Theodora braves the waters of Indonesia’s infamous Crystal Bay, hoping for a sight of the rare sunfish that seduce so many divers to their deaths.
The Indonesian Throughflow is a spectacular natural phenomenon. Day in, day out, around 15 million cubic metres of water runs between the Pacific and Indian Oceans every single second. This mighty current is what gives many of Indonesia’s dive sites their magic. And it’s also what makes them lethal.
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Take the Lombok Strait, the narrow channel between the islands of Lombok and Bali. Over 2.5 million cubic metres of water floods between the islands every second, passing through a channel just 1,000 metres deep. Around the island of Nusa Penida, one of a trio of islands off Bali, the channel shrinks to only 300 metres deep – just when the waters have to force their way around the natural obstacle. The currents produced as the throughflow swirls and eddies around seamounts and islets, warm waters from the surface mingling with chilled waters from the deep ocean, are insanely hard to predict. And that’s why Crystal Bay on Nusa Penida is Bali’s most notorious dive site.
The charms of Crystal Bay are simple: during the season, which typically runs between July and October and peaks in August and September, the oceanic sunfish or mola mola comes to visit. Weighing on occasion as much as 2.3 tonnes, it’s the world’s largest bony fish: and it rises on cool upwellings of deep water to Crystal Bay where smaller fish feast on the many ocean-going parasites that infest it. When the mola molas come through, it’s not uncommon to see as many as 60 dive boats clogging the little bay with its golden beach and rocky central island.
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On a bad day, Crystal Bay can be, well, dreadful. Currents can spin on a sixpence, a tranquil dive transformed into a maelstrom where you need to crawl hand-over-hand up the reef to resist the downcurrents, and regulators, masks and fins can be blasted away in a gust. People regularly die here. In 2011, a Thai woman got caught in a downcurrent and never resurfaced; her sister survived with a case of the bends. In 2012, the site was closed after two deaths – those of a Japanese tourist and a Danish diver – occurred on consecutive days.
Yet because of its notoriety, Crystal Bay is often credited with fatalities that didn’t originate there. Two divers went missing in 2006 and a third in 2007 at Blue Corner, a very challenging and high current dive site on neighbouring Nusa Lembongan. The seven Japanese divers who drifted – with two fatalities – after their boat captain lost track of his divers, ran out of fuel and failed to call for help, had dived Crystal Bay earlier in the day. But they disappeared from Mangrove Point on Nusa Lembongan. A group of divers who floated on the currents for over eight hours before a fishing boat found them had also dived Mangrove Point.
One dive professional blames the fatalities at Crystal Bay on under-skilled and overweighted divers failing to follow instructions: the rule when the molas come is to stay close to the wall for fear of currents that can sweep you down and out to sea. Sometimes problems are exacerbated by incompetent boat captains and inexperienced dive guides who don’t know the current patterns.
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My own experience? A few molas had made an appearance when I dived the site in June, but none were forthcoming that day, so we stayed shallower than most would on a mola dive. The only real sign of those legendary currents was the water temperature, which oscillated spectacularly, going from 21°C to 27°C in the blink of a thermocline. Though some of the reef spoke of years of horrible buoyancy, the corals were pretty enough, with bright clouds of anthia sparkling over purple xenia that waved like long hair in a breeze.
And yet, all in all, when I return to Nusa Penida, which I will, I’ll pick another site. The mola come to many places besides Crystal Bay; mantas frequent a bunch of spots; and, currents or no currents, I prefer my dive sites a little less crowded.
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