Com PIer

Com Pier is an advanced dive at the small coastal settlement of Com in the Lautem District of eastern Timor-Leste, one of the most remote dive locations in Southeast Asia. The pier at Com serves the fishing community and occasional coastal transport of this isolated section of the island's northern coast, and the dive beneath and around its structure — in the warm, biodiverse waters of the Coral Triangle's eastern extremity — delivers an extraordinary combination of pier macro life and open reef biodiversity. Eastern Timor-Leste's Lautem District is among the least-visited diving destinations in the entire Coral Triangle, and the marine life here reflects this exceptional isolation. The reefs have developed with essentially no commercial fishing pressure, minimal tourism impact, and the full benefit of the Coral Triangle's extraordinary evolutionary heritage. The biodiversity in these waters is genuinely among the highest on Earth, and even a pier dive at Com delivers species counts and encounter quality that would represent career highlights at more frequented destinations. The advanced designation at Com Pier reflects the conditions beneath the structure: depth, potential current, and the reduced visibility that pier shade creates require the spatial awareness and dive management of an experienced diver. The pier pilings descend from the surface to the seafloor in a range that provides both shallow and deeper sections, and the encrusting community on the submerged structure is exceptional — the Coral Triangle's extraordinary recruitment of larvae onto any hard substrate means that Com's pier pilings are densely colonised by a diversity of encrusting organisms that would require days to fully catalogue. Pygmy seahorses inhabit the sea fans attached to the pier structure, frogfish wait in perfect camouflage against the encrusted pilings, and the full complement of small reef fish, nudibranchs, and macro invertebrates that make Timor-Leste famous for macro photography are present throughout. The reef extending beyond the pier provides open reef diving in the same exceptional Coral Triangle conditions. One of the most remote and rewarding advanced dive sites in Southeast Asia.