In May 2024 I spent a bit over two weeks diving in Tulamben before moving south to Amed for another week's diving. Both these places are on the north-eastern coast of Bali. While at Tulamben you virtually only do shore dives, most of the dives at Amed were boat dives. Some of these were back up towards Tulamben and some were even to the wreck of the USAT Liberty (which we declined to go on).

Just south of the main township of Tulamben is The Drop Off. While the Drop Off is normally done as a shore dive, unlike other dive sites, The Drop Off has a shear wall and lots of coral. Further south there are similar dive sites and back in 2012 and 2014 I did a couple of them from the small fishing boats that line the beach at the start of the Drop Off.

Emerald is about 950 metres south-east from the start of the Drop Off (or The Wall as it is sometimes called). An approximate GPS mark for the start of this dive is S8° 17.026' E115° 36.1833' (using WGS84 as the datum).

A satellite photo from Google Earth that shows the location of the dive site The dive starts at the marker and ended up close to it. By my reckoning, we went to just past the point to the south-east before backtracking

As I mentioned, I did this dive in a boat from Amed. You could also do it from Tulamben, with a much shorter run. I did it as a first dive and after we had a surface interval at Cantik Point where our second tanks were waiting for us. We then did another dive nearby. It would normally take about 25 minutes to cover the 6.7 kilometres from to Hotel Uyah in the Dive Amed boat (which really could have done with a bottom scrape as it was covered in barnacles).

The run there and back was not too bad but the trip back on other dives was into a reasonable wind which created small sloppy waves and it took over 35 minutes for a shorter distance. This dive started where we finished our previous one at Batu Kelebit.

A panoramic photo from the boat looking towards the abandoned dive resort

The dive starts in a bay off the abandoned Emerald Dive Resort. Since I have been going to Tulamben in 2012, this has always been abandoned. At this spot there are a number of artificial reefs, mostly constructed from large steel pipes. Very impressive! They were apparently put here by the resort owner as artificial reefs. You might not always see them depending on the actual start location. There are also three mooring buoys on the surface which have Admiralty type anchors and stainless steel chain.

Once in the water after looking at the anchors, we head east. In this area there are a lot of garden eels and I can actually get fairly close to them to get photographs.

One of the artificial reefs	Another of the artifical reefs

From here we head south-east. Eventually we end up mostly heading south. The bottom at first is a steeply sloping sand based reef with some coral outcrops. The slope then becomes a very good wall, with huge sponge "fans", gorgonias and a few barrel sponges. On the wall there are a number of moray eels but not many nudibranchs. We also see some barracuda and in some places there are lots of fish, all the normal tropical species.

Up high I see a lot of larger fish, no idea what species they were. There are also a few lionfish on the wall. The wall also has a lot of normal sponges.

Garden eels at the start of the dive	One of the Admiralty anchors

The wall is quite good and goes down deeper than 30 metres. You can hang at any depth along the wall. It meanders a little as you go. The top of the wall is about 12 to 15 metres.

We went this way for 49 minutes and then turned around and cut back across the top of the reef in 12 metres and then getting shallower. We head north-west and end up back almost where we started the dive.

The main part of the wall	Another shot of the wall

In this area there are also some ribbon eels. The boat comes over and collects us. This was quite a good dive. The visibility was at least 30 metres and the water temperature was about 28°C.

MORE PHOTOGRAPHS

All photographs from a GoPro 5.

An anemone and clownfish on the wall	A steel structure on the top of the wall near where we turned around

John the surface at the start of a dive with the dive boat