Micronesia

Divers from all over the world go to marvel at the underwater ‘museums’ around Chuuk, Palau and Yap, softened by time and nature the wrecks have become beautiful living reefs of brilliant soft coral and sea anemones where an abundance of tropical marine life lives and plays. Kate Quarry asks four DIVE readers what they think about the diving. Photographs by Tim Rock


Fairground attraction - Sarah King

Sarah King, 50, is a company director and lives in London. She learned to dive eight years ago, and went to Palau in March 2000 on liveaboard Star Dancer, with Scuba Tours Worldwide. I decided to go to Palau because it was on my diving wish list. A diver I had met in the Maldives told me that there were serious currents and that I’d need a ‘reef hook’ – I’d never heard of one. Then he told me how a dive guide and his client had got caught in a downcurrent in Palau and died. I began to think ‘I’ve booked the wrong holiday’ and I phoned Rob from Scuba Tours who reassured me. Sometimes we did use the hooks, but there were no raging currents!

The Star Dancer was not as luxurious as I’d expected but the woman I shared with was great fun, and it was a brilliant trip. There was plenty of food, and warm towels although they couldn’t actually wash the towels between dives, so we wondered who they’d been wrapped around last time! The diving was incredibly well organized, and four or five of us did a nitrox course on the boat. Palau is like a fairground with lots of very different rides and different stalls: it has everything – walls, tunnels, caves, sharks, barracuda and the famous inland Jellyfish Lake.

Saies Tunnel was beautiful, with the top at 30m and the bottom at 45m. Jellyfish Lake was fantastic. You take a boat there and follow a walkway, climbing up, then down to the lake. You’re told not to touch or stand under the poisonwood trees, which affect your skin. The jellyfish follow the sun and when we were there at 5pm, they were right over the other side of the lake. It’s a snorkel rather than a dive in this green lake – at first you just see one or two jellyfish, then loads, and as well as big ones there are these gorgeous little babies. You could hear shrieks of delight from people, as well as screams when jellyfish touched our faces! Then we did a dive at Mandarin Lakette, where you descend and find a dead-looking stack of coral and wait for about 15 minutes for the mandarinfish to come out. They’re very shy, brightly coloured little fish and are simply beautiful. I don’t really like overhead situations, but Chandelier Cave was fabulous. You drop down about 8m and then surface in the first cave, take your regulator out and look at the formations. We turned off our torches and it was so still – it was extraordinary.


Getting wrecked - Hilary Child

Hilary Child, 42 runs Weezle Diving Services with her husband Paul, 41, in West Yorkshire. They are BSAC Yorkshire area coaches and advanced divers and instructors. They went to Chuuk and Palau on a trip organized by a friend, with Explorers Tours, in November 2000. The flight out was fine, but I’d suggest you check the bags on and off each flight yourself: Paul’s dive knife was stolen at Manila airport. We took our own pony cylinders – you need to ask for extra baggage allowance in advance.

We stayed at the Blue Lagoon in Chuuk, which was lovely. We had our own balcony, from where we saw fabulous sunsets. Take all the diving extras you need with you, as the dive shop is exceptionally expensive: one cable tie cost $1. The boats are quite small and basic, although they do have shade to keep you out of the sun. Also, they didn’t carry oxygen. The diving was well organized, and the policy was definitely ‘Don’t touch’ – some people were searched when they surfaced. Good wreck-diving techniques are needed to avoid stirring up silt, but the diving was good, we visited some of the wrecks twice. One was the Fujikawa Maru, which is in 34m, and has propellers, guns, bathrooms and toilets.

To get to Palau there was a lot of chopping and changing on little planes, and I’d describe the accommodation as ‘interesting’! We stayed at the Palau Marina hotel, which is very close to the dive centre, but try to get a room away from the bar and the karaoke evenings. I was impressed with the organization at Fish ‘n’ Fins, the diving centre. There was nitrox, oxygen and first aid on every boat, lockable cages for your gear, showers and a bar. We had a great time and saw sharks, mantas, barracuda, eagle rays and loads of fish. One of the highlights for me was seeing the mantas and the sharks visiting cleaning stations. I was a bit disappointed by the most famous dive sites, Blue Hole, Blue Corner and Big Drop-Off, all of which had a lot of damaged coral. I thought the walls we passed along the way were preferable. For UK divers the currents aren’t hard to deal with, but I’d recommend taking a delayed SMB. Chandelier Cave is well worth diving, as the water’s very clear and the dive’s very pretty.


Manta magic - Julie Marshall

Julie Marshall, 42, is married to Peter, a farm manager, and works in the accounts department of a company in Leeds. They live on a farm between Leeds and Selby, and learned to dive in the Clyde ten years ago. They dived at Chuuk and Yap on a trip organized by Divequest during December 2000. Our trip involved eight nights in Chuuk, one in Guam and seven in Yap. The journey was a bit of a camel ride: we flew from Manchester to Dubai to Manila to Guam to Chuuk, which took 36 hours. We knew the journey would be that long, so we treated it as part of the whole adventure.

Both of the diving parts of the trip were island-based – there are liveaboards out there but I’m not sure what the advantage would be, as all the dive locations are within easy reach of land. In Chuuk some of the wrecks are quite deep, so you wouldn’t be able to dive more frequently than if you were land based. To dive Chuuk we stayed on Moen Island, diving with Blue Lagoon Dive Shop. The resort was wonderful, with apartments surrounding a beach, and a central dining room. Outside the resort the island was a bit scruffy, with a lot of rubbish everywhere, and we had been told not to venture far as some island men can be quite aggressive, so we never left the hotel complex.

