Diving in Palau
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Welcome to the diver's Paradise!

"Through the window of my mask, I see a wall of coral, its surface a living kaleidoscope of lilac specks, splashes of gold, reddish streaks and yellows, all tinged by the familiar blue of the sea. I am suspended at the rim of a coral reef, supported and surrounded by the still water. Above, red-speckled fish, as blue as the sea itself, swim in lazy circles. And below, I see the limey parasols of the Acropora like trees in a petrified forest.

Butterflyfish and angelfish watch indifferently as I continue my descent along a cliff wholly covered by marine life forms. The shells of giant clams are ajar to display the emerald flesh bordered by a curious zigzag pattern of midnight blue. Sponges, like human hands, clutch the wall; and miniature thickets of black coral shelter colonies of minuscule crustaceans."
The famous Rock Islands of Palau

No, I did not write that, although I wish I had, for it sums up brilliantly and in only two paragraphs, what I am about to spend a lot more than that on: the joy of diving in the Indo-Pacific. An explosion of color, the likes of which Hollywood has yet to imitate, a glorious, unpredictable environment where anything may decide to show up, and does…

The words I stole were written by Jacques Cousteau, in his book "Life and Death in a Coral Sea", one of the many excellent and rare books that may be found in the library of the Sun Dancer II, a 150-foot live-aboard dive boat plying the waters of the Republic of Palau, in the region of the South Pacific known as Micronesia.

Every diver has a list of places that he or she dreams of going to, and sometimes we are lucky enough to make those dreams real. The trip to Palau was the fulfillment of a 3-year dream, picked for a number of reasons: It is widely regarded as one of the underwater wonders of the world. There are reportedly 4-5 times more fish species here than in the entire Caribbean. The visibility is excellent, there is lots of big pelagic action, and there are more wrecks here than you can shake a stick at. Thus, it offered everything both Soyong and I like (Soyong is into clear water, sharks and unusual marine life, I'm into sharks, wrecks and photography).

We booked the Sun Dancer because we had consistently seen very favorable trip reports from this operation, and because Peter Hughes Diving offered a quite substantial discount for booking on this particular voyage, the last trip of the so-called low season, and the last before the vessel entered dry-dock for overhaul and repairs.

Absurdly, even though we live in Asia, traveling to Palau is more of a hassle for us than it is for most of the other trip participants, most of whom were traveling from Europe and the US. To make the cruise, we had to leave Bangkok on a Friday afternoon, overnight in Manila, get up early to catch one of the 3 weekly Continental Micronesia flights from Manila to Koror, spend the rest of the day and night in the Palau Pacific Resort, THEN spend half of Sunday waiting for the pick-up that takes you to the boat!

The Owner's Suite

Note speakers behind bed…

 The boat is definitely a state-of-the-art live-aboard. It sleeps 20 divers, backed up by 10 crew members. On recommendation, we had booked the Owner's Suite, the only suite on the lowest deck. This stateroom is bigger than the rest of the staterooms and features an entertainment set of TV, CD player and VCR, which did not see use throughout the trip. The bathroom is spacious for a live-aboard, with shower stall (including dispensers with lotion, gel, shampoo and conditioner), a marine toilet, and a hair dryer. The beds can be moved together to make a double, and the air-conditioning is individually controlled in all rooms. The Owner's Suite is a little bit cheaper than the other staterooms, only because it does not have a panorama window, but since you are never really in your cabin except at night, this is not significant in my opinion. This room is by far the best on the boat, but the others are certainly also good.
Sun Dancer II is the main boat, and the actual dives are conducted from the 2 tenders, the Magic Bus and the Magic Tram. Once set up, your gear does not leave the tank or the tender until the cruise is over, unless you want to switch between air and nitrox. The vessel pumps EAN32 only, through a state-of-the-art membrane system onboard, and all tanks, air and nitrox, are refilled using a system of whips from Sun Dancer between dives. I never had a fill below 210/3100 PSI bar, with 220 being the norm.

