Malaysia Photographs

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The gorgeous scenery of Redang.

Rob McKnight in his gear during our second visit to Pulau Aur.

A porcupine fish at night, at Pulau Aur.

Diver Down: The Reports from Pulau Aur and Redang

Will Moss, 9/1/96

Rediscovery
.....I first scuba dived in Hawaii about five years ago. It was what they call an introductory scuba experience, where an instructor gives you an hour of basic facts on how not to kill yourself, and then takes you for a dive in optimum waters not more than 40 feet deep. I went with a family friend, and her boyfriend, who was a certified diver, and a NAUI instructor, and we did a beach entry onto a shallow reef off of Kapaa, Kauai.
.....I was amazed. I would discover later that the silted, shallow reef I saw in Hawaii was a colorless reflection of the wonders you could experience on a good scuba dive, but at the time it was astounding. I was captivated by the novelty of breathing comfortably underwater, and enchanted by the marine wildlife that I saw. Ironically, I had earned a degree in marine biology from UCSC in 1989, but never learned to dive there. Looking up through 40 feet of clear Hawaiian water, I wondered why I had waited so long to try.
.....Even after that experience, however, it would be two more years before I would scuba dive again. Inertia, and reluctance to learn in the frigid, demanding waters of Northern California lead me to stall, and it wasn't until Christmas of 1993, on a trip to the US Virgin Islands with my family, that I would again strap on a tank and regulator and venture into the ocean. On that trip to St. John I spent most of my time in the classroom and on a boat, and I earned my NAUI and PADI Openwater 1 (basic) diver certifications. I dived five times in the warm waters of the Caribbean, and saw some interesting things. As befits basic certification dives, it was nothing very challenging, and nothing below 70 feet.
.....Diving in the Caribbean was every bit the experience I remembered from Hawaii, and more, but once again, after the trip, I let my interest in diving lie fallow. I made excuses that I knew no one locally who dived, but, in truth, it was the same old inertia taking hold again.
.....Now I have started diving again, and this time I don't intend to stop.

Objects at Rest
.....Inertia is a deadly enemy. It saps your strength and initiative, trapping you in a comfort zone, a padded cell of banality that will eventually encompass your life in a cocoon of sameness. Desire to overcome inertia was one reason why I moved to Singapore. Inertia had dogged my desire to pursue the hobby of diving. In Singapore, however, I overcame that inertia with the help of Mike MacDonald and Joe Pantuso.
.....It all started on our recent visit to Pulau Tioman, in Malaysia. We did a great deal of skin diving in the excellent conditions there. We spotted moray eels, various fish, and even a small black tip reef shark. Mike was along on that trip, and our snorkeling experience fired his latent desire to learn to dive, and reignited my old passion for the ocean. We came back from that trip ready to go. Joe had not been on the Tioman trip, but he had been interested in learning to dive since we had arrived in Singapore, and Mike's and my combined enthusiasm was enough to get both of them enrolled in a NAUI Openwater 1 course being run through a local dive shop in Holland Village, near where we live. This store had been recommended to us by Yu Min, who was a diver. Mike and Joe signed up for a two week package that included instruction, pool sessions, and certification dives on the island of Pulau Aur, Malaysia. You can dive in the waters around Singapore, but people rarely do as the shipping traffic has rendered the once pristine water turbid and dull. Since I was already certified, I signed up to join Mike and Joe on the trip as a recreational diver. I was two and a half years out of practice, however, and Michael, the classroom instructor and shop owner, suggested I do some checkout exercises with the instructors who would be doing the field dives. Actually, I would end up doing my entire NAUI Advanced certification on that trip, but I didn't know that at the time.
.....After some frustrating false starts concerning the course scheduling, Mike and Joe began learning. We spent two weeks counting down the days until the dive trip while the two of them did their classroom and pool sessions. Mike, in particular, was rabid to get out into open water. He would not be disappointed.

A Healthy Photo Jones
.....Recently, I have found myself becoming more interested in photography, for my own pleasure, and as a way of documenting my life in Southeast Asia. This is not an entirely new thing. I have always enjoyed photography, and spent a year and a half in high school learning developing and printing under the tutelage of Ray "Flower Child" Kortan, one of the weirdest of a weird breed.
.....I had a small point-and-shoot camera that my father gave to me before I left for Singapore. It had been a wonder, traveling with me to Johor Bahru and Tioman, and helping to document my experiences in Singapore. But it was time to seek a bit more flexibility and creativity, so I bought a Canon 35mm SLR and a couple of workhorse lenses. I also discussed with Joe and Mike the possibility of us looking into some underwater photography equipment. They were both interested in the prospect. Joe was particularly excited, and wanted to look in to underwater video equipment. That proved to be prohibitively expensive, but on the day before we left for our dive, up in Pulau Aur (Aur is pronounced "ow."), I found what looked like a good option. I bought a Motor Marine II, a Japanese 35mm camera designed for use at depths up to 150 feet. Despite being the underwater version of a point-and-shoot, the Motor Marine, with its large underwater flash, was not cheap, clocking in at about $900 US. There were cheaper options, but nothing that would withstand the rigors of real diving, or be satisfying to use once I learned the ropes of underwater photography. Despite the price, we were all pleased that we would be able to have a record of our dives.

