Ramblings

Ferox liveaboard boat in Malpelo © Sten Johansson

People have been asking me how they can dive in Malpelo or do a liveaboard charter now that Yemaya, which I considered to be the safest dive vessel at the time, is no longer operating. I couldn’t recommend anyone else.

Last month I had the opportunity to check out the operation of the new liveaboard Ferox. I fell in love with the boat very quickly!

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Sten and Juan Pablo in Las Pocitas © Sten Johansson

My wife and I went for a short exploration trip in our Toyota Tacoma, the vehicle that I finally managed to buy after the worst car I have ever owned, a Ford Explorer (or “The Ford Exploder,” as we used to call it.) To keep life simple, we didn’t come up with a particular plan. We just drove and let the road lead us to our destination.

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This afternoon I went to the beach with my wife to gather some logs that got washed up ashore from some distant storm. While I was chopping the bark off one of the two stumps that I found in the arroyo (dry riverbed), a man called out to me from the beachfront property across from where I was minding my own business. He told me in no uncertain terms that I was in his yard. According to him, I was trespassing. I politely informed him that I was in the arroyo and on the beach. Both were public property.

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Adventure always seems to follow me around. It shows up in different forms — a broken toe, a burglar breaking in, an uzi pointed at me, a capsized kayak, a prison cell, an underwater connection, a lifetime friendship. Things happen to me all the time, I wish for a normal life sometimes. But who’s to say what’s ‘normal’?

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Follow the mother © Sten Johansson

This is what you get when you understand and respect the whales: a mother and her calf for one hour, on their terms.

For every yin, there is a yang. One moment passive, the next minute aggressive. There is a time to strike, and a time to stand down. To seek new thrills, or just to stand still.

I am normally a glass-half-empty kind of guy, but my rantings and ravings need to be balanced by some semblance of positivity, lest the universe go out of whack.

So here’s looking at the glass half-full:

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Update, 24 September 2022:  I thought I was done with Malpelo after this tragic accident happened, but in 2018 I met Tony, the owner of Ferox, when he was just starting trips to Malpelo. Tony sailed this 11-mm-hull ice breaker from Sweden to Colombia when he bought it. I found all safety equipment, including firefighting gear to fire suppressants, when I did my personal tour of the boat. Ferox and Tony made it possible for me to go back to Malpelo.

Learn about my trips on Ferox here: Malpelo Liveaboard Diving

Lost divers in Malpelo.

You have the right to kill… as long as you are in the arms of the Colombian authorities.

After a very windy and bumpy sea crossing from Puerto Mutis, Panama, we arrived in Malpelo, Colombia.

As usual, we tied up on the mooring at Altar de Virginia, a dive site on the northeast side of Malpelo that provides shelter from the wind (when it blows in the right direction). Weather had calmed down and conditions looked good, just a bit murky in the water.

As it was bumpy on the way in, we had decided to postpone setting up the dive gear and I had yet to give a briefing on how to dive Malpelo. (For those of you who don’t know Malpelo, it is a serious dive destination—the briefing needs to be clear and the divers, attentive.) Just when I was on my way to gather our guests for the briefing, a guest asked me, “Who is that in the water?” Our skiff was also out there, so at first I thought it was Juan, my colleague, checking the dive site and the visibility. It was not Juan. It was Peter Morse, a lost diver from the Colombian dive boat Maria Patricia. Lost since around 4:30 pm the day before, and it was about 7:30 am when we spotted him…

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This year has been, as always, a lot of traveling around and a lot of navigation in the seas. After a monthlong visit to Sweden, I found myself in the shipyard in Ensenada, helping to put the finishing touches to Nautilus Belle Amie, a new liveaboard vessel. A crazy project with so many challenges to solve, we had day and night shifts—sometimes I worked both—with around 60 people more or less climbing on top of each other just to finish everything before the deadline. I was on the first trips to Revillagigedo and they were not without problems; the boat turned out very well later on, though.

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On the northernmost tip of the Philippines, not very far away from Taiwan, there is a group of 10 islands called Batanes islands. Only the largest three are inhabited. It’s known to be a weather-swept place, where all the typhoons pass through. The indigenous people are called Ivatan and have their own language and, I would say, their own culture as well.

I have traveled around in the Philippines and been to quite a number of provinces; this place is extremely different from any other I have seen, in terms of its people, landscape, and environment.

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Sten the Viking © Sten Johansson

Updated: 15 February 2019

On rare occasions when I am on the internet, I would sometimes come across these travel advisories that inform people how safe, or suitable, a country is to travel to. I have also observed diving forums to be doing the same thing—letting divers know where to go, what places offer the best diving, and which operators to avoid. Fair enough.

Well, there are two sides to a story. Or two sides to a coin. Whatever. I have been guiding for over 15 years now and diving, even longer than that. Having met my share of difficult clients—and great people—I have decided to come up with my own blacklist in support of all the guides and operators who had, and are continuing to deal with inexperienced divers and/or blind bats and/or impossible clients and/or insensitive people.

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