The Bus and the Tram
On the subject of Nitrox, this is, in my opinion, the only small silliness to be found on the boat. You are not allowed to use Nitrox to extend bottom time, whether you use tables or a nitrox computer. The nitrox is offered only for "safer diving", while diving air profiles. This is one of those subjects which tends to get religious, and personally, I subscribe to the view that there is no appreciable safety gain from using nitrox on an air profile. On the other hand, the operation does not seem to have a problem with sending divers on EAN32 on dives off sheer walls dropping to over 300 meters. Go figure. I dived air.

The crew on the Sun Dancer is incredibly friendly, top professional and very knowledgeable. A number of them have lived in Palau for years, and they know the dive sites in and out. I have never seen dive maps such as the ones drawn by the divemasters before any dive, colorful, artistic and very accurate. They ought to sell them!

TDI nitrox courses and photography courses are available onboard, and Matt, the resident photographer, does a great job of dispensing advice, processing film, and taking unbelievable pictures of his own. There is a full-fledged photo lab on board, and on most dives the divemasters carry either a camera or an underwater video recorder to construct the slide show and video for the last evening onboard. The boat carries a number of cameras, strobes and lenses for rent, which, as we shall see, was a blessing...

Diving Micronesia in the low season has its draw-backs, and we encountered one of them, in the shape of a tropical depression, which turned into a tropical storm and, finally, became Typhoon Zeb. Although the typhoon did not hit Palau, being located on the fringes of it gave us some serious rain on the first day of the trip. This meant, unfortunately, that the sites chosen for this day had to be picked from the limited number of options inside the lagoon itself. The first two dives were wreck dives, followed by a dive at a site called Soft Coral Arch. Visibility was limited, and the mood on the boat was dropping as the rain continued. Although we all understood the trade-offs between price and seasons, when you are pumped for sharks and blue water, wrecks and low-viz 30-foot dives are not welcome.

Thankfully, the typhoon continued its journey northward, passing over the Philippines, and left us with the good dive sites wide open. What follows is more or less verbatim from my logbook, as well as my amateurish renditions of the underwater formations we dived:

Day:1

Site: Wreck of the Chuyo Maru

Site Description: Wreck on an 85 meter long coastal freighter sunk in operation DESECRATE1 on March 30-31 1944. The wreck lies in 21-36 meters, sitting upright on the bottom.
The Dive: Visibility was limited for this neck of the woods, at approximately 5 meters only. We penetrated the cargo holds, the bulkheads between which have been eaten away, and found numerous artifacts, mostly shoes, batteries and bullets. We also found a gas mask on the forward deck, and observed the heavily encrusted stern-mounted gun. There were lots of lionfish on this wreck (insert picture of ladder and gun)
Day:1

Site: Wreck of the Iro

Site Description: The wreck of a 145 meter long fleet oiler sunk in operation DESECRATE1. The wreck lies on a slope, with the shallowest sections in 22 meters and the deepest in 35 meters. Being a vitally important vessel for the fleet, she was one of 10 vessels specifically targeted for destruction by torpedo bombers, and the large hole in the bow testifies to the bombers' success.

The Dive: This is a GREAT wreck! The visibility was at least twice that on the Chuyo Maru, and there were lots of penetration points, both to the cargo holds and in the various bits of the superstructure still left. Since the wreck is very silty and quite deep, and we had no reels or back-up torches, we didn't do much in the way of penetration, but this is a wreck that really warrants 3 or 4 dives to be properly explored, if only for its size. A very large-caliber gun on a rotating turret dominates the stern, which lies at the deepest end. The vessel is STILL leaking a thin stream of oil today, 54 years after she was sunk!
Day:1

Site: Soft Coral Arch

Site Description: The site is inside the lagoon, and was only dived because of prevailing weather conditions. It features a large collection of soft corals, and not much else. Maximum depth is 13 meters, and in the arch itself, it is snorkeling depth.
The Dive: Not worth wasting typing time on, apart from the mentioning of some quite large caverns that one can peek into here and there. Morale took a dive (pun intended) after this site, but would soon pick up again.
Day:2

Site: Big Drop-Off

Site Description: This a steep wall on the outer reef, dropping from just a few meters to a depth of a lot of meters, quite how many remains unknown to me, but definitely well out of sight.
The Dive: Time to reach for Captain Cousteau again, for a quote that accurately describes this and many other of the great dive sites of Palau:

"...And I could see, stretching temptingly below me, as far as my eye could reach, what seemed the infinite sweetness and quiet of a blackness that would yield up the secrets of the universe if only I were to go a bit deeper..."

