Wreck Diving at the U.S.A.T. Liberty

[got trapped into school of jack fish]

[do we look like a twin ?] 

[watching on a parade of sweet-lips fishes]

[entering the underwater cave]

Here are some pictures during my last week wreck diving in Tulamben, Bali. 

We dived at the U.S.A.T Liberty. She is a 120 meter long shipwreck, the remains of a US World War II freight, torpedoed on January 11, 1942 at 4.15 a.m. by a Japanese submarine while crossing the Lombok Strait carrying material [rubber and railway parts] from Australia to the Phillipines. Two US destroyers hitched up to the ship and tried to tow it to the port of Singaraja. 

For 21 years the Liberty was staying on the beach of Tulamben, 70 km away from the nearest safe harbor. Then on 1963, she was pushed from her location by the fatal eruption of the volcano Gunung Agung. During the process the hull broke into two pieces, and now she is laying only 30 meters away from the Tulamben beach on a sandy slope 90 degrees on her side parallel to the shore the deck side faces the ocean. 

Now the Liberty shipwreck is the most visited diving site of Bali at a perfect depth for scuba diving ranging from 2.5 meters down to 29 meters. An amazing growth of encrusting animal cover the wreck, marines biologists estimate that about 400 different species of reef fish live on the Liberty. And last week, I was so happy to met some of them :)