were being offered by an organization called the Marathon Diving Club (MDC). The club was founded by a couple of American men who had learned to dive in the U.S. Navy. They started the club as a means of getting together a pool of potential dive buddies in the Athens area. The only trouble was, scuba diving was quite a new sport in those days, and there were few people about who had learned how to do it. So, hoping to recruit new divers into the fold, the club's founders decided to offer diver training classes.

They ran their first class in 1969. I was in the second class, in 1970. The basic classes were held in a meeting room at the American Club. The MDC instructors had learned to dive in the Navy, and since that is what they knew, we learned to dive the U.S. Navy way.

They put together their own syllabus, and taught us the basics of underwater physics, diver physiology, principles of diver safety, and dive gear maintenance. We had no text. Instead, our instructors gave us hand-outs that were excerpts from the U.S. Navy Diving Manual. (I subsequently ordered a copy of the manual from the U.S. Government Printing Office, and I still have it on my bookshelf -- all 668 pages, not counting the index!)

When we had learned all the theoretical bits to their satisfaction, and had passed our written tests, our instructors took us into the American Club swimming pool. There we would eventually learn basic practical skills and try the equipment, but not before the instructors were satisfied that we could 'handle ourselves' in the water.

We had to demonstrate that we could swim the length of the pool underwater, without coming up for a breath. We had to retrieve heavy objects from the bottom of the deep end of the pool, after having swum there underwater from the shallow end. We had to tread water for what seemed like hours - with no fins, and with hands above the head. Only then did we get to put on a mask and a scuba tank to see how that felt.

We learned how to clear water from our masks and our regulator mouthpieces. Then we did an exercise called "doff and don," in which we had to go into the pool in full scuba gear, swim to the bottom of the deep end, take off all the gear, put it in a neat pile, and swim back to the shallow end without it. That was the "doff" part. For the "don" part, we had to dive back down to the bottom of the deep end and put all of the gear back on, piece by piece, and swim back to the shallow end of the pool underwater with everything on correctly, masks cleared, and breathing through the scuba regulator. We did this exercise over and over and over.

When the instructors were satisfied that we knew how to use the equipment properly, they took us to Schinias Beach on the Marathon coast so that we could repeat the exercise in the sea. The spot they selected was about 30 ft deep, with a sandy bottom. We had to suit up on the beach, swim out to a marker, dive down to the bottom, remove all of our gear, pile it up on the sandy bottom, and make a free ascent to the surface. After a few breaths of fresh air on the surface, we had to free-dive 30 ft back down to the bottom, put all of our gear back on, and then make a controlled ascent to the surface.

For those who managed to survive the dreaded doff and don exercise in the Aegean Sea, the final phase of training consisted of diver harassment. Yes, that's right -- harassment. Remember, these instructors were Navy divers, so they taught us much like they had been taught themselves. Hey, if it was good enough for U.S. Navy divers, it was good enough for us!

As the students swam around underwater on their first dives, happy as all get out to be diving in the sea on scuba at last, the instructors would sneak up from behind and turn off a diver's air, or suddenly pull off his/her mask (and other such indignities). The rationale was that a diver had to be ready for any emergency or irregularity, and be able to solve the problem in place. We were supposed to be able to cope, without panicking. In short, we had to know how to rescue ourselves.

This brand of diver training was not for wimps, to be sure, but the upshot was that the MDC instructors turned out a lot of very competent -- and confident -- divers over the years. I did not realize how good my initial diver training had been until, years later, I undertook several more advanced training courses. For example, I remember noting that most of the emergency procedures and 'advanced' self-rescue principles that were taught during my Rescue Diver course were a mere review for me. I had been required to learn most of that in my initial course, so many years before.

Next, I'll begin telling our readers about some of the amazing adventures the members of the Marathon Diving Club had together, way back when. First, I'd like to say thanks to an old friend, "Big Jer," my first dive instructor. We chatted at length on the phone yesterday, reviewing how the MDC and its diver training course came to be. I wanted to be sure I had all the details right, before I set forth the story here for all the world to read. (By the way, Big Jer still dives!)

Introducing the Marathon Diving Club

by B. N. Sullivan

I wrote last week that I had just returned from a reunion with some long-time friends, all of whom had been members of a dive club in Athens, Greece many years ago. The name of the club was the Marathon Diving Club, and it was organized by a couple of American men who were living and working in the Athens area at that time. (The image on this page is a patch bearing the Marathon Diving Club emblem.)