Chuuk is a ‘wreckies’ heaven. The more shallow wrecks were chock-a-block with coral but had fewer artefacts left on them, despite the warning signs telling divers not to remove things from wrecks. The more a wreck had been visited, the less it had on it, but on the deeper wrecks we saw things ranging from rifle bullets, gas masks and hundreds of saké bottles, to huge shells, aircraft, tanks and human remains. One wreck even had an operating theatre. To me, they all had a haunting, surreal beauty. Every single wreck is better than the Thistlegorm, and in the course of our trip we dived about 15 in total. Each day we did a two-tank boat dive, often stopping at Etten Island for lunch, which used to be a runway, but is now uninhabited. In the shallows off the island there’s a Japanese fighter plane, which is good for shallow diving and snorkelling.

Probably the best dive was the San Francisco Maru, which lies at about 56m at the bottom of Chuuk Lagoon. We had 15 minutes on the wreck and 25 minutes decompression time. It was stuffed full with pottery, guns, gas masks, tanks and mines. There were a couple of sharks buzzing around us, and we saw an eagle ray, but generally there weren’t many sharks in the lagoon. Yap was worlds apart from Chuuk although it was only a two-hour journey away. When we arrived, we were greeted by a bare-chested maiden (the women there don’t wear tops) who put flowers round our necks, and the island with no litter was like something out of South Pacific. We stayed at the Manta Ray Bay Hotel, and dived with Yap Divers, just out of the back of the hotel and I couldn’t praise either of them enough. Every dive was a winner and we saw mantas every time.

On most dives we kneeled on the sand at about 22m and watched the mantas being cleaned by wrasse, and as we were on nitrox we had had a fair amount of time with them. The visibility varied, as the channel where the mantas come is near mangroves, so on an outgoing tide it can be 6m, and on an incoming one 25m. On one drift dive on an outgoing tide we were watching a family of eagle rays feeding, and 70 to 80 grey reef and black-tip sharks came past. I turned round and saw a huge manta right behind Peter. I felt as though I needed eyes in the back of my head – it really was special. We also did a few dives on the outside of the reef, where the visibility is amazing and you see lots of sharks, tuna, jacks and eagle rays. There are acres and acres of buttress coral, which is really spectacular. The people on Yap were very friendly, and that really makes your holiday. It was an excellent trip though as I’m not a wreckie I’m not sure that I would return. I would love to visit Yap again and add a visit to Palau.


History lesson - Bob Findlow

Bob Findlow, 58, from Heckmondwike in North Yorkshire, is a partner in Robin Hood Watersports, a training operation and retail outlet for snowboarding, windsurfing, diving and kite surfing. He runs the business with his wife, Barbara, and the help of their daughter, Sally, and son, Richard. He has been a diver for 26 years and in 2000 he went with nine other divers to Chuuk Lagoon.

The first time I went to Chuuk with a friend. We stayed at the Truk Stop hotel and, on the advice of other friends, we dived with the Blue Lagoon Dive Shop. After that we decided to take a group out there: instead of using a tour operator we booked our own flights. It took two days to get out and two to get back. We had ten days’ diving, one rest day and three days chilling out at Coco Beach in the Philippines on the way back. The Truk Stop has about 25 bedrooms and is quite smart and tidy, with good food, but I think the Blue Lagoon Resort is probably a better place to stay as it’s in a nicer setting. The Truk Stop has its own jetty where you’re picked up by the dive boat, which is 5m long with a top to protect you from the sun. It has two outboard motors, and the aluminium cylinders all clank about in the bottom. None of them have been tested, but it’s just not practical to take your own. Nearly all the dives are within an hour of the resort: we did one dive outside the Lagoon, which took longer to get to, but we expected to see a lot of sharks. As we jumped in, the dive guide said, ‘They’ll all be waiting for the food.’ I realized that we were the food. The current took us towards about 14 sharks, all about 2 or 3m long, but they just had a look at us and swam past to look at the next group of divers brought by the current. The best dive of the trip was on a wreck in about 20m, when a manta spent half an hour swimming around us – its wingspan was about 3m.

A few things have changed between the two trips: on my first visit I saw more human remains on the wrecks – since then the Japanese have gathered up the skeletons to bury them out at sea. Also, some soft coral has been scraped off the top gantries where boats now tie on to the loading derricks.
Some of the wrecks are quite deep. The Rio de Janeiro, which is one of the best, is at 62m, but most of them come within about 5m of the surface. You could enjoy a week’s diving at no deeper than 35m and still have something to see in your decompression time. There is no recompression chamber so we decompressed to the maximum.

On the wrecks you’ll see tanks, pots and pans, tools, guns, lanterns, bombs, portholes, shells, all the utensils in the galley, and an amazing number of saké bottles.
Between dives you can go to Etten Island, where there are a few rustic shelters under which you can eat your lunch. The island was once covered in Tarmac by the Japanese, but now greenery has grown through. There hasn’t been a refuse collection since the American troops left 15 years ago, so there is an appalling amount of rubbish around the island and in the sea. However, a trip to Chuuk really is worth every penny, though it’s not a place to go if you’re not a diver, as there’s very little else to do.