A Gen-U-Wine 3^rd World Experience
.....On Friday, July 26^th, Rob drove Joe, Mike, and me, and all our new dive gear to the train station in Singapore. I say "the" train station because there it is only one, and it is actually an outpost of the Malaysian rail line. And looks it. The station is in an old British colonial building, and it is generally decrepit. The toilets are Asian squat stalls, rare in Singapore but common in Malaysia, and the general state of repair was much shabbier than typically found in Singapore. The train runs from Singapore, across the causeway to Johor Bahru, and on up into peninsular Malaysia. A lot of commuters use it to ride home to JB.
.....A word here on the joys of squat toilets. Toilets are, of course, something that you take for granted except in those inconvenient times when you are desperate to find one and can't. One experience that not many Americans have had is finding a toilet, but having it be the wrong kind. I discovered squat toilets shortly after moving to Singapore, but had never had to use one for a number two, if you know what I mean (and I know you do). Squat toilets are common throughout Asia, the trusty sit-down-and-enjoy-a-magazine type being a largely European convention. There is no enjoying a newspaper on a squat-toilet unless you have cybernetic knees.
.....A squat toilet is essentially a hole in the ground, sometimes with two foot pads to show your slower citizens where to plant for optimum load-dropping. If you've ever been camping, it is essentially the same technique except it tends to smell worse. Malaysia is a beautiful country in many ways, but overall bathroom upkeep doesn't seem to be one of their strong points. The overall mentality seems to be "why clean when you're just going to shit there anyway?" I have to say that the all-time scariest bathroom I ever saw (and possibly the single greatest concentration of human sewage I ever saw) was in a relatively upscale mall in Johor Bahru. And I paid 20 sen for the privilege of entry to that little slice of hell.
.....At the very least you can usually expect a film of urine and scummy bilgewater around any squat toilet. This generally obligates you to actually completely undress, and pray that there is somewhere to hand your trousers and underwear, because if you leave them around your ankles, they are just going to soak up the scum (or you might miss, being inexperienced at this form of relief, and cause yourself a world of hurt). Oh, and something else I would point out if you are ever planning on visiting the less developed quarters of Asia. Bring toilet paper. The Malay Muslim custom is to not use toilet paper, but rather water and the left hand. This is why you never touch or hand anything to a Malay with your left hand, or eat with your left hand.
.....At the station we met Stanley Ong, our dive master, and some of the other divers going on the trip. There was a Scotsman named Tony, and his sullen son, who was at that age when everything dad does is goofy and embarrassing. There was a pleasant British university student named Phil, who had considerable dive experience, and who would become my dive buddy that week and two weeks later in Redang, and three young Singaporean national service studs. All but Phil had been in the dive class with Mike and Joe. Phil was going for his NAUI Advanced certification dives. Joe and Mike had already told me about the three young Singaporeans, who were apparently know-it-all types who had paid little attention in class, and made several mistakes in the pool sessions. I was not comforted at the thought of diving with them.
.....Fortunately, our dive master, Stanley Ong, impressed me as a no-nonsense kind of guy. He gave me a scowl when he flipped through my logbook and saw only five dives, but he soon became chatty with me and said that, as long as I passed a checkout dive with his assistant, Raymond, there would be no problem with me diving along with Phil.
.....Departure time rolled around and we humped all of our equipment onto the train. There was some scuffling and scrabbling for seats and storage space. Stanley wanted us seated near an exit, and it would become clear why when we reached JB. We finally settled ourselves in a car that was unlit and had no fans or air conditioning. In an uncooled rail car that had been baking in the equatorial sun all day, the temperature was well over 100 degrees even though it was now past dark. The car was also infested with cockroaches to a level that I have seen nowhere else in Singapore or Malaysia. I could see four or five of the little buggers at any given moment, crawling the walls, floor, dustbin, and around out dive bags. Joe killed twelve that wandered by his seat.
.....And so we took the thankfully short ride to JB, where we arrived in the station to find large crowds of 3^rd class Malaysian passengers trying to pile onto the train before it had even stopped rolling. Lugging all of our equipment along, it was quite a fight for all of us to get off of the train with our stuff before it started pulling out of the station again. From there we all climbed into a minivan, and began the two hour drive tot he town of Kota Tingi, from which we would embark on the four hour sail to Pulau Aur.
.....The drive up to Kota Tingi was only an hour or so, and pretty uneventful. We stopped for dinner at a local place that was clearly the ang mo ("red hair," slang for caucasian) diver hangout. There were three or four different groups of divers all having dinner before setting out for the harbor, a half hour away.
.....We hit the boat about midnight, with a four hour sail to Pulau Aur. After getting everything loaded the first priority was to get some sleep. It was going to be up at eight the next morning for diving, and we were due to arrive at the island at four AM, which would have us up for an hour or two in the middle of the night. We all managed to grab a little fitful sleep on the pitching boat.

Pulau Aur
.....I woke up at about four AM and looked out the window to see the lights of the island ahead. Moments later we were pulling up in a sheltered bay with the dimly lit resort visible on the beach. I use the term resort loosely. It was really more of what is called a "chalet," in this part of the world; something like what we stayed in at Tioman. There is a central building with an open restaurant, and a bunch of dingy, outlying cabins. There was one grungy, communal bathroom with traditional showers (bucket and tub) and squat toilets. There was no large jetty, so all travel to and from the dive boat was by means of small water taxis. We heaped everyone, along with their packs and gear, onto one small, overloaded taxi and chugged towards the shore 200 meters away.
.....The first thing I saw as we loaded our stuff into our room was two giant bugs, the likes of which you only see in textbooks and nature documentaries in the states. One was a praying mantis as long as my hand. It must have been five inches end to end, and a brilliant shade of green. The other was a beetle that would have looked at home in the Cretaceous period, climbing up the stalk of some cycad. I took photos of both of them, with my handy macro lens. It was a good way to inaugurate my Canon.
.....After that we all crawled into bed for a couple more hours of desperately needed sleep. The beds were one-inch thick mattresses laid on bedframes consisting of iron bars four or five inches apart. It was a singularly uncomfortable experience. After much adjusting I finally managed to obtain a position where every bar fell strategically into a space between my ribs. It was not a glorious night's sleep, and I can report that, for the first time in my life, my overwhelming sensation on climbing out of bed the next morning was one of relief. It was unnatural.

Diver Down
.....And so we woke up the next day, and it was time to dive. We had two days and five dives to do, so there would be three the first day, and two the second. We dragged all of our equipment down to the water taxi and rode back out to the dive boat. I was a bit nervous but mostly I was excited. So were Mike and Joe, who were looking forward to their first open water scuba experience.
.....We sailed for a half hour out to a fairly sheltered spot where Phil and I could do a checkout dive with Raymond, Stanley's assistant dive master, and where the beginning students could do their exercises under Stanley's supervision. It was only forty feet deep and the water was very calm. Phil and I geared up. It felt weird to be wearing a scuba rig for the first time in a couple of years. I found that I remembered most of the esoterica, and, despite the rust, I managed to get all my gear assembled without any mistakes. Of course, most scuba gear is fairly intuitive to set up. It is using it correctly that requires a little technique. Once everything was on, Phil and I shuffled to the gunwales, inflated our buoyancy control vests (much like flying, the idea is to make a controlled descent), and giant stepped into the water.
.....I felt right away that I had been away too long. The water was warm and calm, and visibility was great. I could see the coral covered bottom forty feet below me, with myriad colorful reef fish going about their business. I let the air out of my BC and began to slowly sink towards the bottom. A few feet away, Phil did the same. Raymond, our instructor, was already waiting for us on the bottom.
.....Even though spent most of this dive and my other dives on this trip doing exercises for my NAUI advanced qualification, it wass impossible to shake the wonder of being underwater. We went through the various checkout exercises, buddy breathing, removing and replacing equipment, and basic navigation, but it was impossible to ignore the beautiful scenery around us. This was not a great reef by local standards but even it was overrun with fish, and it had many large living coral formations. It felt good to be back on the ocean floor.
.....Over the course of the next two days we did five dives. I spend three of those dives doing exercises with Phil and Raymond. I had not originally signed up for this trip with the intention of getting my advanced qualification, but since I ended up diving with Phil and Raymond, and doing all of the exercises anyway, I had Raymond and Stanley sign off on my dive logs and I registered myself for advanced certification. It never hurts to have more skills when you are engaged in an inherently dangerous sport. A great deal of NAUI Advanced work centers around underwater navigation, which is practical, since it helps to be able to find your way back to the boat. There is also a deep dive and a night dive, however, and those were two of the high points.
.....The first day we did two exercise dives, and then Phil and I got to do a recreational dive. I took my Motor Marine camera with me for the first time, and Phil and I swam along the reef in about fifty feet of water. It was after six PM, and the setting sun cast rather a gloomy shadow over the reef. Evening is not a bad time to dive, as that is when nocturnal fish and corals begin to emerge, while diurnal ones are still active, but I did wish that I had brought an underwater flashlight for peering into the gloom under rocks and coral ledges where the interesting creatures often hide. I did snap several pictures on that dive, and the picture of me underwater is also from that dive, but the low light didn't help the look of the pictures. There was just enough light to pollute pictures with green and blue colors, as always happens underwater, but not enough to make visibility great. Still, a few good photographs emerged from that dive.

