The Wrecks
Holy moly !!!! I can’t believe anything will ever compare to this . Dial in the easy depths (18 – 40 metres typical), good vis and sheer number and scale of the wrecks and their cargos and it truly is wreck heaven. The Red Sea wrecks are nice enough but when you are diving one of these babies and have it all to yourself for hours at a time you feel like you are taking the p....!
They are almost beyond description and our photos on our little Fuji F30 really don’t do them justice. Many artefacts still remain amongst the cargo and most of the penetration into the holds is easy peasy – I only had to use a line once to get into an engine room but otherwise the entrances and exits from the holds are cavernous. You couldn’t silt out these holds due to their sheer size even if you spend all day in them with a group of Open Water novices !!!!
Tanks, trucks, ammunition boxes, medical supplies, guns, cannons, mines, periscopes, torpedoes, bombs, gas masks, sake bottles, telegraphs, compass binnacles – just endless things to find and investigate. Sharks and rays patrol the decks from time to time and after a few days you have to pinch youself from becoming too blasé about what you are seeing !! Incredible stuff.
We invested in a set of ‘wreck slates’ which Odyssey had specially printed with a plan of each wreck and the things of note to see, very handy and great for planning the dive on
It’s so hard to say what the best dive was, the majority of ships were cargo ships with lots to see but we also dived a destroyer and a bomber that crashed after taking off from a nearby airfield. The ‘San Francisco Maru’ or the ‘Million Dollar Wreck’ as it became tagged due to the sheer value of it’s cargo was my last dive and probable favourite with it’s holds stuffed with trucks and munitions, tanks on decks etc... It was also the deepest and longest dive I did so maybe that makes it more memorable (or not with a bit of the Narcs!) – 54 metres on air with a 30 minute bottom time and 95 minute run-time, deco on 50% and 100%. Watching the other divers bounce-diving the deck on single Ali 80’s made me thankful for lugging most of my kit halfway around the world !
Conclusion
I may as well join in with our American cousins as they really do have ‘the’ word for it – AWESOME !! If you are a wreckie it really lives up to everything you have ever heard about it and if you get the opportunity to go then grasp it with both hands. It was a diving ‘lifetime’ ambition to get over to Truk for me but it was over all too quickly and I feel I have only just scratched the surface.
The plan now is to save like mad and get back out there in 2009/10 for 2 weeks on Odyssey – anyone fancy joining us ?
A full listing of photos can be found at the following link -
Public Album
Graham