Dayang Gloomy Trip

An very sad accident happened during night dive in Dayang Jetty on 7^th, Saturday night. A diver was hit by boat propeller and suffered cuts on arms and head. He was evacuated to Mersing jetty and to Mersing hospital. Everyone did their part to try to render helps, supports or resources for the rescue. Unfortunately, the diver passed away...

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Deepest sorrow and condolences for the family who had been left behind...

RIP...

Not a pinpoint for this particular case, because nobody understand what happened,

just something to remember for me or anyone else..

Water is not human’s natural environment. We rely on equipments, skills and self diligence to know our limits and respect the boundary. There are many times we take things for granted, or treat weekend trip as just another short trip where we thought it was okay to loosen our awareness and carefulness. I’m guilty for this too. Weekend trip or whatever trip is still water, still same or even more amount of risks. Some currents there are more ripping, some waves are dangerously higher, some dangerous components and animals are the same. Anywhere in the world, dive accidents constantly happen, regardless how technology has evolves. Human is still made of flesh and breathes air.

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When we got home to Singapore, somehow I can’t get it out of my mind that someone else wasn’t going to….

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Dayang Island

6-8 June 2008

It was a very hectic week for me before the trip. Suddenly there were so many things to do after came back from Genting until I had to listed it down to make sure nothing is left out, from making check up appointment for Dad to submitting the first draft of my final project. Workplace didn’t help at all because there was equally amount of work so I couldn’t do my personal thing.

It all got worse because I didn’t feel perfectly well. So for the few days between the two weekend, I actually didn’t have the mood to go, imagining the rough journey on the way to the island.

But things were picking up when we met Cynthia, Froggie and James our old friends. Restoring my mood, the journey didn’t feel that bad even though we were hit by a very bad jam. Since Singapore important captive went lose months ago (I think it’s months already!) they kept tightening the security on the check border despite public pessimism. The result is the horrible jam on the immigration check point. Leaving from Newton around 7.30, we only managed to pass Malaysia almost ten o’clock.

The journey to Mersing was the rougher one, the van’s driver didn’t know how to use brake. On the way to Mersing the road was winding and long…and he turned here and there without stepping on the brake at all in the dark. Sometimes I really feel amazed that we managed to go through it, the other times I felt pity for those dive operators who has to go through it weekly.

It was very good unlike usual in Mersing jetty. Half an hour pass midnight, instead of waiting, we could board the jetty directly and we got the whole boat for ourselves. We also didn’t need to use transfer boat because the tide was still high enough. It was a bigger boat with seats and a lot of floor space. Each of us can occupied 3-4 seats, so I slept well until we reach the island at almost 5 am.

Walked through the jetty, I felt alive again. Dayang looked pretty in the shade of moonlight. It’s the island I liked more compared to Tioman. We went here many times during 2006, so in 2007 we skipped it at all and changed our weekend trip destination to Tioman. Tioman is a more developed and commercialized island, while Dayang is only a little patch of white beach with nobody but divers. No activities to do but dives and no shops but two little very basic shops served by the dive resorts. The nice characteristics it has are the high cliff and white sandy beach.

Usual schedule is to sleep until around 8.30 and get ready for first dive. But this time we aimed to do dawn dive. Hubby and Froggie wanted to test out their new cameras. I was supposed to test my strobe too, but we had too many things to bring already and we haven’t been diving for 9 months! ..the longest break since we started!, so no camera for me because I didn’t want to have too many things to worry about and just wanted to enjoy the dive. So, dawn dive! We assembled our gears and camera near the beach, it actually felt very nice because the surrounding was semi dark and quiet. There was only one group of divers, and one of them was Joshua. They looked seriously deep involved in quiet discussion. Around 6, we donned our gears and walked along the beach to get nearer to the dive site. It was time to visit the Dayang wreck again, my very first wreck, since it was low tide, it wasn’t so deep.