Another World
.....That night was a real highlight, however. Phil and Stanley and I went on a night dive, my first ever. It was the most surreal experience of my life. I didn't bring the camera because I was worried about managing my flashlight and buoyancy while worrying about the camera. That turned out to be a big mistake, because the night dive yielded what would have been some of the best photos of the trip.
.....Jumping into the ocean is always a slightly spooky experience. That is part of the fun and part of the adrenaline rush. There is always the mystery of what is lurking at the edge of visibility, and anticipation of seeing something really big. At night, when visibility is confined to the cone of your flashlight beam, and everything else is inky, impenetrable blackness, that feeling is intensified. We all rolled into water, and I immediately shone my light around to see what was about. The bottom was vaguely visible thirty-five feet below, but everything else was gloom. We deflated our BCs and sank into the darkness.
.....It didn't take long for all my anxiety about the dive to disappear. That first night dive was the single most surreal and astounding thing I have ever done. It helped that there were only three of us, so there was a great feeling of solitude and serenity. We slowly sank to the bottom, and there we began a leisurely tour of a very nice, if not very deep coral garden. In the limited visibility the coral pinnacles that were ten feet high looked like cliffs that extended up forever. Every wall was a precipice and every mound of coral a mountain. There was no sunlight so there was no color pollution from the ubiquitous underwater blue. Although we couldn't see much at any one time, our flashlights revealed the true colors of the reef, a carpet of deep reds, greens, and oranges. Periodically we would find a large parrotfish or triggerfish asleep in a branch of coral, or under a ledge. You could actually stroke the sleeping fish as long as you were delicate, although I did get my regulator knocked out of my mouth when a parrotfish we were touching suddenly woke up and bolted into my face. The overall effect of surreality was intensified by the other divers being invisible, except for the beams of their flashlights. The only time I could see Stanley or Phil's bodies is when I shone my beam directly on them, or when they silhouetted themselves against their own lights. The flashlight beams were visible in the water as bright cones twenty or thirty feet long.
.....A good find was a squid who cruised out of the darkness and into my light beam like a tiny, streamlined spaceship. It hung there in the blackness, and then it slowly cruised right up to the lens of my flashlight (squids are attracted to light, as they normally orient themselves by moonlight at night). There, inches from my face, it hovered, rapidly shifting color and patterns with a fluidity no chameleon could ever match. Then, deciding that we weren't the moon, it streaked off into the darkness gracefully, and faster than we could follow. There has only been one other time I have so regretted not having my camera handy, when we saw turtles at Redang.
.....When I was a student at UC Santa Cruz, I experimented with psychedelic drugs, as many of my friends did. One thing we used to like to do was to take a handful of magic mushrooms and wander around the redwood forests. One effect of the drug was to drape a level of surreality around everything, so that the redwood forests had the benign feel of a movie set, or fantasy creation. That experience had nothing on the night dive as far as providing the sensation of being on another, wholly alien world. It is a remarkable experience to dive at night in the tropics. I recommend it enthusiastically.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
.....The next day it was time to head back to Singapore, but we had two dives lined up first. They were both scheduled for a reef known as Pinnacles 2, which is one of Aur's most renown dive sites. Pinnacles 2 is a peak that begins at forty feet of depth, and then slopes away gradually to the deep, sandy bottom at about 100 feet. It was there that Phil and I would do our deep qualification dive and also take our second recreational dive of the weekend. There wasn't much to see on the sandy bottom below the reef, but it would give us a comfortable place to kneel while we did our exercises. The sea was a bit rough that day and Mike and Joe, along with a few other unfortunates, suffered bouts of seasickness. I am lucky enough to not suffer from motion sickness.
.....The deep dive was an exercise dive, so I left the camera with Joe, who shot a roll of pictures on his recreational dive. Phil and Raymond and I backrolled in, as the heavy swells that day made giant step a tricky proposition. We all descended by the anchor line. I didn't have time to linger over the view, but even just in passing I could see that Pinnacles was quite a spectacular reef. I was glad that I would have time to dive it recreationally later.
.....I burn air very quickly, being a large guy. As you go deeper, air consumption is increased as the pressure it takes to draw each breath from your tank gets higher. (It takes four times as much air to fill your lungs at 100 feet as it does at the surface, since pressure is four times higher - 1 atmosphere every 33 feet approx.) Raymond, who breathes like a canary, had told Phil and me to warn him when we were at half tank pressure (1500 psi) so we could return to the surface with enough air to make a safety decompression stop.
.....We made it down to 100 feet in fairly short order, although I had still burned nearly 1/3 of my air just descending. Once there, we engaged in some simple exercises to test for nitrogen narcosis. Raymond had Phil and me identify some colors (we both saw red as purple, but that is because there is very little natural red light left at that depth). We also both had to solve a math problem. We blew it, but I am pleased to report that it is because we both suck at math, and not because we were suffering from nitrogen narcosis.
.....Even while we were doing exercises I had time to appreciate my situation. I was 100 feet below the surface. That's the equivalent of a ten story building. A lot of water was between me and an unlimited air supply. Nonetheless. The experience was quite cool. Visibility was still good at that depth, and the overall light level was good. I had dived to nearly seventy feet in the virgin islands, and one thing I had noticed there was that I could no longer see the surface clearly. These Malaysian waters were so clear, however, that the rippling surface was still clearly visible, high above us, with shafts of sunlight reaching from the zenith down into the depths. It was hard to believe it was 100 feet when it looked like only forty or fifty. Our gauges didn't lie, though. And neither did my air consumption rate.
.....I had been sucking air at a prodigious rate throughout the dive, what with our depth, and my high rate of general air consumption. I informed Raymond when I was at 1500 psi, and again at 1000, and, finally, at 700. When I was down to 700 psi we started heading back towards the surface. There was no way I was going to make a safe ascent with a decompression stop on 700 psi of air. At thirty feet or so, I hit about 200 psi. I signalled Raymond that I needed to breathe from his second regulator for the safety stop (every diver has two second-stage regulators attached to his or her tank, for just such a situation). Raymond still had about half his air so it was no problem hitting from his tank while we continued a very gradual ascent. Knowing that there were swells on the surface, I wanted to make sure that I had enough air to power inflate my BC in the rough waters up top. At fifteen feet I went back to my own regulator and completed my ascent. I did still have enough air to power inflate my vest, and I made it back onto the boat with about 100 psi (1/30^th of my starting air). Usually, you should surface with 300-600 psi left in your tank for safety, but sometimes it just doesn't work out. The key is that you are safe as long as you and your buddy are prepared and well trained. Although I was low on air for much of the dive I wasn't worried because I knew that Phil and Raymond had air to spare, and were both competent enough to buddy-breathe me if necessary.
.....As we had risen past the Pinnacles, we had seen some of the other divers in our crew exploring the reef. We surfaced and passed off some of our equipment to Tony and his son, who had been waiting for us to return before beginning their dives (we were short BCs and regulators, having lost a bag at the train station in Singapore). We spent an hour and a half lolling around on the boat, shedding excess nitrogen from our bodies while the others dived on pinnacles. Joe took the camera down and got some good photographs. Mike and some of the others fed fish with bread brought down in plastic bags. During that surface interval I was treated to the sight of Stanley reaming out one of the know-it-all young Singaporean dudes. They had been screwing up throughout the trip, doing various things designed to piss off dive masters. They had been putting equipment together wrong, and making fundamental mistakes such as failing to monitor their air (!). Stanley's patience was sorely tried. Finally, one of them made the mistake of asking to borrow a dive knife from one of the other divers, and Stanley blew his top. "What you need a knife for, lah?" he yelled. "What you going to kill down there? You learn how to dive first and then you get a knife." Properly chastised, the young buck dove knifeless. Which is no big deal, really. So far the only thing I have ever used my dive knife for is resetting the "maximum depth" needle on my depth gauge.
.....After a good surface interval, Phil and I geared up for our last dive, a purely recreational cruise around the Pinnacles. We hadn't been able to take in much of the sights on our first dive that day since we had been doing our deep exercises. On this dive, however, I took the camera along, and Phil and I lazily cruised over the reef taking snapshots and enjoying the sights. We ran into Joe, on his last dive, and saw Stanley free-diving above us, sometimes as deep as forty feet. There were some big batfish cruising around, as well as a large school of young barracuda patrolling the top of the reef. Some of the young Singaporean dudes reported a small blacktip reef shark but we never saw him. I shot a roll of film, and we enjoyed a relaxed swim before ascending and taking a safety stop on the boat's anchor line at fifteen feet of depth (it is quite something to see the boat suspended forty feet over your head, by the way.
.....Unfortunately, as we surfaced in the swells on this last dive, disaster struck. Well, it wasn't a real disaster since no one was injured, but it was disastrous to me. I lost my Motor Marine camera. We had surfaced in the swells on the wrong side of the boat. As we were swimming around the boat I had my camera's lanyard strung over my shoulder. That was foolish. It should have been anchored to my BC vest. Somewhere in the swells the lanyard slipped off my shoulder and the neutrally buoyant camera drifted into the blue. Phil was swimming in front of me, so he never noticed. I didn't notice myself until I was on the boat and I thought "I don't remember handing my camera up to the deckhand." A panicky search of the boat revealed the worst. I had lost it in the water. The Motor Marine doesn't sink, so I couldn't just comb the bottom and look for it. And the current at the surface was swift. We used the boat to search for a while, but it is a big ocean and a small camera. It is probably well on its way to Hong Kong now, with my best roll of film from that trip still in it. If those o-rings hold up someone might find that thing months from now and still be able to process the film. They won't find any clues to my identity. Just a lot of picture of fish.
.....I was extremely depressed, but pleasantly surprised to find out that it wasn't enough of a tragedy to ruin the weekend. It was $1300 Sing down the tubes, but it had still been wonderful to dive again, and it felt good to have completed my advanced certification. We enjoyed a sunset sail back to Kota Tingi, watching lightning strike the ocean on the horizon. When we returned to the harbor at Kota Tingi we found about a dozen kids eager to help us carry our equipment from the boat to the van. Sensing what was coming, I dissuaded some of my would-be porters and carried my gear myself. It wasn't easy, they were a pretty determined bunch. I practically had to peel my pack from the back of one kid. Stanley, a Malay himself, dissuaded us from allowing the kids to haul or gear. Those who did let the kids carry their stuff found themselves hit up for "donations" when we got to the van. Those who refused were treated to a hefty heckling. I watched the back of the van until it was closed to make sure no equipment bags got "lost" due to bruised feelings. We got a rousing send-off of window slapping and yelling on our way out, including a un-translatable insult written in the dust on Joe's window by the kid he had stiffed. And then we drove back into Singapore.

