Ran into Guido at KuDeTa yesterday evening, and I was slightly
misinformed about the Ombak Biru/Komodo Dancer thing. The Ombak Biru
is the Komodo Dancer, at least whenever it's booked by a through any
agent, so it almost never operates under its real name.
Both the Biru and the Putih are Phinisi schooners, nothing like a junk
in hull section or sail rigging (not that they use their sails much),
Phinisis are rigged fore-and-aft like any other schooner. As dive or
cruising boats, they're almost always running under power.
I don't know what tenders the Biru has. Guido arranged a couple of
tenders for us, but we also arranged to hire a good-size speedboat with
twin 200s to serve as the main dive tender, so we could park the Putih
in a nice place for the kids and beach people and use it to get to
different dive sites beyond the range of the small tenders Guido had
arranged. This boat is very fast, and it is what we used for the
search after Kameron was lost.
Re: Your other message. Peliliu in Palau is definitely another area
where I would consider carrying a very large sausage and a light
mandatory on every dive. (If one of the five Japanese divers in that
group had been carrying a dive light, they all would have survived -
one of the woman who died wrote on her slate that search boats came
very close during the night, but they were unable to signal to them,
and the search boats couldn't hear their cries over the engine noise.
But they didn't drift for five days - that woman and I think two others
were found the following morning, already dead, and the others were
never found. And it was a she, not a he, and not a real diary, just a
farewell note to family that mentioned that the searchboats had come
close during the night but never saw them.
Feesh wrote:
>In a region that big, but clearly not as big as the Pacific Ocean
down-current from Palau, I would think that the "official" rescue
squads (speed-boat patrols and nearby air search/rescue facilities)
are needed rather than the chance rescue by other dive operators
and fishing boats.
The FRS (floating ranger stations) and fast patrol boats were purchased
for surveillance and enforcement operation against poachers. In the
earlier years, the main focus was dynamite fishermen, cyanide fishermen
and deer poachers (Timor deer on Komodo and Rinca are a key prey for
the endangered Komodo dragon), now it's fishermen from Sumbawa, Sumba,
and Flores. If a diver is lost, they will respond and join in a
search, but the FRS's aren't fast - these boats are intended for long
(10 day) patrols with a crew of rangers and sometimes TNI (military) on
board. At any given time, there is one FRS in the north part of the
park, one in the south, and the other en route and/or preparing for
deployment out of Labuanbajo.
The speedboats (we have 3) patrol on random days during the month, but
not every day - we don't have the fuel budget for that. If we got a
radio call that a diver was lost in the south part of the park, and
there wasn't a fast patrol boat already there, it would take our
fastest boat, going at full speed, at least four hours to get from
Labuanbajo to South Komodo or Rinca.
Last but not least, one of the new requirements under the new rules is
that all dive boats MUST carry a radio, VHS at a minimum, but because
of all the islands, VHS doesn't work in a lot of the park, so we'd
would like everyone to have a SSB. Of course, the high-end
live-aboards already have radios, but most of the locally-owned
dayboats don't. Now they will. Kameron's boat (he is the
owner-opeator who died on Batu Balong last October) DIDN'T have a
radio. They searched for him themselves for several hours, then
finally came and found us. We notified the park by radio, and then
immediately started to search using the fast patrol boat we were using
for a long-range tender. The first park boats didn't arrive in the
search area until almost dark, and the search was called off the next
morning.
Kameron wasn't carrying a light (or a sausage for that matter), so once
it got dark, it was already a lost cause. (From the S&R point of
view, however, if a drifting diver does have a light or flashing
strobe, once the search area is large, it is probably going to be
easier to find him/them at night than during the day. Many people have
an exaggerated idea of the distance at which a search boat can spot a
5' orange SMB even under ideal sea and visibility conditions. But it
still helps.
Without a sausage or a light or strobe, finding a lost diver in the
open ocean in any kind of sea, day or night, is very long odds.
Robert
On Sun, 22 May 2005 20:23:55 -0400, Reef Fish wrote:
>On Sun, 22 May 2005 09:56:32 +0800, Robert Delfs <[log in to unmask]>
>wrote:
>
>>I forgot to mention in my last reply, but it's interesting that you
>>should speculate whether the boat that was spun like a top was the
>>Komodo Dancer. The Ombak Putih (which, as I said, I was on when it was
>>spun in the whirlpool of Padar Is.) is actually the much bigger sister
>>ship to the Ombak Biru, which is the Komodo Dancer.
>
>True. <The Ombak Biru IS the Komodo Dancer! as you said later.>
>
>I immediately thought of the Komodo Dancer because of your initial
>description of a 90-foot liveaboard -- which is what the Komodo
>Dancer is. It looked like a Chinese junk with huge sails in the
>design of dive flags! Now the BOAT would be easy to spot at sea or
>by air.
>
>
>> It was the Ombak Putih, a large Phinisi schooner, adequately powered,
>> actually more like 120 ft, and I was on it.
>
>So it was a bigger "junk"? :-) Those are not exactly known for
>their manoeuverability with the tall-ship sails. And I suspect
>they don't have any jet-powered tenders (because I didn't see them
>described as in other Dancer boats) to chase down divers.
>
>
>>Peter Hughes doesn't actually have his own boat in Komodo. Hughes has a
>>contract with Guido Brink, so many trips a year. When Hughes books out
>>the boat for Hughes guests, then the Ombak Biru "becomes" the Komodo
>>Dancer. The rest of the time, you can charter the boat under its real
>>name. At one point, I think the Hughes people may have had their own
>>DMs on board when the boat was operating as a Hughes boat, but I don't
>>think that's always the case anymore, and except for this arrangement
>>with Guido Brink (whose company owns both boats), the Hughes
>>organization doesn't have a real presence here.
>
>That's fairly "standard" Hughes practice. First, to have their
>Dancer boats operated and owned by LOCALS greatly reduced Peter's
>liability of being sued by the litigous 'Merkins. Second, if sued,
>as in the hurricane-sunken Wave Dancer in Belize, the ownership
>and crews being Bellzeans helped Hughes got insurance settlement
>through the Belize courts, keeping 'Merkin sharks at bay, more or
>less.
>
>
>>We chartered the Putih, the larger sister ship because (1) the Biru was
>>already booked to take a group of divers to Wakatobi the time we wanted
>>to go; and (2) we had a lot of non-diving family members - elderly and
>>small children - aboard for our trip, and the Putih is a larger and
>>slightly more comfortable boat than the Biru or most of the other
>>liveaboads operating in the park, including the boats we tend to use
>>for a smaller group, all or most of whom are diving.
>>
>>Robert
>
>da Feeesh.
>
>P.S. Just came back from a non-diving 1-night-stand weekend trip. :-)
>I had written about the incredible perk we had at the Chicago downtown
>Hyatt when we visited John Nitrox -- we had a two-bedroom suit with
>more amenities than a shiek's harem, for something like $99 or $109.
>
>Last night, we had one of the LARGE suites at an ATL Hyatt with a
>"traveller book coupon" price of $69, and that suit had a dining
>room table (looked about 15 feet long) for a seating of EIGHT :-)
>It had more amenities than two shieks' harems.
>
>Has anyone seen the movie "Kung Fu Hustle"? We went to see it
>yesterday not knowing anything about it other than a "A-" rating
>in the Choo Choo newspaper and it wasn't shown in Choo Choo.
>It was a HOOT!
>
>-- Bob.
>
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