With the improvement in the weather, we had finally made it to the dive sites we had robbed our piggy-banks to see. This wall features the ever-present (in Palau) schools of thousands of pyramid butterfly fish, in addition to hundreds of sweetlips, red-toothed triggerfish, surgeonfish of many varieties, wrasses, lots of titan triggerfish, and large groupers. There were lots of juvenile regal angelfish hiding in the crevices, and we saw 2 hawksbill turtles close up, just to top things off! There were no sharks yet, but the dive was, nevertheless, unbelievable, quite like swimming in the world's largest aquarium...
Day:2

Site: German Channel

Site Description: German Channel is the only channel that offers quick access to open water without having to go the long way around from Koror Harbor. It is an artificial channel, blasted by the Germans in 1904, when Palau was a German colony and the Germans needed better access for their ships carrying the phosphate they mined here. The average depth of the channel itself is 14 meters, dropping off much deeper on the open water-end. There is an (unreliable) manta ray cleaning station in the middle of the channel, and currents can naturally be quite strong here.
The Dive: Buddy teams were dispersed quickly over a large area by the current, and every team had different experiences. We started off exploring the manta cleaning station, but noted with disappointment that no mantas were present, so continued into the channel itself. Relatively quickly, we were joined by a hawksbill turtle, and soon thereafter by a Napoleon wrasse, which we followed at a distance. The wrasse became the dive leader, and did not disappoint: It led us over a small crest and onto what I can only describe as an underwater ski-slope...A long, meandering path of snow-white sand leading through the reef, littered with large patches of garden eels in their hundreds, disappearing as soon as you got close. This was the first time either of us saw garden eels, and they were cool! We were also joined for a short while by a clown triggerfish, my favorite trigger, and all around were the usual reef fish in amazing abundance. A great dive which because of the shallow depth lasted well over an hour.
Day:2

Site: New Drop-Off

Site Description: This is one of the newer dive sites in Palau, and has already gained a reputation for lots of action. It may well be at least the equal of Blue Corner. It features the usual steep wall dropping off into infinity, but with somewhat of slope towards the end of the dive.
The Dive: Sharks, sharks and more sharks! The first gray reef shark arrived after only a few minutes, and hung around for a while, actually feeding on reef fish as we watched it dive-bomb after its terrified prey! A large Napoleon wrasse also joined us early on, we could have ended the dive happy at that point. But we pressed on, and a good thing we did, too, because soon thereafter, there seemed to be more sharks than other fish! Picture a scene of 5 white-tip reef sharks, 10 gray reef sharks, a huge school of sennet barracuda, an even larger school of black snapper, Napoleon wrasses and thousands of pyramid butterflyfish and red-toothed triggerfish, all within your field of view, without even having to turn your head!!! Truly a world-class dive.
Day: 3

Site: Ngemelis Wall

Site Description: Cousteau called this "the greatest wall dive in the world". It is a sheer wall, but with plateau at the top.

The Dive: Sharks again. Two gray reef sharks and 5 or 6 white-tips, in the usual soup of pyramid butterflies, Napoleon wrasses, and, as something new, lots of giant trevallies. Amazing seafans and great big bushes of red wire coral. Another world-class site, but dwarfed by our recent dive at New Drop-Off. Already, we were spoiled...
Day: 3

Site: Blue Corner

Site Description: Probably the most well-known site in Palau, this is the site most people come for. The site is along another wall, this one with a flat reef at 8-15 meters on top. There is a sharp bend in the wall, and this is what is referred to as the Corner. Shortly before the Corner, there is an indent in the wall, which can feature an extremely strong upwelling when the current is running. This is referred to as the Elevator, and if you get caught in that upwelling, you lose the dive, or at least you miss your hook-in on the plateau.
The Dive: First opportunity to use that weird-looking but very useful little device called a reef hook. Everybody is issued one at the beginning of the trip, along with a Dive Alert and a safety bat (note of interest: safety bats are supplied to Peter Hughes by the Thailand Sub-Aqua Club, one of our club's fund raisers). Reef hooks sound terribly politically incorrect, and conjure up visions of great big hooks splitting the reefs apart. In fact, it is nothing but a small shark-fishing hook with the barb ground down, attached via a 5-foot piece of rope to a small carbine hook that you can clip on to your BCD. It is incredibly handy in a strong current, and one now has a fixed place in my BCD pocket. Coming up to the plateau, once you peek over the edge, you have about 5 seconds to hook in before the current dispatches you to the other end of the reef, and you have missed the action. We all managed to find little sections of rock where our hooks would fit, and after hooking in, added air to our BCDs to keep us off the reef. Thus transformed into human kites, we faced into current and waited for the show to begin.

