For one and other reasons, and I also can’t pinpoint why, this will be our diving trip after more than one dry year. So we were planning big (as in visiting diving site we had never been and longer trip). There are few options come to mind, including Rajah Ampat (of course this is shelved as soon as the dollars and cents appeared), Wakatobi (shelved because of security concern, I’d love to go this area if our confidence improves), Sipadan (we shelved the plan in June and it would be easy to resurrect it back), Gorontalo and Togian (we actually one step away from booking air ticket until we were convinced that it might not be a good choice for us since it’s not macro heaven). Anilao came to mind but for this one , we decided to take it easy and wanting to be home. So we settled for Alor, one little nice hidden place that was almost forgotten. We first heard about this place when we visited Komodo Island in 2005. If you look at the map, it is located above Timor Leste. The distance from Alor to Autaro Island (the island that is part of Timor Leste’s territory I visited earlier this year with nightmare on the sea journey) is roughly the same with the distance from Autaro Island to Dili.
It certainly a lucky year that I got chance to visit this area twice, beforehand I didn’t even know exactly where is Alor on the map. I know it’s there, but don’t know exact point. Hm..
For the preparation, haven’t dived for a long time proved not to be good idea. We had a lot of equipments to be serviced, and the most shocking of all, when we thought everything was ready, we found that our camera casing’s buttons were not in tip top conditions. Some were stuck, because apparently the salt residue had hardened and made it difficult to operate. Therefore we needed to do the servicing ourselves since it’s not available locally and it would take too long to send it overseas.
After overcoming the sparepart problem, we got very poor advice from the distributor to use denatured alcohol while doing the cleaning of the buttons. Tweeet. It was a horrible idea. And to be honest I was furious about this. Alcohol and acrylic don’t interact well and upon applications, since it had delayed effect, by the time we realized this effect like cracks appeared on our housing. What is more frightening than cracks on your underwater housing?
It was less than a week to the trip, there were not much solutions provided. What we could do was doing the pressure test in the chamber, which luckily proved to be okay, and be very careful on the trip. It’s still beyond me that fatal advice like that can be given by someone who supposed to know better. We kept hoping that everything would be okay.
Without further yadda yadda… let’s start with the journal.
·