The founders of the club had learned to dive while serving in the U.S. Navy, and had continued to dive for recreation. The idea for a club arose as a way to attract and train other sport divers living in the Athens area, and thereby increase the pool of potential dive buddies.

The club name might be a head-scratcher at first. It does not imply that we did marathon dives! Rather it reflects the fact that the focal point for many of the club's early activities was an area known as the "Marathon coast" - the region on the eastern shore of Greece's Attic peninsula, near the site of the ancient Battle of Marathon.

In the early days, most of our organized dives, and some of the club's training activities, took place at beaches along the Marathon coast. The club also had a small facility located at Nea Makri, a little town situated on the Marathon coast. The facility (more like a little shack!) was where we stored pieces of communally owned dive gear. It also housed the compressor that filled our scuba tanks.

Recreational scuba diving was a relatively new sport in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we first met and began diving together, and it was almost unheard of in Greece. As I recall, there was only one dive shop in Greece at that time, and it was in the port of Piraeus. Certified training for new divers was non-existent there, so the founders of the Marathon Diving Club put together a training program of their own.

The club's instructors all were -- or had been -- U.S. Navy divers. I have no idea exactly how many new divers were trained over the years by the Marathon Diving Club's instructors, but it was a good number. What amazes me, when I think back, is just how good that initial training was, and how many of the divers trained by the club's instructors stayed with the sport for years -- even decades (including yours truly).

I'd like to thank my friend Lorna for unearthing a Marathon Diving Club patch -- in mint condition, no less -- and bringing it to last month's reunion. Lorna's husband was a founder of the club, and was my first dive instructor. You'll meet him in the next regular post (right after Wordless Wednesday) , when I write about the Marathon Diving Club's training program for new divers.

Preview of things to come, based on things past

by B. N. Sullivan

I have just returned home from a week-long trip. (Did you miss me?) I went to the reunion of a dive club I belonged to many years ago.

Earlier, I briefly mentioned the club when I wrote about our training as divers. I first learned to dive through classes offered by the club. That was in 1970.

Members of that dive club were my first dive instructors, and my first dive companions. Several of them appear in the photo at right, also taken in 1970.

At the time we met one another, all of the members of this particular dive club resided in Athens, Greece and its suburbs. While the membership included a handful of Greek nationals, most of us were foreigners living and working in Greece. We were a diverse lot in terms of nationalities and occupations, but we all loved the sea and the outdoors. That was our commonality.

Although we could not have known it when we joined, the club would become a central focus of our lives for years, and its members would form close, enduring friendships. We dived together, went on camping trips together, and groups of us traveled to other countries together.

We all were young then -- in our 20s and 30s -- and most of us were married and had infants or small children. Far away from our homelands and our families, we became one another's support group. We celebrated holidays together, and our children played with one another. We behaved like a large extended family.

We've lost track of some of the people who were members of that dive club. Others have passed away. But remarkably, quite a few members of that old dive club have remained in touch all these years. Our children now have children of their own, but many of them still stay in touch with one another, too.

We are quite literally scattered around the globe these days, but a number of us still come together periodically for a reunion. During our most recent get-together this past week, I proposed that the story of this remarkable group be set forth in The Right Blue, and everyone in attendance agreed. As we reminisced, we prompted one another for half-forgotten details of our past adventures, and I made notes. Everyone agreed to contribute old photos from our dive trips and other gatherings, too.

We're going to relish recounting our tales here, and we hope that readers of The Right Blue will indulge us while we do just that. Stay tuned...

Diving then and now - Part 1

by B. N. Sullivan

One of the earliest posts in The Right Blue tells about our training as divers. In the post I mentioned that I first learned to dive in 1970. That's right -- 38 years ago!

Diving has changed a lot since 1970, mostly because of improvements in equipment. We decided it would be fun to review the progression of those changes for our readers. This exercise will take several posts, so bear with me.

To start things off, have a look at the picture at left. That's me, in 1970, when I was a newly minted diver. (No, I wasn't angry -- the sun was in my eyes!)

When we first unearthed this old photo, I had to laugh. That red thing I'm wearing looks like a life vest pilfered from an airliner, but it's not. Known as a 'horse-collar' vest -- for reasons I'm sure are apparent! -- it was used primarily for surface flotation.

Dive gear is very heavy, and can be cumbersome. Swimming on the surface with, among other things, a metal tank on your back, and lead weights arrayed around your waist can be incredibly daunting at times. When the flotation vest was inflated, it helped counteract that weighed down feeling, and enabled divers to keep their heads above water while waiting for a boat, or swimming to shore. Those horse-collars were not very comfortable, however.