Shortly, sharks (white-tips and grays), joined by a huge school of jacks, another of sennet barracudas, and still another of black snappers, performed for us in the in-your-face fish extravaganza that we were becoming used to. Several Napoleon wrasses and a turtle joined the fray off and on. I found the dive great, but I have to say that although the sharks are plenty, the silvertips of the Burma Banks are more majestic. Talk about a luxury problem, though :-)
Day: 3

Site: Blue Holes

Site Description: Adjacent to Blue Corner, this site is a cavern in the reef, whose roof has collapsed in places, so that when viewed from the air, the reef appears to have large blue holes in it. This site is not nearly as spectacular as the Blue Hole in e.g. the Bahamas, but it is a rare opportunity to fall "through" a reef into a large, totally safe cavern below. As always, "safe" is relative and closely connected with your IQ: The cavern does lead on to a real cave system in which several Japanese divers have perished, but to get in there, you must pick the tiny, man-sized hole in the wall over the 200 meter-circumference opening that frames the deep blue water of the wall outside the cave. There is a memorial plague in the cavern, in Japanese. Perhaps a Braille translation would be in order as well...
The Dive: We fell through the reef (dive started with getting over the side of the tender into water 5 feet deep), looked around inside the cavern for a few minutes, then amazingly managed to pick the right hole to exit into deep blue water with a few gray reef sharks (yawn...) playing outside. A left turn took us back to Blue Corner for a quick look around, but rather than hooking in, we elected to swim across the plateau in the most amazing surge I have ever experienced. To borrow a phrase, it is the first time I have seen FISH tumble!!!
Day: 3

Site: Barnum's Wall

Site Description: It should come as no surprise that this is a wall dive, but with the slight twist that this is a sloping wall with a ledge at about 45 meters. It lies close to New Drop-Off.
The Dive: A slow, lazy drift dive along the wall. The usual schools of pyramid butterflyfish, and loads of moorish idols on this dive. Lots of red whip coral and huge gorgonian seafans festoon the wall. Only one shark deigned to make an appearance, perhaps because this was a dusk dive and the main herd was off feeding somewhere in deep water, or perhaps they were just at the edge of visibility, who knows ? As a bonus, we surfaced right into an amazing sunset, rendering the whole experience even more ephemeral.

At this point, however, my electronic devices started acting up, with the first item to go on the blink being my Ikelite SS-200 strobe. Everything would function, except the tube. Bummer, but at least I could rent a replacement Nikon SB-105 as a replacement. I had also used the E-6 processing services on the boat for my slides, and a good thing, too. So far, an unacceptably high number of slides had been hideously overexposed, probably because I'm not used to photographing in conditions where sunlight easily penetrates down to 25-30 meters...At least this gave me a chance to compensate, both by using higher F-stops and by pulling the strobe further back. The results were encouraging.
Day: 4

Site: New Drop-Off

Site Description: See Day 2 for description
The Dive: "Total sensory overload" is the best way to describe this dive. We started the dive drifting along the wall, amid a myriad pyramid butterflyfish and red-toothed triggerfish, joined quickly by 2 gray reef sharks. At one point we hooked in and went into kite-mode, and were rewarded for our patience by 3 gray reef sharks, a couple of white-tips, swimming and hunting in a school of sennet barracuda, bright blue fusiliers, red-toothed triggers, yellowtails, and giant trevallies. The trevallies made a few kills of their own, but the most impressive was to see the entire bouillabaisse scatter like flies whenever a gray reef shark got hungry and dive-bombed into the cloud of fish.
Day: 4