Camera II
.....I got two rolls of film out of the Motor Marine; the two most expensive rolls of film I have ever shot. Actually Joe shot one of them and, on the whole, his came out better since the light was much nicer when he took his roll at Pinnacles. Still, I was encouraged by the results, and I resolved to continue doing underwater photography. The question was, how? I though abstractly about buying another Motor Marine. For the price it was a pretty functional underwater camera. We were at Michael Lim's Great Blue Dive Shop when opportunity knocked. We had walked back into the shop two days after getting back from Aur so that Joe and Mike could take their written tests for their NAUI basic certifications. The moment we walked into the store, Michael said cheerily, "Who lost the camera?"
....."Thank you, that would be me," I replied. We commiserated a bit, and then Michael made me an offer. He said that he had a Nikonos RS-AF, the top end Nikon underwater camera and possibly the slickest production underwater camera made. He had sent back for servicing a while ago, and had never bothered to pick it up. He said that he had not needed it, and that I could have it if I paid the servicing bill. "Well," I said, "how much might that be."
....."About two thousand," Michael answered. Yowch! That's some expensive servicing. Still, a Nikonos with an extra lens (which this one had) is about a $6000 Sing camera, so even $2-3000 is a substantial discount on a camera that, as long as it was in good condition, I would never outgrow. I had bought the Motor Marine knowing that I would replace it someday, but the Nikonos would be the end of the road. Still, I didn't leap at the deal right away. Michael gave me a brochure about the camera and the repair receipt for it and invited me to go down to the Nikon servicing center in Singapore and check it out. So I did.
.....At Shriro House, the Nikon service center, I had my first look at the camera. It was a big, machined aluminum job with two interchangeable lenses. Unlike the Motor Marine the Nikonos is a true SLR, with through-the-lens metering and viewfinding and a reflex shutter. It also has a versatile autofocus mechanism. There was no doubt that was not a camera to take lightly. I asked what had happened to it. The service people told me that it had developed fungus on the lens elements and viewfinder. This is something that happens to cameras in the tropics when they are stored improperly. The humidity causes fungus to grow on the glass, which requires the entire lens system to be rebuilt. But it can be prevented with proper storage and maintenance. (Both my Canon, and the Nikonos, which I now own, live in waterproof, padded, airtight cases packed with silica desiccant, which is how you prevent fungus. Also, I spent over an hour every evening we were diving at Redang and two hours after we returned on maintaining the Nikonos, cleaning the lenses and greasing the o-rings. It is rather a Zen experience actually, and well worth the effort.)
.....Anyway, the word from the Nikon people was that the camera had been sent to Nikon Japan for servicing, and was essentially new. It should experience no problems. Everything I tested on it worked well. So I paid the bill and took it home. I had some qualms about the expense (I had to buy a strobe too), but they disappeared the day I picked up the prints from the four rolls of film I shot with it at Redang.
.....So I took the Nikonos home, where Mike voiced a theory. He said that he thought the reason why Michael had offered me this deal was that he couldn't afford to get the camera out of hock. It made sense. Stanley had told us on the boat back from Aur that Michael was really struggling with the store and having trouble making ends meet. I didn't associate that with the his selling the camera until Mike brought it up, but it made sense. The camera had been at Shriro house for nearly a year, and after a year Shriro would have taken possession of it. So Michael either had to sell it or lose it. I felt a little sad for Michael, but on the other hand, it was a great score for me, and it helped to take the sting out of losing the Motor Marine.

