Black Sand Dive Centre
Black Sand Dive Centre
The dive centre at Black Sand Dive Retreat is on the beach, a short downhill walk from your room.
Getting back up is another matter - but the good thing about that is, you get a good workout on your quads :-) Hot tip: make sure you have everything you need before going to the dive centre!
Each room (not each guest) gets a 'closet' to hang your wetsuit and leave your dive equipment in.
The steps down to the dive centre
One of three speedboats
Breezy dive centre facing the beach
Your own space
Tanks are large enough for several cameras with strobes
Nice wide camera cubicles
A map and whiteboard are part of the dive briefing
Free flow of water, and at tea time, there's also hot coffee, tea and home-made biscuits
The dive centre by night
The dive boats are nifty little speedboats, which means getting around is much faster and surface intervals are spent back at the resort instead of on the boat.
You put on your wetsuit on shore before getting on the boat. The crew will make sure your gear (BCD and fins) is on the boat, and they will also bring your camera onto the boat when you're just about to leave. On the boat you just sit tight until you reach the dive site, when you put the tank on your back, put on your fins, and enter the water with a back-roll entry.
After your dive, you can just leave your BCD and fins on the boat, and just hop off with your camera (best to leave your wetsuit on, it's too troublesome taking it off on the boat).
What I really liked about the dive centre were the many dunk tanks for your dive gear. Four big square-ish dunk tanks for general dive gear, and three big long-ish dunk tanks just for cameras are yours to use. What's more, the water from the tank taps runs smoothly. There are also two cold-water showers and a foot tap, with stone flooring and good drainage.
(Above left) Dunk tanks for general dive gear and (right) tanks just for cameras. Best of all, they're wide enough for several big-ass camera setups
Like the rest of the resort, there's plenty of space everywhere. Divers can put on their wetsuits (and I can put on my three layers) without bumping into each other. Each diver will be provided with a bath towel, and camera users will get an additional white hand towel for use in the camera room.
The camera room is dry and spacious, with plenty of powerpoints, and two types of voltage. At night, it will be locked up and a security guard will be on duty all night at the dive centre. This means you can choose to leave all your heavy camera gear there and skip back up the stairs to your room if you want to :-)
(Above left) The dry camera room with sufficient cubicles for every guest, and (right) plenty of power point sockets with two types of voltage
Dive Briefings
Dive briefings take place at the dive centre after you're done donning your wetsuit, and before you board the boat. The briefing basically gives you essential information about the dive site (eg white or black sand, sloping or flat, general route) and the marine life you might see. The guide will also draw out the site on a little white board for you to get a clearer picture of your dive.
If you're the type of diver who likes to find your way around yourself, listen closely to the guide during the briefing, when he highlights what you might find at certain landmarks at certain depths, and where they expect to anchor.
Dive Guides
The most practical thing to do when diving in Lembeh, is to follow your guide. In this way, you will see the best that the Lembeh Straits has to offer, you will not get lost, and you will not have to huff and puff a hundred metres back to the boat after surfacing.
Black Sand Dive Retreat likes to keep the dive-guest ratio to never more than four guests per guide. When we went in March 2009, Hengky, a very diligent guide, looked after the 3 of us including one videographer, and on our last day, the two of us had him all to ourselves. There was also a group of 5 friends who understandably wanted to dive together, so dive together they did, but at different sites from us. They were also assigned two dives and two boats. So it's very flexible, and you can see that a lot of thought goes into meeting every guest's needs.
Boat Crew
The boat crew and guides will:
Chivalry meter: GOOD
Surface Intervals
The boat will bring you back to the resort after every dive, so if your next dive is say in an hour's time, your surface interval is spent chilling out at the dive centre (where the kitchen staff will greet you with home-made biscuits, coffee, tea and water, and they will also take your orders for lunch and dinner). If your next dive is a few hours later, you can spend your surface interval in your room, in dry clothes!
A Typical Dive Day
Like a lot of other places in Indonesia, the times are flexible, especially if you do just 3 dives a day. The dive centre also tries to stagger the timings of the dive groups to give you more space. The videographer diver we dived with shared our love for long shallow dives, so for our first two days we took 90-minute dives with surface intervals of at least two hours. The resort also has unlimited shore dives if you're on their dive package (or one free shore dive with two boat dives), and if you choose to go for an unguided one, then the timing is absolutely yours to choose. We did this for our check-out dive, and ended up accidentally doing a night dive, because we descended at 5.45pm, and emerged when it was dark. (But DWS was prepared, as always, with torches!)
6.30am Wake up. Go to the toilet, brush your teeth, put in contacts, set up camera.
7.00 Breakfast
7.45 Return to room. Sit on throne if necessary. Wash up. Test camera.
8.00 Go to the dive centre, put on your wetsuit, dunk camera and attend dive briefing. Your equipment will already be rigged up to the tank (Nitrox would already be analysed) and on the boat.
8.20 Leave for 1st dive site, which is likely to be less than 20 minutes away by boat. .
10.00 Return to resort. Hang out at dive centre and take morning tea.
11.00 Leave for 2nd dive.
1.00pm Return to resort. Shower, lunch.
2.00 Back to room for nap.
3.00 Wake up, go to the dive centre, put on your wetsuit, attend dive briefing.
3.20 Leave for 3rd dive (if you don't want to do this 3rd dive before the night dive, my advice is to take afternoon tea. Or if you are doing the night dive, you could choose to have this 3rd dive a little earlier like 2pm).
5.00 Return to resort. Shower, take a late afternoon tea at the dining area. (Or if you're doing the night dive, you'll probably leave on the boat around 6pm.)
7.00 Dinner (if you go on the night dive, dinner will be much later).
7.45 Back to your room to pore over your photos.
10.00 Sleep
Note: If you opt for the Mandarinfish dive, it will start about 5.15pm because the peak mating period is at about 5.45pm. There will be no night dive after that.
Shore Dives
The Black Sand shore dives are lots of fun. You have the option of going left or right, and the only boat traffic comes from the resort's boats. We went for both unguided and guided shore dives, and both were very rewarding. The first thing we saw on one of the shore dives was a seahorse at 4 metres, after finning out about 5-10 metres from the shore.
Here are some of the things we saw on one shore dive: seahorse, big-ass hermit crabs, delicate ghost pipefish, cockatoo flounder, shrimps, devilfish, scorpionfish, lionfish, Banggai cardinalfish, nudibranchs, porcelain crabs, eels, emperor shrimp on a sea cucumber ... the list goes on. A guided shore dive is as good as a boat dive!
The only thing is, well, it is a shore dive, so you will have to tahan the walk back up with the heavy tank and backplate on your back. Going in is easy, but coming out can be a bit of a balancing act, especially for me. After I made it up the steps to the dive centre, I was seriously panting, but once I took off the stuff, it was ok.
