Wow, what can I say about this trip other than it went better than we could have hoped.
Two friends and I sailed my boat down to Oshima Island from Iwakuni on Saturday where and begain our search for the wreck at around 2:30pm. The water was calm and there was no wind. After searching around the area for an hour looking for some kind of buoy I just decided to find it the "old fashined way" by taking a compass out of my console, whipping out my navigation chart (all in Japanese of course) and having my friend Shane hanging over the side with my underwater range finder. After figuring the location by using a folded up piece of paper as a slide rule and using dead reckoning with the compass on the surrounding islands I was able to figure out a good search pattern and we began sweeping back and forth on an East, West line. After about 30 minutes Shane about jumped off the boat when the range finder jumped from 131 feet to 88 feet then he started jumping around screaming "We found it!!" It was pretty funny, you had to be there.
I then quickly took some compass bearings from the surrounding islands to triangulate our position so we could get out there quickly on Sunday when we picked up the rest of the team and the gear. We then found ourselves a nice, quiet spot to anchor for the night, fired up the barbeque on the bow and got comfortable.
The next morning we picked up the rest of the team in Towa Town near the Mutsu Memorial Museum. With 5 people and gear on a 21' sailboat we were pretty cramped but we managed. It only took me an hour and a half to find the site this time but the depth was bouncing around 70-80 feet which was confusing us quite a bit. I threw the anchor off the bow and managed snag something shallow and hard. I hadn't planned on actually anchoring ON the wreck but there was no pulling it up now since she was completely locked.
We strapped up our 92cuft tanks, jumped in the water and started our descent. The surface temp was a balmy 68 deg F. and visibility was about 25 feet. It didn't take long to land on the wreck and I quickly discovered why my anchor was so stuck. It had fallen through a porthole on the side of the wreck at 83 feet. There was plenty of ambient light around and the only reason I turned my dive light on at all was to peek in the portholes and open areas of the wreck. Another thing that I quickly noticed was the sheer number of fish living in the wreck as well as the beautiful orange polyps that are growing on the hull. The silt is minimal on the top of the wreck most likely due to currents and storm activity.
We immediately began heading alongside the wreck staying around 90-100 feet and at about 50 feel from my anchor line we found the obvious explosion area where the ship split in two. The metal was still stretched outward and you could even see parts of the individual decks of what appeared to be what was left of the number 3 ammo magazine. We kept circling around and headed forward on the other side in an effort to locate the bow when we came to where it looks like the hull has collapsed on itself. Most likely from the hole cut in her from the salvage operations and being down there for 63 years. We descended to 112 feet to check it out but we decided to turn back since we didn't want to use all our air up so fast and we still had plenty to explore. After 20 minutes we decided to head back and start our decompression. Our deco rig was nothing fancy, just a single 80 at 18 feet with 4 regs on it. We planned for using our own air for deco but the tank was there for emergency.
All in all it was a great dive. We now have it marked on GPS and we're already planning our next trip down there. One thing that I found is that if you plan the dive around the tidal movements, as we did, the currents are non-existent. We're even talking about making this a regular dive site for us. We're pretty lucky to live near an actual WWII wreck that has some very real historic significance.
Here are some of the pictures, sorry they aren't that great. But since I was operating my range finder, my friend Michael was operating my camera and wasn't too familiar with it.