Consolation Trip
.....Mike and Joe and the rest of the crew went to the States for Gen Con, a trip that I was sorely disappointed to be missing. Stanley had faxed me that he was going on a diving trip to Pulau Redang, way up north in Malaysia, and would I like to sign up? I waffled about it until Phil gave me a call and asked if I was going, so I decided to treat myself to another underwater adventure by way of consoling myself for not visiting the states. It turned out to be a good decision and a good trip.
.....It was a three day weekend, so we all met at the Newton Circus hawker center at 6:30 PM on Thursday evening. It was to be a ten hour bus ride to Kuala Terrenganu, on peninsular Malaysia's northeastern coast, and then a brief boat ride out to the island. I didn't look forward to the bus ride, but I did look forward to another weekend diving. Stanley and the rest of his dive masters showed up and herded us onto the bus. Phil and I sat together as neither of us knew anyone else on the trip, and we were planning on being dive buddies again anyway. Traffic leaving Singapore was hell. It was National Day, which is Singapore's independence day, and it features much flag waving and parades, and general patriotism and propaganda. A large part of the population uses that as a good excuse to bail out of Singapore for the weekend. And a good excuse it is, too. I didn't really want to be exposed to it myself. Unfortunately, it meant that traffic across the causeway into Johor Bahru was a nightmare. It took us two hours just to get from Newton Circus to the Causeway, and through customs. Then we had the delightful experience of having to carry all our heavy dive gear through customs and 500 yards to another bus. Finally, we all got settled in, however, and as Judge Dredd unspooled on the in-drive movie system we began our overnight cruise into the reaches of rural northern Malaysia.
.....The drive was a special kind of hell. We made a couple of bathroom breaks at skanky, Malaysian roadside food stands. That was pretty interesting actually. It was the first time that I really felt like I was penetrating Malaysia, as opposed to loitering in the de-ethnicized zone around Singapore. The drive itself was a pain, though. Much like flying, it was just uncomfortable enough to prevent sleep. The movie system stopped working about two thirds of the way through Judge Dredd. Eventually I managed to get just enough sleep to feel really tired.
.....At some point it finally dawned on my addled brain that it was beginning to lighten up outside. I woke up rapidly and began staring out the window fixedly. Although we had driven to and from Kota Tingi for our trip to Pulau Aur, this was actually the first time I had been on the road in Malaysia during the day, and it was the first time I got a good look at the country. We were driving through semi rural areas near the town of Kuala Terrenganu, and it was quite a fascinating view. We drove on narrow roads, through villages shanty houses set back in deep groves of palm trees. Mosques were very common. Livestock roamed freely between the houses. There were also thick stands of native rain forest, although much of it had been cleared for palm oil plantations. Almost everyone visible wore traditional Malay Muslim garb, which includes veils for the women that cover the head and hair, but not the face. (One outstanding scene on the drive home was a large group of young Malay schoolgirls, all in identical uniforms of ankle length skirts and blue veils. I wished that I had a photo.) It was all quite something to see. This was Malaysia, after all, heart of Southeast Asia, and a country where people are still occasionally killed and eaten by giant reticulated pythons (I have the newspaper article to prove it).
.....We also drove through the town of Kuala Terrenganu itself. It was interesting. Much of the town was ramshackle and decrepit looking, but parts of it were quite modern. It was only about seven AM, and the only things that appeared to be open were breakfast restaurants. There was little traffic. It was most certainly not Singapore, but it also didn't have the oppressive sleaziness of my first Malay urban experience in Johor Bahru (see Report from Singapore 4).
.....My enchantment with the exotic view was diluted when I realized that we were going in circles. It soon became clear that the bus driver was lost. After ten hours I didn't want to spend any more time in the bus than necessary. After some poking around, the driver got us on the right road. It turned out that the harbor we were supposed to use was actually nearly an hour beyond the town. There was a little more confusion, but eventually we found the harbor a good hour and a half before our ferry was due to leave.
.....That left us with a strong need to find breakfast. The waking hordes in the bus (actually two dive parties) was cranky, stiff, and in dire need of caffeine. Most of the local eating houses had a top capacity of about twelve, however, and none of them looked up to handling the forty grumpy divers on the bus. Finally, after being waved off by one place, we found a nearby restaurant that could accommodate the horde. Breakfast consisted of rice with noodles and spicy ikan billis, which is a local Malay favorite. Ikan billis are small, whole dried fish. Needless to say, this is not the ideal breakfast food for a guy who grew up on Cheerios. That, and the sight of a large swarm of flies making a home on the exposed tray of boiled eggs, and I contented myself with a cup of 3-in-1 tea. (3-in-1s are little envelopes that contain powdered tea or coffee along with whitener and sugar. Twinings it ain't, but when in the provinces you take such civilization as you can get.)

