Scuba Jim
Contributor
In Truk, but does Ian's camera work?
Sunday 04 May 2003
So, we had arrived in Truk. As anyone who has been there before will know, Baggage Reclaim at Truk International Airport is an interesting experience. Coolers full of ice and rotting fish drip stinking juices all over your bags, and it is a mad scramble to find your things before they go walkabout. Of course there is also the added joy of worrying if your baggage arrives at all!
But it did, and we cleared customs and pushed through the jostling crowds to find the crew from the Truk Aggressor, which was to be our home for the next week. Safely ensconced on their bus we took the 20 minute pot-holed journey down Truk's Highway 1 (there is only one highway) to the Blue Lagoon Resort, where the boat is moored. A couple of tender rides got us all on board. That's as in rides on a tender, rather than a ride that made you tender. Anyway, 2 more guests were already aboard, having arrived in Truk on Thursday. It was about 10.30pm and they were tucked up in bed. Bless. A few drinks, some snacks etc and we then all retired to our respective cabins for the night.
Monday 05 May - Sunday 11 May 2003
We awoke to find the sun streaming in through the window - yippee! The sun was out! It was a nice day!
So, instead of detailing each ship, here are some pictures, with a little bit of waffle about the image. Saves time and money. Also, I would like to point out for Ed/blacknet's benefit that these are quick, low res scans, no dodging and burning, no touching up to remove backscatter, no readjustments of any kind. Ain't got no time to make them all picture book perfect!
Now, I won't bore you with details of the Truk Aggressor - here's a picture of it. Please note the grey skies. The sun didnt last!
Truk Aggressor II
And here is another from a different angle, me trying to be arty-farty
Truk Aggressor II
I am also not going to bore you with the exact details of each and every ship we doveded on, as that would be tedious and laborious. Anyway, Brian/deepstops has done a report on Truk that gives some excellent details on the wrecks. (Thanks Brian!) Or you can look at my web site! Suffice it to say that Truk has lots of WW2 Japanese freighters in it, sunk in 1944 during Operation Hailstorm. They are full of bullets, shells, guns, trucks, aeroplane parts and all sorts of other stuff. They are all covered in soft corals, sea anemones, sea fans, schools of fish etc. Very pretty. Most are well within sport diving range, though some are considerably deeper (even deeper than Bikini).
This is a gun. Derrr! Sets you in the mood for the ships at Truk. It's on the bow of the Kensho Maru.
Gun.
Apart from one, the destroyer Fumitzuki, the wrecks are all basically freighters and passenger ships converted to war time use. So, no battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers etc. (You have to for the Bikini bit wait for that sort thing!) Also, because Truk is a lagoon with high islands within, as opposed to an atoll like Bikini, the water is much more nutrient rich, and so the wrecks are covered in a very luxurious growth of hard & soft corals, sea fans, anemones, sponges, zigzag clams etc.
Here's another gun, though you would be hard pressed to recognise it, as it is completely covered in soft & hard corals.
Yes, that really is a gun.
Here's a typical bit of wreck structure, including a black lionfish
Corals & stuff.
Soft corals are especially prevalent in Truk, and some are very large; this one quite clearly wants no one else to pass through his doorway!
Get orf moi land...
All this rich reef supports plenty of fish, and on certain wrecks, particularly those closer to more open water, schools of jacks are often seen. This school was on the Fujikawa - you can see Niall, skipper of the Aggressor, swimming below them.
Jacks. Or should that be jaks?
The wrecks make for fabulous silhouette shots, especially such things as masts and king posts. When the water is clear and the sun is out, they look great!
Silhoutte
A deeply religious experience!
The holds of the ships are full of interesting stuff. Some are full of shells, some bullets, some trucks, some guns, but there does seem to be one item that was a lot more popular than any other, and this may help to explain why the Japanese ultimately lost the war. Please see this image to find out
Hic!
I leave you to make your own conclusions!
The Sankisan Maru was blown in half by a torpedo and only the stern section is left. Her holds are littered with millions of bullets, so it may be safe to assume that she was perhaps and ammo ship and the torpedo set of bombs etc in her forward holds. What do I know. Anyway, here are some bullets!
Bullets
The Fujikawa Maru holds contain, amongst other things, the remains of some Zero fighters. This shows the cockpit of one of them.
