Diving Chuuk Lagoon

I was berated (nicely) this week by a reader who pointed out I had promised pictures of our most recent video shoot, and never delivered. Mea Culpa. For my penance, here’s a preview.

Japanese Zero

The background. Chuuk (often called “Truk” because its original German colonizers couldn’t pronounce its name – “Chooook”) was a major refueling, repair and communications hub for the Japanese fleet during WWII, and the site of a fierce two day attack in February, 1944. It was a major American victory: US fighters and bombers just pounded the crap out of the Chuuk atoll, destroying 3 cruisers, 4 destroyers, 3 auxiliary cruisers, 2 submarine tenders, 3 smaller warships, 32 merchant ships, and 270 aircraft. The US sustained two damaged ships. There was no strategic advantage to an American occupation of the atoll group, so they never landed.

Dive Deck of the Odyssey

Today Chuuk is one of the four Federated States of Micronesia. Tourism is their biggest industry, and diving is the engine behind the tourism.

We dove for a week from the Odyssey, one of the two liveaboards in the lagoon. It’s a dive boat, not a luxury liner – but it was the best liveaboard I’ve experienced – good food, great crew, big cabins, and of course – those wrecks.

Tank on the deck of the San Francisco Maru

The San Franciso Maru, for example, sits at nearly 200 ft.  It’s roughly the size of a thirty story office building lying on its side – so big that this tank sitting on its deck is just a small detail.

Rio De Janeiro Maru, leaving the wheelhouse

Most of the deck areas are open, swim-through galleries glowing with corals and sponges. Some parts of the wrecks reminded me of walking through the cloistered walks of a Florentine monastery -eerie, utter tranquility and filtered light. Beauty in destruction.

The dive masters, of course, knew the wrecks inside out. And once convinced that you weren’t an idiot and could be trusted, they’d take you right down into the interior, a pitch-black labyrinth of upside down stairwells, heavy machinery, dangling wires and blown-in walls, where they only way to tell which way was up was to watch your bubbles.

Ascending from the Fujikawa Maru

It was dreamlike, surreal, and you were always secretly relieved to finally see that patch of blue light  that meant an exit.

Machine guns and gas masks

There were bones, skulls, shells, bullets, guns, torpedo parts and gas masks scattered throughout the wrecks, and for some reason divers past had felt compelled to erect these odd little sculptures on several of them, an underwater fusion of Salvador Dali and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Bomber Interior

This is the interior of a Betty Bomber that failed to make the runway during the attack. The wrecks, big and small, have become artificial reefs, slowly crusting over with growth, home to corals, fish, sponges and the whole beautiful spectrum of marine life.

Down into the engine room, up to the deck

We did up to five dives per day – four daytime and a night dive after dinner. It was fairly strenuous – three of the sixteen divers, all younger and much more fit than me, were hit by decompression sickness severe enough that they quit diving for the week.  Which goes to show that in diving, if not in politics, being conservative is a very good thing.