Tioman (Jellyfish Weekend)

Tioman Island (14-16 September 2007)


This weekend trip is so called unplanned one. Swearing not to go Tioman again, but here we are. I desperately want to touch water again, I know I’ve been saying the same thing all the time. I need to cool down my head, I got so many anxiety these few weeks, need to taste the saltwater again, and I miss diving with my friends, and we are not going to have anymore trip again this year, so many reasons!

This trip was a leisure to us, because Leo was driving, we can enjoy the journey, we didn’t need to drag our bags down for immigration purposes, we didn’t even need to get down! We also got a chance to stay overnight in Mersing instead of sleeping in the boat. Timotel is really five-star for my weekend diving standard, it’s clean and it has bathtub…the water tap is not turning together when we try to get water and the toilet is actually clean and towel is provided and beds are not saggy! Wahhhhh!

Although we only reached Timotel at around 2 am, I still enjoyed the sleep. I slept all the way, despite me wanting to accompany Leonard and Cynthia along the way, I failed to fight the travel sickness pill. I was knocked off like a bear…

Saturday morning, ate breakfast in hotel, I missed the delicious bihun they served three years ago, during my open water course, the one and only time I got the chance to stay in Timotel. We had to take speedboat to Tioman. The seats was very cramp but I like the boat because it was fast and it has natural ventilation. Two hours only and we reached Tioman. One thing good in traveling with Fisherman, my Open Water Operator, is I got to meet my OW Instructor who was still as relax and helpful as ever, and friends from Fisherman, and the resort we stayed was near the jetty, and .. ice cream shops.

11 am, we did the first dive. We used speed boat to dive, so it was bloody cramp. Hubby found good spot in front only shared by us and one guy. We gotta recap the equipments on the floor but it’s okay, one good thing, we learned to jump from over the front railing. I was scared at first, but the boat man taught us to jump from there since behind was jam packed. Fully geared, holding onto the roof, we had to step over the railing, one leg, two legs and jumped. It’s easier than it looks and very fast way to get into water, no queue in the front.

This trip we also tried to make it practical not to wear wetsuit, only vest and short. It’s not suitable for me, because I’m allergic of something in the sea water, and my legs got to suffer, although I really love the needless to don the wetsuit. But the consequence is high! And this trip, there were so many bloody jellyfish everywhere! I’ve never seen so many, hell, I’ve never seen jellyfish in Tioman before. This time, we needed to avoid them, avoid being stung on the face, it ended up on the leg. I only remember being stung three times, but I got so many polkadots on my legs, so it’s really the bloody allergic.

Another thing, it’s sooo good to be leisure diver. No need to worry about anything, just behaved and plugged into the water. Five of us went on our own way.

I learned another new thing from this trip, yawning underwater. I yawned so many times that I had to remember to keep breathing. It’s not because it’s that boring though..
First dive is quite plain.., unhealthy coral and so little fish… but I soon got adapted to the feeling of flying that I love the most, so it didn’t really matter. I like the third dive at Roger’s wreck, because we saw this beautiful school of fish, so many of them packed together. Nothing much on the wreck, so we just hovered and watched the fish.

Ice cream, every dive had to be ended with my favorite Tioman only Apple Slurpz ice cream. I logged eight ice creams for two days. We decided not to go night dive, we left the torches at home anyway. Nobody went because it was scheduled in jetty amd the tide was too low.

We had BBQ dinner, chicken, sotong, fish, they were all delicious, there were so many kittens everywhere, they came as they pleased and sneaked below our dining table. We happened always to sit at Cat’s point or Cat’s cleaning station.

Football game in the island. Nah, only saw the goal replay, I preferred to sleep early. Our aircon didn’t work well, it was hot all night, I woke up at midnight to talk to the aircon, half cursing, but it didn’t behave still.
Early morning we walked around looking for breakfast before breakfast, but no restaurant was opened, it’s fasting month, so everything was quite different.

Finally, we had our prata breakfast at 8.30 am, the sky was so dark and it was raining hard. The horizon and neighboring islands disappeared between the fog. We were pondering about whether to dive or not. One part of me wanted to just have dry morning because my allergic worked up, but the other part was longing to dip into the water again.

We decided to dive, when we reached the jetty, the rain was gone, and the sky was clear. The best thing was, the visibility was great. We dived around Soyak and it was a nice dive. Some of the corals were still healthy and beautiful but most of all I enjoyed playing flying again so much although in between it was disrupted of jellyfish. We had to put in combat mode to avoid any flying jellyfish, they were literally everywhere. When we surfaced, the sea was swelling, the wave reached one meter height and we had to get up the boat real fast.
Second dive we were dropped around the Salang bay and had a long dive until we passed the jetty and reached the shore where the dive center were. Happy end of the dive.

It kind of pretty good to dive with fisherman again, to have dive center where we could wash our gear and worked with the log book, although we missed the big boat, but it’s okay.

We boarded 3.30 ferry to Mersing, it was freezing cold on the feet (huh?) and we had to transfer to small speed boat because the tide was low. When two third of the passengers was out, including us, the remaining passengers were the moved to the front and the boat slowly sailed into the jetty.

We had seafood dinner in Mersing, it was yummy, cuttlefish salted egg, YUM YUM….
Because of traffic jam near the immigration, we reached home few minutes passed midnight.