Zero
The Hoki Maru is a famous wreck in Truk by virtue of the fact that the hold is full of trucks! Plus tractors, bulldozers and the like.
Oi've got a brand new combine 'arvester
And these are the control levers for one of the caterpillar-driven bulldozers
How do I make this thing go backwards?
The Heian Maru was a liner in a previous life, and even has a ballroom. It was used as a submarine tender and contains spare periscopes, torpedos etc. Here is one of the ends of a periscope. You can see where you stick your eyes and the handle on top that they flipped down on either side.
Up periscope
This is the innards of a torpedo. You can see others stacked behind. They had two counter rotating propellers to make them travel in a straighter and truer line
Torpedo
We found this very nice octopus towards the end of this dive, and after much coaxing he vacated his premises to inspect the torch, I mean flashlight. He then went on a walkabout, but I had run out of film by then. Typical!
Gimme that torch,I mean flashlight.
The Nippo Maru has a wonderful 2-man tank on the deck close to one of the forward hatches. The gun barrel has fallen off since I was last there about 15 years ago.
Tank
Behind the bridge superstructure are two fields guns with rubber wheels. Guess who built them? Yup, the French. Seems that selling arms to the enemy is an age-old tradition!!!!
I surrender!
The ships are also full of pottery and glassware, cutlery and all sorts of other stuff that would be needed to run a ship at time of war. People have kindly found things and made little displays of things for you to photograph.
Mess tins, plates, bottles, glasses etc
Who's gonna do the washing up?
More china
There's a fly in my soup
A bottle, a door handle and what looks like the top of a lantern or similar.
Drinking and door knobs dont mix
The stern holds of the Yamagiri contain some nice shells.
Does it look big? Hard to tell, isnt it
That's not a shell
THAT'S a shell
Originally thought to have been 18" shells for the Japanese super battleships Yamato or Musashi, they in fact are 14" shells, so must have been for their older ships such as Kongo or Fuse class ships.
There is a very nice tomato clownfish near the props!
You say tomato, I say Yamato.
There is one other thing on the Yamagiri that is worth mentioning. If you go down towards the engine room and then sneak up through a hole into another room, you will find wedged in what looks like the ceiling (the ship is lying on its side and so it is in fact the wall!) the skull of a Japanese sailor. Clearly he was blown to bits and parts flew in all directions. I have a picture of it, but thought I might offend some people's sensibilities if I posted it. What a thoughtful person I am. PM me if you want to see it!
Now, you may be wondering why I have not shown more pictures of telegraphs, bridges and all that stuff. Well the answer is twofold. Firstly, the weather was not kind to us after day 2, and the clouds were grey and the sun did not get a look-in. Available light was not brilliant down there - the tank shot at 130ft on the Nippo was taken on Velvia (believe it or not!) at f2.8 at 15th of a second - so the conditions were not great for that sort of thing. And secondly, if you have been to Bikini you will know why I've not bothered!!!!
Wrecks are not only great for those who like their ships, but also act as artificial reefs, particularly those that lie away from the shoreline and reef systems. The Shinkoko Maru is a case in point. As a ship she is not that different from say the Nippo or Fujikawa, but as a reef she is surely one of the most beautiful wrecks in the world! Lying upright, she is a typical freighter with a central bridge superstructure and stern structure with funnel. She has a nice infirmary and bow & stern gun. (The gun covered in soft corals at the start of this report is from the Shinkoko. However, she is completely covered in a bewildering array of soft corals, sea fans, whip corals, had corals, sea anemones and a myriad of fish & invertebrates. There are dozens of anemones on the forward section of the boat between the bridge and foc'sle and the whole thing looks like a ship on drugs! The deck lies in 60-70ft of water, so you can make a dive last a long time. A totem pole mast rise forward othe bridge to about 20ft. Shock horror I did 4 dives in one day to make the most of this wreck, including a night dive - the first I have done for almost 3 years! What a brave & fearless chap I am! But it is worth it - Shinkoko Maru is one of the best wrecks I have dived on for wildlife, and the following pictures were all take on her:
A clownfish nestles cosily in his home.
His friend pops round for tea!
What a subtle colour!
Anemone having a bad hair day!
