I wish I had been there years ago. Warming/bleaching and maybe the tsunami whacked alot of the corals some years ago, I've seen accounts that there is only 10% of the coverage there used to be. Supposedly stuff is coming back. It was still beautiful and the fish life was tremendous. Sometimes you couldn't see through the fish. There were some sites that appeared for whatever reason not to have lost so much coral and they were amazing to see, I could just imagine what it all looked like before. Great macro critters, stuff everywhere. Lots of sharks at the end of the channels. We saw mantas, including a big squadron flying overhead (blotting out the sun style) even though it wasn't the time of year for it, we got lucky. We got skunked on whale sharks, but the odds are supposed to be pretty good. (My shop ran a second trip 2 months after the one we went on and they saw them.) Large variety in the sites.
Yes, the currents can be bad. It varies with location, time of year, time of day/tides. They also seem to be somewhat unpredictable because it's complicated, you've got an atoll of atolls with tides flowing in and out of all that, wind, and currents in the Indian Ocean itself. Usually they called it right but sometimes you'd get surprised when you went in, and they planned for both. We were there in Jan which is during the strongest period on average, and I get the impression that this year and what we experienced was exceptionally strong. Some dives we only rode the current for only part until getting into the lee of something, and sometimes it was pretty much the whole dive and you hung onto dead coral at the end of a channel to watch the show. (Plenty of dead coral but hard to find a place to grab sometimes as everything had something living in it.) There were some dives that were nuts, and one I was downright scared on. Made Palau look like a swimming pool, though I think things in Palau was relatively tame when we were there. YMMV. I'm pretty sure it is not always like that, and I also supect our sites were chosen for what we would see rather than worrying about the currents since everyone on the trip was capable. (We did do one current free dive on a wreck and small wall, the very first of the trip, so it was clearly possible.) But what we experienced there, no way I would suggest for someone new or not 100% on top of things.
