OP
Robint's link above to his trip report describing 35 sharks at close range is mindblowing, but my best shark encounter was at Siaes Corner. I didn't actually see the sharks striking, but they seemed to be corralling the fish. The shoal moved up and down, but not along, the wall, so when we ran into it we could just hover in place. The largest of the grey reef sharks was probably no more than 4' but, because they were entirely concerned with the shoal, kept coming ridiculously close to the divers. To make it even better, a large sea turtle decided that the the middle of the shoal was the best place for a nibbling spot on the wall and then a cloud of anthias, which I have decided are my favorite tiny fish in Palau, showed up. One of those dives where everybody surfaces involuntarily smiling.
Other highlights:
Peleliu Express to Peleliu Corner: My second best 'shark dive'. Once we were hooked into the corner, it was a neverending queue of 4'-6' grey reef sharks passing by, though none got as close as the Siaes Corner dive. Up to 10 individuals at a time. Also easily the strongest current I've ever been in, which swept us off the corner and into open ocean with ridiculous speed.
Peleliu Drop-off: The best wall of the trip. I can remember ever crinoid I've ever seen on Guam distinctly. On this wall, there were so many crinoids of different colors that I just gave up after seeing four attached to each other. Laid-back dive with great fans, small sharks regularly passing by below and my favorite anthias everywhere.
Peleliu Corner: A dive directly down on the corner and hiding from the current along the top of the wall to the tip. Small (9') bull shark on the way out, gave way to a rush of 100 or so bluefin trevallies, which led to the guide ducking with his arms covering his head. (He later explained that he wasn't worried about the trevallies, but rather whatever might have been chasing them.) About 500 giant trevallies came out of the dark to check us out once we got to the tip and we spotted the largest ray I've ever seen in the distance on the way back in. Guide described it as the first "devil ray" (which type I don't know) that he's seen in three years. Bailing out the wall and kicking out of the downcurrent, only to see my exhalations, which had been pulled down and dispersed, come back up as a vast field of tiny bubbles in open ocean in one of the eeriest and most beautiful scenes I've ever seen. An adrenaline rush from start to finish.
Yellow Wall (the second time around, when I wasn't seasick): Coming across a flat area of coral formations that seemed to have sea turtles around every corner. Every time I looked up for about 15 minutes there was at least one turtle slowly winging away. Went down to one turtle that had its head stuck in a hole and, at a gentle touch on the shell, it backed out and the two of us inspected each other for several minutes at close range.
Peleliu Pocket: A dive not on any maps I've seen that we hit when the currents were wrong so there were hardly any fish. Which just meant that there was no distraction from the fact that this was the most pristine coral that I've ever seen. So untouched you were able to pretend that you were the first human to ever dive the site.
German Channel: The opposite of pristine coral, but even waiting for the mantas that didn't show up, there's an astonishing number of fish in schools wandering by overhead. The cherry on top of this was the four foot long barracuda chasing a porcupinefish during the safety stop.
I had the mixed blessing of having Blue Corner as my first Palau dive, mixed because there were walls of fish in a stiff current but I was in a state of total sensory overload, along with trying to figure out how to use a reef hook and worrying about why I felt buoyant. (I had foolishly not realized that Palau dive shops use standard 80s, rather than the compact 80s my LDS rents out, so needed an extra 4 pounds to be neutrally buoyant at the end of dives.) I imagine that Blue Corner would make the highlights if I could remember anything specific beyond a kaleidoscope of comically large numbers of fish and sharks... and one napoleon wrasse that seemed the size of a car windshield. (Hooray for animals that prey on crown-of-thorns starfish!)
There were a bunch of other dives that I'm not mentioning, the worst of which was probably at least as good as the best dive I've done on Guam, leaving aside the stuff which I've already ranted about. It was better than I had imagined it after I had been told that Palau has the best diving in the world. Superlatives fail in the face of the reality. The dives as a whole were like dreams of dives, if one had the raw material in their subconscious to assemble dreams that amazing.