Moving in a bit closer
An array of clownfish at home 1
An array of clownfish at home 2
An array of clownfish at home 3
An array of clownfish at home 4
See-through shrimp
Soft and luxurious. Someone should try and reproduce the feel of an anemone's body - it would make very velvety bed sheets!
Close-up of a feather star
And another
Mr Moray on the foray
The only way is down .
Nice bit of art!
At the end of the week we went at did a shark feed dive. We only had about 10 sharks, but it was an interesting change from bits of metal.
Are you sure we didn't meet in Tahiti?
Now you may be saying to yourself that Ian would be fine; after all, he had his video camera. Well, things were going wrong for poor Ian again. You see, the colour corrective filter that he had in his video housing, which could pushed in front of the camera lens by way of a manual lever, depending on whether you were filming with or without lights. Well, it scratched everytime it was swivelled in front of the camera. "I'm going home. " Oh Gawd, here we go again. Of course, Ian realised that there was only one person to blame for this - and that person was not Ian. Back to being a bear with a sore head. What a misery! Finally Niall managed to cobble together something with a spare filter (right colour correction, wrong size) he had, but Ian seemed eternally ungrateful, and seemed incapable of thanking Niall, which we kindly did on his behalf. Oh, and one of the zips on his dive bag bust on the flight from Honolulu to Truk. Niall mended that too, with some small cable ties. Thanks? Nowhere! But the worst thing of all was that every minute Ian was not in the water he would moan constantly at a nice middle aged couple I had on the boat about all the things that had gone wring on this trip and every other trip I had done. As if they cared! It seemed that Ian was more than an accident waiting to happen - he was actually an accident that happened at regular intervals. But NONE of it was EVER his fault! Oh no!
Anyway, on Saturday afternoon we trotted back to port, and had a bit of a knees up on Saturday night before disembarking on Sunday morning. We spent the rest of the day and that night in the Blue Lagoon Resort, which is about as long as you would want to stay at the BLR, to be honest, as it is a pretty non atmospheric place, despite the location on a little headland with a nice beach. To make matters worse, I had come down with some kind of bug, and felt like ****. Also, my neck, which has caused me on going problems for 15 years, was causing me some amount of pain. (Go on, get the violins out you lot!)
Late on Saturday night the other 3 people who were only doing the Truk section of the trip headed off to the airport for their 0230 in the morning (nice!) flight to Guam. Poor old Mark then had a continuous journey from Guam to Honolulu to Houston to Orlando before returning to Haiti. The others had a stopover in Honolulu, which helped!
Well, despite the weather being 65% bad and only 35% good, we had a great time in Truk. The boat was great, the food on board was superb, the crew were all top notch and the beer was included in the price! The diving is spectacular, especially if you like a combination of great wrecks, interesting artefacts and out of this world marine life. Would I recommend it? Yes, but if you don't like wrecks, don't bother!
The Next Installment:
Go east, young man! (After all that's where the Marshall Islands are!)
Sunday 04 May 2003
So, we had arrived in Truk. As anyone who has been there before will know, Baggage Reclaim at Truk International Airport is an interesting experience. Coolers full of ice and rotting fish drip stinking juices all over your bags, and it is a mad scramble to find your things before they go walkabout. Of course there is also the added joy of worrying if your baggage arrives at all!
But it did, and we cleared customs and pushed through the jostling crowds to find the crew from the Truk Aggressor, which was to be our home for the next week. Safely ensconced on their bus we took the 20 minute pot-holed journey down Truk's Highway 1 (there is only one highway) to the Blue Lagoon Resort, where the boat is moored. A couple of tender rides got us all on board. That's as in rides on a tender, rather than a ride that made you tender. Anyway, 2 more guests were already aboard, having arrived in Truk on Thursday. It was about 10.30pm and they were tucked up in bed. Bless. A few drinks, some snacks etc and we then all retired to our respective cabins for the night.
Monday 05 May - Sunday 11 May 2003
We awoke to find the sun streaming in through the window - yippee! The sun was out! It was a nice day!
So, instead of detailing each ship, here are some pictures, with a little bit of waffle about the image. Saves time and money. Also, I would like to point out for Ed/blacknet's benefit that these are quick, low res scans, no dodging and burning, no touching up to remove backscatter, no readjustments of any kind. Ain't got no time to make them all picture book perfect!