Redang
.....A short hour later we were all humping our gear a tortuous three hundred yards from the bus down to the pier where the ferry was waiting. After some brief confusion and haggling, we all slung our gear onto one fast ferry and boarded for the forty-five minute trip out to Redang. It was a quick sail to the coast of Redang, an island about the size of Tioman. As we rounded the coast, I saw a resort that I assumed was the one we were staying at. I was quite surprised when we shot by the jetty and kept going. Instead, we heaved-to a few minutes later at the working jetty of a Malay fishing kampung. It was pretty obvious that this was not where we were staying. The kampung was a genuine example of rural third-world squalor. It was also totally fascinating. The entire village was constructed on stilts, over the shallow inshore water. It was easy to see why. The ocean directly below every building made a convenient rubbish dump and sewer. Everything, and I mean everything, went into the water. The amount of trash lying on the bottom was staggering, as was the volume of refuse floating on the surface. It didn't take much imagination to picture most bathrooms opening directly onto the water, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case. Despite that, when the water receded at low tide, I saw people showering and washing clothes in the muck beneath the village. It made me wonder what kind of a hepatitis problem they might have in areas like that.
.....Ironically, even beneath the village the water was quite clear, and I could see trumpet fish and butterfly fish swimming around the sunken chairs and bicycles, and wadded, disintegrating piles of old fishnet. Nonetheless, I was quite happy that we wouldn't be diving in that small bay.
.....The village itself was as interesting as the water below. The people were traditionally dressed, and generally friendly. The buildings themselves were ramshackle constructions of warped wood, with sheet-metal roofs and unglazed windows.
.....We dragged all of our stuff through the kampung and up to the main road, where we caught a shuttle-bus to the Berjaya resort, where we were staying. Phil and I seized ourselves a double room. A quick inspection revealed facilities far beyond any we had stayed at either on Tioman or Aur. (The Berjaya on Redang was a sister to the Berjaya Tioman, written about briefly in Tropical Bliss: The Report from Tioman. Note for the politically incorrect: The parent corporation, Berjaya Holdings, is one of the most ruthless Asian logging combines, doing major harvesting in rainforests throughout Asia and South America.) The room had two comfortable beds, a television that received three (count them) channels, a mini-bar, and a nice bathroom with a European style toilet and hot water shower. Of course, that's why this trip was $650 Sing without food, as opposed to the $400 it cost to go to Aur, with meals included.
.....There was a short break for lunch (35 ringgit buffet, as opposed to the 5 ringgit deals on Tioman) and then we hauled all our gear back out to the lobby and headed out for our first two dives. We were all a bit fatigued from the bus ride, but the general excitement about hitting the water made up for that. We rode out to the hotels dive yard where we loaded tanks and regulators, and then we boarded small boats at the nearby jetty and ferried out to our dive boat, a battered green job with no discernible name. My outstanding memory of the dive boat is that it had no head (toilet), which lead to some minor miseries, as the mixed company on the boat precluded the old over-the-gunwales technique that maritime men through the ages have relied upon. And I just couldn't bring myself to go in my relatively new wetsuit. Which reminds me of a funny story I heard on this trip.

A Funny Story
.....It seems one of my fellow divers had a friend who, for a spell of cold water diving borrowed a dry suit belonging to another friend. (Unlike a wetsuit, which traps a layer of water next to the skin, and dry suit, as the name implies, admits no water whatsoever. They tend to be expensive.) It was the custom of the diver who borrowed the suit to urinate into his wetsuit when he hit the water, since the warm urine provided instant heat in cold water situations, and the neoprene was resistant to damage from urine. Diving in cold water tends to promote frequent urination, and urinating into ones wetsuit in such situations is fairly common practice, although you won't find it listed as a technique in the basic diving textbooks.
.....Anyway, this friend hit the water in his borrowed dry suit, and immediately set about pumping a little extra heat into it, in his own inimitable fashion. It wasn't until he stripped off the suit, after the dive, that he realized what he had done, leading to what must have been one of the most acutely embarrassing moments in the history of mankind.