The vests had little CO2 cartridges inside. The CO2 could be released to rapidly fill the vest in an emergency, but most of the time, we blew the things up by puffing into the little inflator hose. The CO2 cartridges were single-use only, and it was expensive to replace them all the time, so we really did restrict ourselves to using them only when we were struggling or in a jam.

Fortunately those dopey horse-collar vests with the CO2 cartridges are no longer used by sport divers. They've been replaced by buoyancy control devices (BCDs for short), in the form of vests, jackets, or pouches (called 'wings') attached to a harness. These days, BCDs are inflated at the push of a button, with air supplied from the scuba tank through a special low-pressure hose. Divers can and do still use the BCD for flotation on the surface, but they also make use of the device underwater. By adding a little puff of air to the BCD at depth, divers can adjust their buoyancy, compensating for the weight of their gear.

The next thing I spotted in the photo was the tank -- or rather the valve on the tank -- and the regulator. We were using "J-valves" on scuba tanks at that time. There was no such thing as a submersible pressure gauge, so we could not monitor how much air we had left in our tanks once we entered the water. Tanks fitted with "J-valves" had a mechanism that blocked the diver's air supply at a certain (low) pressure level. The valve had a lever on it that the diver could pull to release the remaining air, known as the 'reserve' air. Believe me, that reserve wasn't much, but it would provide a few more breaths -- usually enough to get to the surface (we hoped!).

The regulator in the photo is a single-hose demand flow regulator, which was a pretty sophisticated rig at that time -- compared to, say, a double-hose regulator. Those old double hose regs required the diver to sort of suck the air out of the tank! We still use single-hose demand flow regulators, but the ones we have now have numerous ports on the first stage -- the part that attaches to the tank valve. To those ports we attach various pieces of gear, including power inflators for our BCDs, submersible digital pressure gauges so that we can continuously monitor our air supply, and one or more extra second stages -- the part of the regulator that has the mouthpiece -- to facilitate sharing air with a dive partner if need be.

Note the clunky old analog depth gauge that I'm wearing on my wrist in that photo. Key pieces of dive management gear in those days were the depth gauge and the dive watch or timer. Those relics now have been replaced by digital electronic decompression computers which continuously sense depth, keep track of elapsed time, and recompute every few seconds how long we can safely remain at a given depth -- as well as many other bits of information that I won't go into until another time.

Even our wetsuits have changed. The one I'm wearing in the photo had no lining and was extremely difficult to get into -- just rubber against skin. Everyone carried a box of cornstarch or a can of talc in their gear bags then. We applied it liberally before donning our suits, but it made quite a sticky mess, and often didn't help the process all that much. These days our suits are lined with Polartec or other soft materials that make them as easy to slip into as a pair of jeans.

Ahh, the good old days!

Wreck of the Jolanda: Strange cargo

On April 1, 1980 a Cypriot cargo ship called the Jolanda was en route to the Jordanian Red Sea port of Aqaba. As the vessel passed by Ras Mohammed, the cape at the tip of the Sinai peninsula, it encountered very rough seas and ran aground on a reef.

The freighter took on water and sank, coming to a rest on the edge of the reef near a steep dropoff, where it reportedly teetered for several years. Finally, in 1986, a storm took the Jolanda the rest of the way over the ledge, and she sank out of sight into the depths.The Jolanda was carrying containerized cargo, some of which spilled out onto the reef as the vessel broke up. For years, the containers and some of the cargo remained as the only sign of the wreck visible to divers at sport diving depths. We first saw the remains of the Jolanda's cargo in 1989. By that time soft corals already were growing on the broken containers.

For quite awhile, lines and cables attached to one of the more intact containers were used as a mooring for visiting dive boats. This photo was taken in April of 1991, eleven years after the Jolanda sank. On a return visit in late 1995, this particular container was gone, too.
These days not much of the Jolanda's cargo containers remain, but some of the freight that was inside the containers still can be seen littering one section of the reef. No, you're not seeing things. The Jolanda was laden with bathroom fixtures -- toilets, sinks, and bathtubs.
For decades, this cargo has been a source of amusement for divers, and especially for underwater photographers. Nearly everyone who has dived on this reef has taken a souvenir photo of this cargo.

The reef where the Jolanda sank used to be called Turtle Reef. Later it was renamed Jolanda Reef after the famous shipwreck. The name may sound a bit familiar to those who have been reading The Right Blue for awhile. It was mentioned in the story of an exhilarating dive we made in some crazy currents at Ras Mohammed.