Diving Bali [antikvár]

Préfacéand AcknowledgmentsIn a way, this book began the day Wally and I met, almost eight years ago now. I had just finished putting Underwater Indonesia (now Diving Indonesia) on press, and flew to Bali to meet Kai Muller, my friend and the author of that volume, for some diving and general R&R. Kal wanted me to meet a dive guide living in Bah whose knowledge had been essential to the Bali, Komodo, and Banda Islands sections of that book. He thought I might get along with this guy.That turned out to be something of an Understatement, and for whatever reason we were both born in the Year of the Rat, we both love fixing things, we both drink beer with immoderate relish, we'd both be happy picking up a snake or a spider or a whip-scor-pion but very unhappy sitting on the back of a horse, we'd both make lousy accountants, who knows?on the day we met it was as if we had been friends since childhood.As soon as we started diving together, we realized that our philosophy and approach to diving was another thing we shared. Diving, to us, is not a sport. It is a means to explore the diverse community of plants and animais that constitutes the coral reef. More than anything, we like the riddles: Why does this fish look like a leaf? Why does that sponge grow sideways? The idea of collab-orating on a book to share our philosophy and experience arose almost immediately.Wally is from Java, but he and his family have lived in Bali now for more than a decade and a half. He is without a doubt the most ex-perienced and knowledgeable diver working on the island. The long free-diving fins he favore, their cracked blades repaired with dentai floss, are recognized by every operator, porter, and skipper on the island. You could say he is famous, but "infamous" would be more accurate. His personality combines irresistible charm and stubborn prickliness, a fierce intellect and a sometimes fierce temper,David Pickelland this mix is reflected in a réputation that has a few grease stains on it. To me this seems appropriate. In his field Wally is an artist, and an artist's job is insight, not consistency.I have a twenty-year-old C-card that isn't in much better shape than Wally's fins, and have dived more or less regularly, particularly over the last ten years. But as a diver, I am an amateur. My professional work takes place over a keyboard.Wally has a favorite phrase: "Trust me, Fm a dive instructor." My experience has been that he is only being sarcastic by half, and I have always foui îd trusting him in these cases to be at least interesting. By the rime we had finished the fieldwork for this book, I had my own corollary to this phrase: "I'm a writer, not a dive instructor." I would invoke this complaint after, say, a deep mapping dive that required more than an hour of décompression, or after an exploration dive that required swimming upcurrent across a kilo-meter-wide wasteland of coral rubble using a borrowed regulator with a flow adjustment set by Scrooge himself.The voice of this book, unavoidably, be-