Site: Blue Corner

Site Description: See Day 3 for description

The Dive: Yet another shark lunch buffet featuring Divers-on-a-Hook as the main course...Lots and lots of grays and white-tips, this time for some reason much closer than before, which certainly made for better photo opportunities. Napoleon wrasses, fusiliers, pyramids and red-toothed triggers galore. I shared my little hook-in spot with a Clark's clownfish which was not pleased and kept bumping the line to my hook. Glad these things are not more than a couple of inches long...
Day: 4

Site: Turtle Cove

Site Description: There are no turtles at Turtle Cove, but there used to be. Most of them became soup. This is a cavern-cum-wall dive which is quite similar to Blue Holes. You enter the cavern through a hole in the reef top, then exit through a huge gap at 25 meters depth to commence you wall dive.
The Dive: Quite similar to Barnum's Wall, this dive is not so much about large action as it is about lazy fish-watching. Hundreds of reef fish species and large clouds of fusiliers, accompanied by the ever-present black snappers made this afternoon dive memorable for its meditational nature.
Day:4

Site: Wonder Channel

Site Description: Wonder Channel is in a different part of Palau, and we had spent most of the afternoon travelling there while enjoying Chef Wade's gastronomical miracles. It is a sloping reef, not a wall, and for the first time in a while, we actually got to see bottom. Visibility is not as good, but still weighed in at a respectable 15 meters.

The Dive: The dive was late, a dusk dive turned night dive, and lots of macro stuff was out. For the first time, I saw a juvenile batfish, something I've wanted to see ever since I first saw a picture of one in a fish ID book years back. They are very beautiful, almost jet black with a distinct, bright orange stripe outlining their entire body. I speak only half the truth when I say that I've always wanted to "see" one. Naturally, what I've really always wanted to do is to photograph one. It was therefore a foregone conclusion that when I finally did see one, my camera was loaded with a 1:2 macro extension tube....I think it was Bob Halstead who said that if you don't have a sense of humor, you should not take up underwater photography!
Day: 5

Site: Jellyfish Lake

Site Description: Jellyfish Lake is one of 6 marine (saltwater) lakes in Palau. Over geological time, these lakes have become isolated from the sea, and this has dramatically changed their nature, and that of the animals that live in them. In this particular lake, the jellyfish, having no enemies any longer have over thousands of years lost their ability to sting. They have also changed from being predators to being farmers, getting all their energies from tiny algae growing within them! The algae in turn get their energy from nitrogen and the sun, and so it is that at night, the jellyfish descend to the bottom of the lake, where there is a layer of water so rich in nitrogen that SCUBA diving here would be fatal after only 10 or 15 minutes, and at day they come up to the top layer and follow the sun, migrating from one end of the lake to the other and back again every single day! There are estimated to be well over a million jellyfish in this lake, and this phenomenon occurs only here in Palau and in one lake in Indonesia.

Crew member Matt in Jellyfish Lake
The Dive: No diving, only snorkeling. Swam out to the middle of the lake, and soon found ourselves surrounded by the little buggers. Thousands of them, both species, big and small. An amazing experience, quite a lot of fun for 10 minutes, but then it got old, in my opinion. Soyong wasn't quite as keen on the little darlings…

Day: 5

Site: Wonder Channel

Site Description: See above.
The Dive: This was billed as a macro photographer's dirtiest dream come true, and Wonder Channel did not disappoint. I got more nudibranch and flatworm pictures than you can shake a stick at, and other groups saw pipefish and what they claimed to be a Spanish Dancer. Conveniently, however, they could not remember the color, and in their heart of hearts they probably knew that it was just another flatworm elevated to Dancer status. Or so we told them...
Day: 5

Site: Ulong Channel

Site Description: Ulong Channel is a natural channel, quite narrow but pretty long. It is famous as a dive site that almost appears to have been landscaped, and although shallow at 10-15 meters, anything can show up here.
The Dive: We started on the ocean side, swam along the wall to the channel entrance just as the current was picking up. We hooked in at the corner, but nothing much was in the mood for a visit, and having just seen a large hawksbill turtle disappear up the channel, we unhooked and let the current take us up this wonderland at a brisk but dignified pace. Saw the only potato cod of the trip, and a lot of pretty coral, I mean REALLY pretty coral, and periodically a gray reef shark would cruise overhead as if watching over us.