The First Two Dives
.....I was looking forward to this trip because it would mark the first time that I would hit the water for several solely recreational dives, without having to worry about any training or drills. I would not be disappointed. Like our trip to Aur, we anchored for our first dive in a fairly sheltered spot with a mild current. I prepped my new Nikonos and loaded a roll of film, and Phil and I geared up and hit the water. The first dive was fairly unremarkable. The bottom was flat, and only about forty feet deep. In fairness, there were some excellent coral formations. I must confess that I was too busy fidgeting with the unfamiliar Nikonos to give them as much appreciation as I should have. Still, it was a pleasant dive, despite the lack of any really dramatic sea life. It didn't yield any great photos, but it was a good way to get stoked up for the rest of the trip.
.....Our second dive was a different story. It yielded some of the most exciting moments I have yet had in the water. And, naturally, it was the one dive on which I did not bring the camera. I had to tighten down a fastening on the strobe, and I didn't have the appropriate tools on the boat, so I left the camera on board and we hit the water. One thing I have learned in my brief underwater photo experience is that sometimes it is nice to leave the camera up top and not have to worry about it. This time, however, I regretted it.
.....We anchored near a small island, maybe 200 yards in circumference. It was separated from Redang by narrow sound, perhaps 100 yards across. Phil and I decided that we would take a lap around the small island on this dive, sticking to 50 or so feet of depth. We hit the water before any of the other divers and immediately began soaking up the view. Where we were anchored there was a large shoal of small fish in the midwater. The sea floor was about 60 feet below us. We forged towards the island on the surface, preserving our air supply and bottom time. As we approached the island we saw that its shores plunged sharply into the water, creating a steep wall of boulders and coral perfect for marine life. We emptied our BC vests and sank down 40 or 50 feet. It immediately became clear that there was a stiff seaward current splitting around both sides of the island, but we hugged the wall of boulders where it was less noticeable.
.....Right away I began to see great marine life. The was a very large porcupine (puffer) fish rooting around the boulders where we first sank. We appreciated it for a few moments, and then began our swim through the scenic waters of the sound. The corals were nice. I felt a little apprehension as we rounded towards the seaward side of the island, wondering if there would be anything big. As it turned out there was, and it would be one of the highlights of the trip.
.....One of the outstanding things we noticed right away was the view upward. Mild waves were striking the edge of the water, and the great visibility allowed us to see clearly all the way up to the surface. From below we could watch the waves break against the boulders, and see several species of fish navigating the swells and foam. It was like diving in a giant version of the tide pool tank at the Steinhart aquarium in San Francisco, when the simulated wave comes crashing in. Lurking in the boulders I spotted a good sized grouper, perhaps four feet long. He was a shy fellow, however, and he ducked into a cave in the boulders moments after we spotted him. A few moments search failed to turn him up again. Moments later the grouper was forgotten as a large hawksbill (a guess on my part) turtle appeared in front of me. I got a mild jolt of adrenaline, never having seen a turtle underwater before. This one was, perhaps, eighteen inches across; a good size, but not huge. It was quite calm about us, and allowed us to approach within a yard or two. I immediately kicked myself for not having the camera, it would have been an astounding photo opportunity. I signed my frustration to Phil, and we followed the turtle around the seaward curve of the island.
.....As we pulled around opposite to the boat, a blue spotted stingray spooked out of the sand below me and zipped off into the blue. And then another turtle emerged. This one was quite a bit bigger than the first one, but also more shy. It stayed well away from us, although we did get a good look at it before it cruised off into the depths.
.....Coming around back towards the landward side of the island we began encountering the stiff current. Even close to the wall it was an effort to swim against. It wasn't bad enough to dilute our enjoyment, however. We forged back into the sound, towards the boat. We took a safety stop in the midwater near the boat, which was difficult in the current since we didn't have the anchor line to hold on to. Then we climbed on board and enjoyed the warm afterglow of a good dive. Some of the other divers saw the smaller turtle, although no one else reported seeing the large one. There is something to be said for being the first in.
.....vWith a good first-day's diving behind us, we headed back to the resort for dinner and relaxation.

Saturday
.....The next day, Saturday, we had three dives planned, two in daylight plus one night dive. Saturday turned out to be a good day in general. I managed to get the camera down on all three dives, and came up with some nice photos, and I also got to know some of the other people on the trip. Three people that I became quite friendly with were an American expatriate named Jim Myran and his Japanese girlfriend Kazumi, and a Singaporean Indian woman named Sharon. Meeting Jim was a quite a pleasure. He had a computer background and worked for Du Pont in Singapore. We had similar senses of humor and some similar interests. Jim also shared some similarities with Joe, and I introduced them the week after we got back. I had lunch at Sharon's house the following weekend, where I met her mother, a very nice, somewhat traditional Indian woman who attempted to kill me by feeding me until I exploded.
.....Our first dive on Saturday was kind of a bust. We went to a deep spot to go looking for whale sharks. We didn't find any, so we went down to the bottom. There was an elevated reef at about 70 feet, sloping down to about 130 feet. Unfortunately there was also a wicked thermocline at about 60 feet, and visibility dropped to only about ten feet in the colder water below. We went down nearly a hundred feet, and I shot a few photos, but the cloudy water and short dive time at that depth made it fairly pointless. Phil and I took our safety stop in the clear water above the thermocline. It was nicer floating in the bright, warm water near the surface, watching a couple of large shoals of fish go by.
.....Our second dive was quite a bit nicer. We anchored by a long, straight stretch of shore and did a drift dive, letting the mild current carry us along the reef in 40 or 50 feet of water. There were some nice sights, although nothing really dramatic. There were a few nice photo opportunities along the way. On the whole it was a pleasant and relaxing dive. I got more bottom time out of this dive, since we were fairly shallow, and the drift dive-plan cut down on the exertion since we didn't have to worry about finning our way back to the boat. We were picked up by a smaller launch when we surfaced.
.....The peak of Saturday's diving action came in the evening, on the night dive, which was one of the more spectacular dives I have been on. We anchored over a nice spot of reef in about 40 feet of water, dropping away to 80 feet in places. A large group of us went into the water, but the spacious reef gave us enough room to explore in pairs and quartets without running over each other. Raymond tied some chemical light sticks to the anchor line to help us navigate back to the boat in the darkness.
.....This dive didn't have the isolated surreality of the night dive Stanley, Phil and I had done in Aur. There were too many of us in the water. But it was cool for its own reasons. One big reason that this was a great dive was the lightning storm raging nearby. There were frequent, bright flashes of lightning that illuminated the entire reef every few seconds. If you were looking in the right direction you could see fish frozen by the brief flash, or divers suspended in blue space. It was very spectacular, and far outclassed anything that my camera strobe created. Jim also told me that the phosphorescent algae were active that evening, and divers were leaving trails, but I never turned off my flashlight, so I didn't see. I regret that now.
.....There were far more active fish about on the night dive. There was a large school of smallish fish suspended over the entire reef. These fish always stayed out of the direct beam of the flashlight. You could wave your flashlight beam through the thick school and watch the thousands of fish part in a perfect, rippling circle to stay out of the light beam. As I shone my light around me I could also see bigger fish, always staying at the periphery of the illumination, twenty-five or thirty feet away, and rarely letting us approach. I snapped some good pictures on the night dive. The lack of sunlight helped the color of the photographs since I didn't get the blue color pollution that comes with taking daylight shots of subjects more than a couple of feet away. Eventually Phil and I returned to the illuminated anchor line and ascended to take our safety stop. Our safety stop was nearly over when I learned a valuable lesson about night photography and buoyancy control. I backed a few feet away from the anchor line to take a shot of Phil (the one where he is clearing his nose), and as I looked down to adjust my camera I started to rise. In the black midwater, with no visible point of reference, I didn't realize what was happening until my head broke the surface, a few seconds later. It wasn't a safety hazard since I didn't come up under the boat, and the safety stop wasn't required, but any uncontrolled ascent can be dangerous when scuba diving. I resolved to be more careful in future.
.....After the dive, we sailed back to the kampung. The storm had grown much closer. At the surface, the lightning was still spectacular. Every few seconds there would be a flash and for just a fraction of a second the black water and sand would glow their respective daylight sapphire-blue and white. It was very beautiful. Unfortunately the storm broke over heads right as we reached the jetty and we all got soaked on our way back to the hotel, but it did give all of our equipment a rinse.

