This week in Lembongan… On many of our dive sites around Penida and Lembongan we have Bali dive centers that take the journey across Badung Strait to bring their guests to dive our reefs. So we thought maybe we should do the opposite and head over to Bali to check out the diving there. For this trip we we loaded our boat Freedom with many tanks and a lunch and drinks and left Lembongan at 7.30am for a day trip to explore the famous Liberty wreck.
We can run this trip daily from Lembongan with the support of Two Fish Divers Sanur team, which meet our guests in Padang Bai and take them by car to dive these great dive sites. If we have a full boat of people wanting to do the trip, then we bring one of our dive boats over or of course you can dive all of these dive sites daily while staying in Bali and diving with Two Fish Sanur. It couldn’t be easier. We pick you up at your hotel, go diving and you will be brought back to your place at the end of the day.
The USAT Liberty was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in the Lombok Strait on 11th January 1942 and was subsequently towed to the north coast of Bali. But because she was taking on too much water they beached her on the eastern shore of Bali at Tulamben. When Mount Agung erupted in 1963 the ship slipped off the beach due to the tremors associated with the eruption. She now lies on a sand slope in 7 to 30 meters and now provides one of the most popular dive sites in Bali. Nowadays more than 400 fish species live on and around the wreck and wait to be explored by all levels of divers.
The usually calm waters and the different depths make it a great wreck to be explored by every diver. Another popular site in that area is the Tulamben drop-off, where schools of bumphead parrotfish can be seen but also a lot of small critters wait to be found.