I just got back from an extended trip in which our group of 12 visited both Yap and Chuuk. This is a report on Yap.
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Yap is a beautiful island, but it is impossible to overstate the importance of the betel nut to their culture. Whenever I think of Yap, I will think of people carrying around baskets of betel nut paraphernalia and smiling with bright red teeth. Our dive masters and boat captains chewed continuously, except (I assume) while actually diving. When their last chew was getting old, they would split the next nut, pour on the powdered lime, wrap the pepper leave around it, spit out the old wad, and put in the new one. I wonder if there are any official warnings about diving under the influence of a betel nut buzz.
When we arrived, our group of 12 divers was told immediately by our operator (Trader’s Ridge) that this was the wrong time of the year to visit Yap. (No one told us that before we booked, though.) Seasonal unfavorable winds had made many of the best dive sites too rough to dive. The first time we tried one of the southern sites (Yap Caverns), the dive master on our boat said it was too rough. We had all dived rougher seas, but we said, “Well, you know this area better that we do” and went instead next door to Lion Fish Wall. The DM was still reluctant, but it turned out to be a relatively easy dive. The next time we were at Yap Caverns, it was even rougher than before, but we talked the dive master into giving it a try. It turned out to be a beautiful dive, with no real difficulty at all. We went in, and a few feet below the surface it was perfectly calm. Even getting into the boat at the end was not too bad—we have all had more difficult conditions by far. We concluded that the concept of rough seas in Yap (at least for this operator) is quite different from ours. We likedYap Caverns a lot, but an attempt to repeat the site failed when the DM missed the opening, and we ended up doing a nice dive on Gilman wall instead.
Yap is famous for Manta Rays, but you have to go to certain places to find them. They frequent known cleaning stations. One station in particular was the main interest in this operator—we went to the Goofnuw station three times, and the other boat with our group went there three times as well, twice along with us. We had a decent encounter on one dive and an excellent encounter on another (without the other group), with the rays repeatedly passing close enough for us to touch for over an hour. The other two dives were complete strikeouts—divers kneeling in the sand for over an hour, looking at nothing and waiting for something that never happened.
After one of those dives, we went north around the island through truly rough seas to Miil Channel, supposedly the best site for mantas. We went to the feeding station there, but the visibility was so bad that we could have had seven mantas recreating the ballet scene from Fantasia and we would not have known it. We left and explored the channel, with the main goal being to keep sight of one another in an environment that would have brought nostalgic tears to old time quarry divers.
We also did a dive on the southeast side called Millenium Wall—perhaps. The current was tricky, going north at the surface but south 15 feet down. I suspect the DM might have been fooled by it. Whatever it was, we dived a wall of dead and storm-battered coral. I spotted a decent swim-through about half way through the dive, but only I and the other stragglers in the group did it.
Our hotel had an employee from a village on “the forbidden island,” where the villagers had chosen to maintain their traditional culture and where tourists are supposedly not allowed to go without special permission. His connections allowed him to gain us that permission—or so the story goes. At any rate, we spent a lot of money to go up and see some stone-floored meeting areas with stone money propped up around it. The stone causeways that connected the villages and allowed dry passage through the tidal floods were impressive. We did not see any actual people or homes on this tour of villages that had chosen to maintain the traditional ways of life until the very end, when we saw one house composed primarily of corrugated steel and surrounded by plastic bottles and beer cans.
In summary, we had some wonderful dives in Yap, but we had some yawners and some disappointments as well. Our options were very limited. The northwest sites had horrible visibility. We took the operator’s word for it that the southwest sites were undiveable because of wind. We had to convince the operator that we were skilled enough to do the southern tip despite the conditions, but once we did that, they were beautiful. The east walls were all pretty much dead because of a past typhoon, and they don’t even appear as sites on the dive maps. Goofnuw Channel was hit or miss with the mantas. We did a total of 10 dives, with 3 of them at the Goofnuw station. If we had stayed any longer, we would have been repeating sites we had already visited.
