BALI DIVE SITES: AMED WALL

BALI DIVE SITES: AMED WALL

‘Amed Wall’ is one of the spectacular wall dives in Amed and one of my favorite dives. Covered in a variety of sponges, soft and hard corals, seafans, and hydroids, it plunges down to about 40M at its base. It’s also fun to get there- by local jukung from Jemeluk Beach. I start from Diver’s Cafe, in the center of Jemeluk Beach, since they can help organize the jukung and equipment porters. We divers set up our tanks then watch the local female porters carry them out to the boat while we squeeze into our wetsuits and other gear…

Climbing onboard the jukung for our dive

It’s a short stroll on the beach to our jukung. We clambour on board, joining our tanks, the boatman heaves the jukung off the beach and we head over to the far west end of Jemeluk Bay. It’s a pleasant 10 minute ride to the drop off point, admiring the pretty scruffy hillsides of Jemeluk en route. Pretty soon it’s time to pull on our fins and jump overboard. The boatman slips our tanks into the water and we secure ourselves in the BCDs. After quick buddy checks, we’re ready to dive!

View of Mt Agung and Bali’s north coast from jukung

We’re now about 200M off shore in generally clear calm open sea. It’s a free descent down to the wall. Depending on where we enter, the beginning of the dive may start along sloping reef, the vertical wall coming up soon. There’s often a gentle current that glides us along, making an easy cruise, as we admire all the corals, sponges, and tropical fish life.

Bumphead Parrotfish

Green sea turtle eating coral

Two spectacular hopeful sitings at the Amed Wall are the 1.5M bumphead parrotfish and the large turtle that lives around Jemeluk bay. On most dives we get to see at least one of these amazing sights… But even if they aren’t around, we’ve got plenty to see, including angelfish, various surgeonfish with long streaming tails, clouds of pretty little anthias hovering about table corals, moray eels, schools of longfin bannerfish, and of course, the gorgeous wall itself.

Blut-ringed Angelfish

Coral Grouper hiding along wall

Eventually the wall gives way to a sloping reef closer to Jemeluk bay. By now it’s time to ascend to more shallow depths, cruising up above dense growths of short hard corals. On top of the slope, in 5-8M of water, there’s also a gorgeous hard coral garden, the extension of the coral reef at shallow Jemeluk beach. It’s great to end the dive here, feeling like we’ve done 2-dives-in-one: spectacular vertical wall followed by gorgeous hard coral garden!

Diving above gorgeous coral reef

Once we’ve run low on air, it’s time to ascend, and our jukung cruises over to pick us up. We hand up our weighbelts, then BCDs to the boatman. Keeping our fins on, we make a brave kick up onto the boat, flop our bellies across the top, and wiggle into the boat for our cruise back to Jemeluk Beach.

Me in dive gear

Others wall dives in the area include ‘The Drop Off’ over in Tulamben, Batu Kelebit and Alamanda, both farther extensions of ‘The Drop Off’, and both of which are accessed by local jukung fishing boats. Closer to Amed there’s Jemeluk Wall, at the eastern side of Jemeluk Bay,  accessed by jukung. In fact, except for  ‘The Drop Off’ all wall dives here are generally reached by jukung, eventhough they’re not very far off shore. ‘The Drop Off’ is the most well-known and is dived day-in-day-out, but personally I think it’s the least beautiful of Amed’s wall dives. Ironically, that’s probably due to it’s popularity, making it rather over-dived, and the fact that you can access it from the beach simply by walking in and making a short surface swim. The other walls are slightly less accessible, in that you can’t just swim out from shore. Thus they are more pristine. In any event, all are quite spectacular vertical walls that plunge down well below 60M.

Happy diving! cheers, Lash

You might also enjoy:

DIVING STORY: AMAZING BALI DIVE PHOTO GALLERY: FEATHER STARS PHOTO GALLERY: CORAL REEF MACRO LIFE MY GUIDE TO SCUBA DIVING IN BALI