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.

This site is about 400 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° 16.783' E115° 35.950 (using WGS84 as the datum).

A satellite photo from Google Earth that shows the location of the dive site The dive starts near at the red marker and ends at the bombora above the end of the word backpacker

As I mentioned, I did this dive in a boat from Amed. You could also do it from Tulamben, with a much shorter run. It took us about 35 minutes to cover the 8.5 kilometres from 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 was not too bad but the trip back was generally into a reasonable wind which created small sloppy waves. Note that we had a surface interval at Cantik Point where our second tanks were waiting for us. Our second dive started where we finished this one at Batu Kelebit.

Typical bottom scene at the start of the dive	The friendly turtle

The dive starts in a small bay and you soon drop down a sandy slope which is covered in lots of small coral growths. As you head east and then south-east, you come across some larger coral outcrops. There are plenty of sponges and some smaller gorogonias. The sponges were sort of like large lettuces and there were also some chunky tube ones.

There were a few moray eels, a large friendly turtle, a yellow-lined triggerfish (which was not aggressive like the one we saw a week earlier), ribbon eels and flutemouths. The bottom became more sandy towards the end. We drifted about 250 metres and ended at a bombora.

A larger outcrop of coral	A reasonably sized gorgonia

This was quite a good dive. The visibility was at least 30 metres and the water temperature was about 28°C.

Nearing the end of the dive it is a bit more corally	The bottom near the end of the dive

All photographs from a GoPro 5.