This time diving, the visibility was not so clear, it was less than 4 meters on our first dive, and the most we had for the trip was maybe 6-8 meters?

There were not so many things to see around the wreck, it was half dark and we had to keep track about everyone whereabouts in not so good visibility. But I liked the dawn dive because we were still fresh instead of just waking up from sleep like usual first dive.

After breakfast, around 9 we headed out for the sea on the boat. First dive we went…argh..somewhere.. can’t remember..I jumped in first so that I could take hubby’s camera before he jumped. But, when I ‘giant stride’ in, turned back, I found out I was already three meters away on the left where I jumped. I got to fight back to the ladder and from above, everyone called it quit for that dive site, current too strong. So took out my fins, climbed out and we went for another site. It looked quite bad still but when we went down it was alright and even very calm.

For the rest of the day we mostly dived on our own, three of us with Froggie. The dives were quite awarding, we saw Thor shrimp, small school of barracuda (looks like giant barracuda), nudibranches and amazing color variation for Christmas Tree Worms, seriously! From white, blue, yellow, maroon, black, orange, purple, green, stripes, you name it, they have it.

Late afternoon before night dive, Cynthia and Jerric brought us to the secret place they called as Blue Lagoon. It’s a tiny patch of beach surrounded by rocks and cliff with white sand. It was indeed quite pretty with occasionally wave crashing to the shore. We played around for sometimes. Riding the wave, jumping on the sea, laughing like mad and ended up like sandy man. The tiny fine sands were really hard to get rid off; wetsuit, booties, hair. We went nuts for about an hour, it happened that all ten of us had same amount of craziness and childishness, the combination made it all real fun.

The better one was night dive, where we saw spider crab, few big crabs, big huge unidentified yellow-green-flat-almost 20 cm nudibranch, tiny crabs, tiny shrimps, and of course sleeping parrotfish. This time I found two sleeping rabbitfishes under the table coral.

But after night dive, there was a sad incident. We were gathering around in the dining area when there was a commotion on the jetty. Since there were so many people around, we could only wait and see if any more helps were needed. There were flow of first aid and oxygen tank, and people. After awhile, a boat left.

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Not as usual, this time we took a break on Sunday. Four of us with Ong, Froggie’s non diver friend stayed in the island. Since we did 5 dives in Saturday, we were so called 'break even' and wanted to relax on Sunday. We could sleep a bit late until 8.30, had breakfast and enjoy the scenery. When everyone else came back for breakfast, we went to the oat to pack our gears. The morning went out very fast, it didn’t really feel like we were wasting time at all. It was a quite a good idea to dive intensively on Saturday and relax on Sunday. I felt fresh the whole day, because we started the dawn dive fresh instead of rudely awaken for first morning dive. We could relaxing and packed our gear leisurely without rushing as usual and we wouldn’t feel too tired on Monday at work.

We saw a dolphin’s carcass washed up to the shore. At first I thought it was a turtle, ccan’t remember why I guessed so also. The dolphin skin was totally white, the carcass almost broken by half because of very big wound that left the stomach part ripped open. From the grey color of the organs, it must had been quite sometimes.

Hm.. things were quite gloomy this weekend. The whole two days were also decorated by pouring rain.

We left the island about one pm in different boat. We had to transfer our gears. The boat was very uncomfortable because it was full, there was no many seats left inside the boat, and seats available were only like middle seat in the middle of two people who used it for their legs, luggage, extended belly etc. So four of us sat on the upper deck. I almost kissed the floor when I fell asleep, I was very sleepy because of the pills, so it was quite a tedious four hours to stay awake.

Luckily at Mersing, the tide was still high, it was still early and we were optimist to be able to reach Singapore early. However, we wasted a lot of time for dinner because of a gigantic group of some Lexus community in the same restaurant, and we had the record long of jam time at the borders. We stuck in jam for about four hours, and finally reached home after midnight.

Photos from Hubby..

(Click for bigger view)