Hi there! It’s Wilfried again. My DMT journey continues in Sekotong after my two weeks in Bunaken (Sulawesi). During the last two weeks, I’ve been in near the south Gili’s, where are located the South Lombok facilities of TwoFish.
As a DMT, the major change is the fact that there is no swimming pool here: the confined water is shallow water in the sea with a sandy bottom. Although one might think that it doesn’t change lots of things, it does: you have far more space and hence more liberty than in a pool but each time someone moves on the floor, it decreases the visibility. Which is especially true when you have a group of three students doing the confined water sessions for their DSD (and then OW). At the end of each confined water session, you can also directly go to the open water session without interruption and that’s very cool and rewarding for the students.
Dives sites in South Gilis are very varied. Whether you like muck or corals, nice slopes or walls, currents or not, you can find the dive sites that suits you here. I personally like “Superfan Ridge” and “Jay’s Cathedral”. The first one because it offers amazing landscapes with these huge fan corals on the edges of giant coral stairs. On the site, you will find sharks, leaf fish, frogfish, very nice nudibranchs… and happiness. The second one because it’s a far more active dive. To reach this site, you will be dropped 100m from the site, at a place with no visibility on the surface (it gets better below 5m) and once you’re at the bottom, you will need to swim to reach the site, sometime against the current. Then, you arrive at this site where one can often see sharks or schools of barracuda or tuna in the current. This site is also the realm of the blue spotted rays.
If you like diving with some current, you need to go to Belongas Bay. OK, it’s one hour by car in the morning and another in the evening but it’s worth it. For starts, the new road offers an amazing view on the coast. You’ll enjoy it! Then, you will have two or three very different, exciting and fun dives. I dove first on Gili Sarang. There we saw 2 schools of Mobula rays and penetrate in this cave shaped like a tube. Then, we went to the expected “Magnet”. Of course, we had to face some currents, but Jay allowed us to stay away from the stronger ones. We didn’t have the luck to see some hammerhead on this time but let’s say that it was a good warmup for the swimming skills of the DMC. Finally, for the last dive of the day, we went to the “Cathedral”, an amazing site where the dive is active: last dive of the day, going down again to 40m, we have to chase deco all the way up, fighting against or with the current, enjoying this amazing colorful landscape. The only reason not to go there is if you are really frightened of snakes since you will see more sea snakes than you’ll be able to count. Maybe someday, I’ll feel confident enough to guide divers in such a location but for now, I feel like it’s too big a responsibility for me.
Discovering different centers and different teaching and diving environments really is a chance that we have when doing our DMT with TwoFish: depending on the sites, the instructors or on the conditions, the experience is really not the same from one place to the other. I’m eager to discover my next location in Amed (Bali).
