The USS Liberty in Amed, Bali was my first shipwreck dive, and it was amazing. It’s a great dive for beginners, or for people who aren’t actually certified to wreck dive (ahem) because it’s a shore dive, and the wreck isn’t very deep, only 18M, so it gets a lot of sunlight.
The water is very clear so it’s easy to see everything, and it’s pretty wide open so even if you are claustrophobic, there aren’t really any places where you feel trapped inside.
There were a lot of little fish, although we didn’t see anything super exciting, but just the feeling of being inside the wreck was enough to make it one of the best dives I’ve ever done.
I was able to do some wreck diving in the Philippines a few weeks ago, and I actually had kind of a scary experience, (more on that later) but it definitely made me look back on this dive with even more affection, because for those dives it was very deep, and the visibility was pretty terrible, and it was so dark that we needed a flashlight inside the ship.
We talked to almost every dive company in Amed, before deciding to go with BLD.
Most of the dives around Amed are shore dives, so it was cheaper than some of the other diving we’ve done, but if one thing to keep an eye out for is that a lot of the companies will only take you to one dive site per day, to do two dives there, and we found out it’s because they have to pay a tax for each dive spot they go to, and they make more money by just keeping you at one site.
It’s up to you if you want to dive only one site, but we wanted to see as much as possible, which is one of the reasons we went with BLD. Our second dive was actually not that great, it was a shore dive down a sandy slope, there wasn’t much to see but we did spot a black baby frog fish, and it looked like a tiny alien.
Our dive guides were really great, they were local guys from Amed, and we ate lunch with them and chatted about our lives, and their lives and learned a lot about Bali. They both thought it was very strange that we had been married for 3 years and didn’t have any babies. They invited us out to see a band with them at a bar that night. All of the people in Amed were lovely.
If you are a diver, or even a snorkeler, and you have some time when you are in Bali, definitely make the trip up to the USS Liberty, it’s so so worth it.