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Yap is a beautiful island, but it is impossible to overstate the importance of the betel nut to their culture. Whenever I think of Yap, I will think of people carrying around baskets of betel nut paraphernalia and smiling with bright red teeth. Our dive masters and boat captains chewed continuously, except (I assume) while actually diving. When their last chew was getting old, they would split the next nut, pour on the powdered lime, wrap the pepper leave around it, spit out the old wad, and put in the new one. I wonder if there are any official warnings about diving under the influence of a betel nut buzz.
When we arrived, our group of 12 divers was told immediately by our operator (Trader’s Ridge) that this was the wrong time of the year to visit Yap. (No one told us that before we booked, though.) Seasonal unfavorable winds had made many of the best dive sites too rough to dive. The first time we tried one of the southern sites (Yap Caverns), the dive master on our boat said it was too rough. We had all dived rougher seas, but we said, “Well, you know this area better that we do” and went instead next door to Lion Fish Wall. The DM was still reluctant, but it turned out to be a relatively easy dive. The next time we were at Yap Caverns, it was even rougher than before, but we talked the dive master into giving it a try. It turned out to be a beautiful dive, with no real difficulty at all. We went in, and a few feet below the surface it was perfectly calm. Even getting into the boat at the end was not too bad—we have all had more difficult conditions by far. We concluded that the concept of rough seas in Yap (at least for this operator) is quite different from ours. We likedYap Caverns a lot, but an attempt to repeat the site failed when the DM missed the opening, and we ended up doing a nice dive on Gilman wall instead.
Yap is famous for Manta Rays, but you have to go to certain places to find them. They frequent known cleaning stations. One station in particular was the main interest in this operator—we went to the Goofnuw station three times, and the other boat with our group went there three times as well, twice along with us. We had a decent encounter on one dive and an excellent encounter on another (without the other group), with the rays repeatedly passing close enough for us to touch for over an hour. The other two dives were complete strikeouts—divers kneeling in the sand for over an hour, looking at nothing and waiting for something that never happened.
After one of those dives, we went north around the island through truly rough seas to Miil Channel, supposedly the best site for mantas. We went to the feeding station there, but the visibility was so bad that we could have had seven mantas recreating the ballet scene from Fantasia and we would not have known it. We left and explored the channel, with the main goal being to keep sight of one another in an environment that would have brought nostalgic tears to old time quarry divers.
We also did a dive on the southeast side called Millenium Wall—perhaps. The current was tricky, going north at the surface but south 15 feet down. I suspect the DM might have been fooled by it. Whatever it was, we dived a wall of dead and storm-battered coral. I spotted a decent swim-through about half way through the dive, but only I and the other stragglers in the group did it.
Our hotel had an employee from a village on “the forbidden island,” where the villagers had chosen to maintain their traditional culture and where tourists are supposedly not allowed to go without special permission. His connections allowed him to gain us that permission—or so the story goes. At any rate, we spent a lot of money to go up and see some stone-floored meeting areas with stone money propped up around it. The stone causeways that connected the villages and allowed dry passage through the tidal floods were impressive. We did not see any actual people or homes on this tour of villages that had chosen to maintain the traditional ways of life until the very end, when we saw one house composed primarily of corrugated steel and surrounded by plastic bottles and beer cans.
In summary, we had some wonderful dives in Yap, but we had some yawners and some disappointments as well. Our options were very limited. The northwest sites had horrible visibility. We took the operator’s word for it that the southwest sites were undiveable because of wind. We had to convince the operator that we were skilled enough to do the southern tip despite the conditions, but once we did that, they were beautiful. The east walls were all pretty much dead because of a past typhoon, and they don’t even appear as sites on the dive maps. Goofnuw Channel was hit or miss with the mantas. We did a total of 10 dives, with 3 of them at the Goofnuw station. If we had stayed any longer, we would have been repeating sites we had already visited.