Spot the Big Boy
.....Sunday was our final day and our final dive, before beginning the long journey back to Singapore. It was also the single most thrilling dive of the trip.
.....It didn't start all that well though. The boat stopped and we were told to hit the water. So we did. Then we were told that it was too deep where we were, and we needed to move closer to a nearby island. Nearby is relative, however. It took us ten minutes of hard swimming on the surface in all our gear to get into water that was shallow enough for us to dive in. We were supposed to follow a guide on this trip for reasons I never fully understood. One of the boat hands was our guide, so he geared up (he had stayed on the boat, I noticed) and joined us. Finally, all in the water at the right place, we descended. The water was quite nice until the guide took us below the thermocline at 60 feet, at which point it became much more turbid. I was getting ready to work myself into a righteous snit about the crummy conditions when the guide made his first score and found a lobster fully four feet across the antennae. I got some nice shots of him, and we moved on.
.....Phil and I were swimming by a low coral rise a few yards away from Sharon and the guide when excitement appeared in the form of a six foot long gray reef shark who cruised out of the gloom with his entourage of pilotfish in tow. My adrenaline level immediately shot through the roof, and I probably burned a couple of hundred PSI of air right on the spot. This was not like seeing that little black tip at Tioman, hightailing it away from us a fast as he could. This guy (yes, he was male, I could see the claspers) was the same size as me, big and sleek, and not intimidated by us. He cruised towards the rise where Phil and I were and took a lazy, graceful circle before receding into the gloom. And then he came around for another pass. This time I kept my wits about me, and I actually managed to get a photograph off. The shark was about fifteen feet away when I snapped, near the limits of my camera's range, but he is visible in the shot. After the shark made his second pass, I moved along. Phil watched him go by one more time before joining us.
.....The shark was the highlight of the trip. Sharks are, in fact, rather rare and shy, and getting a long look at a good sized one is unusual. It took me eighteen dives to see this shark. Many of the other divers were acutely jealous when they heard what we had spotted. Even Sharon, who was very near us at the time, did not see the shark. She was simply looking in the wrong direction at the time, and did not see my hand signals.

Back Home Again
.....Phil and I were elated, so we were in a good mood as we packed, took the ferry back to the mainland, and climbed onto the bus for the ten hour drive back to Singapore. We were getting a much earlier start on this trip. That, along with my knowing many more people on the ride back than on the ride in, made the return journey much more fun. A great deal more of the trip was in daylight as well, so I got a good look at the Malaysian countryside. It was a bit sad how much of it had been cleared and turned into palm oil plantations. Jim pointed out that when you fly over Malaysia you can really see how much of the original forest has been cleared for palm trees.
.....At two AM we were back in Singapore. Jim and Kazumi and shared a cab from the Causeway, and seven hours later I was at work, telling tall tales.

Reflections
.....I have come to love diving a great deal in the short time I have been doing it again, and I don't intend to stop any time soon. It isn't difficult to explain why I enjoy it so much. First, I have always loved the ocean, and fish. I grew up in San Francisco, fishing from the municipal piers, and I later got my undergraduate degree in Marine biology. As a child I was an avid reader of Jacques Cousteau books and any other book on marine life I could find. Nothing made me happier than a marine life documentary on TV. Except maybe cartoons, but that's a given.
.....Being able to dive regularly in such a wonderful environment is the culmination of a lot of childhood dreams. I felt a part of that when I first dived in Hawaii, and again when I got my basic certification in the Virgin Islands. But I let it all slip away after that, caught in the inertia of grad school and my days in San Francisco. That won't happen again.
.....Diving is a pain for a few reasons. It is expensive. It is equipment and effort intensive, and it requires a fair amount of training. It can be dangerous, and, even under the best of circumstances, you can only do so much of it. But diving is glorious in ways that more than make up for its limitations and headaches. It is one of the last confrontations you can make with real, untamed nature. It is a whole new world, as exotic and surprising as anything dreamed up by an army of hack science fiction writers. Once in the ocean you may see literally anything. There are colorful fish, corals, kelps, sharks, dolphins, shipwrecks and more. There is an element of adrenaline and excitement to diving that is unlike anything else. There is no speed rush, but hitting the water for a dive carries its own, unique brand of excitement and mystery. Diving is a little like sex. In those rare moments when you are actually engaged in it, you sometimes think to yourself "I can't believe I'm doing this!" Of course, don't forget to check your air.

Watching Sharks
.....My fascination with sharks revolves around the juvenile amazement of the thirteen year old boy I am at heart, with a thin veneer of scientific literacy layered over the top. I find sharks amazingly beautiful, diverse, and graceful, and I have always been attracted to them. It doesn't have to be great white sharks tearing away at ham-hocks slung in the water by Australian tourists. It can be something as mundane as the docile, serpentine leopard sharks that inhabit the sloughs and estuaries of the Bay Area. I am always spellbound by the shark tanks at aquariums. That is why our brief shark spotting at Tioman and our more substantial encounter at Redang were so special for me. It is one thing to see sharks on television or in a tank, it is another to see them from a boat, as I often did at Santa Cruz, and quite something else indeed to swim with them. Lurking over that coral rise at Redang and watching that gray make his lazy circles, thinking to myself "hey, I'm swimming with that thing," is one of the pinnacles of my life so far.
.....Honestly, I have to say that only part of the joy of that experience was aesthetic appreciation of a beautiful animal. There is a very real adrenaline rush from swimming with a shark. I may get blase about it someday, but it is pretty goddamn acute right now. There is a deep twinge of primal fear that comes from watching a big, wild predator circle you. Imagine watching a tiger from fifteen feet. Intellectually you may know that chances are the shark isn't interested in you in the least. But you watch it all the time anyway. Your heart beats a little faster. You blink less. Your air consumption goes up just a tad. You tell tall tales over beers when you reach the surface, and exaggerate about how cool you were.
.....Stanley Ong, my dive master out here, has dived over two hundred feet to look at schools of hammerheads deep in the gloom.

.....Now there is something to aspire to.

Photo Lessons I Have Learned
.....I have a long way to go before I challenge any of the great underwater photographers. Don't get me wrong, I got some good pictures on this trip, and I am quite pleased overall. There is dramatic improvement over the Aur photos, and it was a pretty good result considering it was my first time using the Nikonos. But I learned some good lessons both from looking at the results of my photos, and from reading an excellent book on underwater photography last week. Next time out I will be more patient, shoot from low angles, eliminate cluttered backgrounds, take time to compose my shots, work closer to my subjects, and have a better understanding of how my exposure settings will affect the photos I get. Or, maybe I'll bliss out, point and shoot, and wait for the next big boy to cross my path. Either way, I'll think to myself, "I can't believe I'm doing this!"