But the big surprise came towards the end of the dive, when we came upon two huge pink-faced triggerfish, a close relative of the titan triggerfish. I thought we were incredibly lucky to have seen this, firstly because I had never seen one before, secondly because there were two of them. After due admiration and study, we turned around to continue the dive - and found ourselves face-to-face with least 50 more!!!

The story gets sad at this point, because I had trouble getting my strobe to fire, and the shutter did not always open and close within the same second. Deep inside, I knew what the problem was, and when I surfaced and tried to rewind the film on the way back to the mother ship, and it wouldn't, I knew two things: That there would be no more pictures from this trip, and that the trip price just increased by 800 Dollars or so. Yes, for the first time in 4 years, my Nikonos had let in water :-(( It got a good rinse in fresh water on the boat and would probably have functioned at M90, but it wouldn't have been the same. So I sent a silent prayer to the diving deities for having at least spared me until the 2nd-last dive of the trip, and prepared for what I think is my only non-training, non-teaching dive in 4 years without a camera.
Depth Charges

Day: 6

Site: Helmet Wreck (Unidentified Maru # 2)

Site Description: This relatively small freighter lies on a sloping reef with the stern at 10 meters and the bow at 30. Like the others, she was sunk in Operation DESECRATE1, and is one of the latest wrecks to be discovered in the early 80's. She is called the Helmet Wreck because one of the most striking features was stacks of helmets in the hold, fused together from spending 54 years beneath the waves.
The stern gun

The Dive: Our last dive, and what a finale! The Vertical Wreck is the best wreck I've ever dived, for the stunning visibility and sense of discovery. The Helmet Wreck is by far the best from every other perspective. Artifacts are seemingly everywhere. There are enough intact portholes to make a grown BSAC diver cry and reach for his crowbar (one British diver was seen actually stroking one), there are sub-machineguns, shoes sake-bottles and gas masks all over the deck, the holds are filled with depth charges, grenades and bullets, there is a heavy machine gun on the bow, and the anchor is still in place. The visibility was good at about 15 meters, and I could have spent dive after dive here. The wreck gave you a real sense of history, without the undignified display of skulls and bones you see in pictures from Truk, and I was a bit quiet after surfacing.
Gear dries for the first time in 5 days…

This was the last dive we did. Others did Chandelier Cave after the Helmet Wreck, but flying constraints kept us from doing so. We also didn't get to dive Peleliu, home of one of the world's fastest drift dives, because the weather in that area prevented us from going. Still, that is a reason to return to Palau, and return we will!
Happy hour back in the PPR. From left to right: Me, Ben the Two-Toned-Fin Globetrotter, Caroline, the saintly wife of Chris the Porthole-Stroker, and Chris himself…

Naturally, once we had determined that we weren't going to dive Chandelier Cave, we discovered that we had mis-read our flight itinerary. Somehow, we had overlooked that rather than flying out that night, we weren't actually leaving until the following night! This gave us some time to a) get used to being back on dry land and knock back a few drinks with our new-found friends, b) take a look at some of the sights of Palau, not that there are many, at least not in the state of Koror. Allegedly, there is lots to see in Peleliu, particularly if you are interested in WW2 history.

Peleliu is where you find "Bloody Nose Ridge", where the USMC landed and dealt the occupying Japanese a mighty blow, but much as this is right up at least my alley, we did not have time to arrange a trip there, so had to settle for Koror.
A Japanese Shinto shrine dedicated to the war dead on both sides

A Japanese armored artillery tow-truck in the jungle

Without a doubt, Palau offers some of the most spectacular diving either of us has ever done (although we both think the sharks are better in Burma), and it was not long after our return that we started talking about when we might go back! There are dives we didn't do, such as the high-voltage drift dives off Peleliu, the Zero plane wrecks, Chandelier Cave, and some of the other wrecks around (Palau actually has more wrecks than Truk). It's nice to have something to go back for, but even if it was only to dive the same sites again, both of us would go without hesitation.

It is possible to dive Palau without being based on a live-aboard. There are plenty of shops close to Koror, and lots of inexpensive hotels. But the downside of that is that you will get only 2 dives per day, and pay $150 for the pleasure, and the hotels aren't that cheap. Thus, the live-aboard option offers by far the best value for money, and we highly recommend it.