Now, I won't bore you with details of the Truk Aggressor - here's a picture of it. Please note the grey skies. The sun didnt last!
Truk Aggressor II
And here is another from a different angle, me trying to be arty-farty
Truk Aggressor II
I am also not going to bore you with the exact details of each and every ship we doveded on, as that would be tedious and laborious. Anyway, Brian/deepstops has done a report on Truk that gives some excellent details on the wrecks. (Thanks Brian!) Or you can look at my web site! Suffice it to say that Truk has lots of WW2 Japanese freighters in it, sunk in 1944 during Operation Hailstorm. They are full of bullets, shells, guns, trucks, aeroplane parts and all sorts of other stuff. They are all covered in soft corals, sea anemones, sea fans, schools of fish etc. Very pretty. Most are well within sport diving range, though some are considerably deeper (even deeper than Bikini).
This is a gun. Derrr! Sets you in the mood for the ships at Truk. It's on the bow of the Kensho Maru.
Gun.
Apart from one, the destroyer Fumitzuki, the wrecks are all basically freighters and passenger ships converted to war time use. So, no battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers etc. (You have to for the Bikini bit wait for that sort thing!) Also, because Truk is a lagoon with high islands within, as opposed to an atoll like Bikini, the water is much more nutrient rich, and so the wrecks are covered in a very luxurious growth of hard & soft corals, sea fans, anemones, sponges, zigzag clams etc.
Here's another gun, though you would be hard pressed to recognise it, as it is completely covered in soft & hard corals.
Yes, that really is a gun.
Here's a typical bit of wreck structure, including a black lionfish
Corals & stuff.
Soft corals are especially prevalent in Truk, and some are very large; this one quite clearly wants no one else to pass through his doorway!
Get orf moi land...
All this rich reef supports plenty of fish, and on certain wrecks, particularly those closer to more open water, schools of jacks are often seen. This school was on the Fujikawa - you can see Niall, skipper of the Aggressor, swimming below them.
Jacks. Or should that be jaks?
The wrecks make for fabulous silhouette shots, especially such things as masts and king posts. When the water is clear and the sun is out, they look great!
Silhoutte
A deeply religious experience!
The holds of the ships are full of interesting stuff. Some are full of shells, some bullets, some trucks, some guns, but there does seem to be one item that was a lot more popular than any other, and this may help to explain why the Japanese ultimately lost the war. Please see this image to find out
Hic!
I leave you to make your own conclusions!
The Sankisan Maru was blown in half by a torpedo and only the stern section is left. Her holds are littered with millions of bullets, so it may be safe to assume that she was perhaps and ammo ship and the torpedo set of bombs etc in her forward holds. What do I know. Anyway, here are some bullets!
Bullets
The Fujikawa Maru holds contain, amongst other things, the remains of some Zero fighters. This shows the cockpit of one of them.
Zero
The Hoki Maru is a famous wreck in Truk by virtue of the fact that the hold is full of trucks! Plus tractors, bulldozers and the like.
Oi've got a brand new combine 'arvester
And these are the control levers for one of the caterpillar-driven bulldozers
How do I make this thing go backwards?
The Heian Maru was a liner in a previous life, and even has a ballroom. It was used as a submarine tender and contains spare periscopes, torpedos etc. Here is one of the ends of a periscope. You can see where you stick your eyes and the handle on top that they flipped down on either side.
Up periscope
This is the innards of a torpedo. You can see others stacked behind. They had two counter rotating propellers to make them travel in a straighter and truer line
Torpedo
We found this very nice octopus towards the end of this dive, and after much coaxing he vacated his premises to inspect the torch, I mean flashlight. He then went on a walkabout, but I had run out of film by then. Typical!
Gimme that torch,I mean flashlight.
The Nippo Maru has a wonderful 2-man tank on the deck close to one of the forward hatches. The gun barrel has fallen off since I was last there about 15 years ago.
Tank
Behind the bridge superstructure are two fields guns with rubber wheels. Guess who built them? Yup, the French. Seems that selling arms to the enemy is an age-old tradition!!!!
I surrender!
The ships are also full of pottery and glassware, cutlery and all sorts of other stuff that would be needed to run a ship at time of war. People have kindly found things and made little displays of things for you to photograph.
Mess tins, plates, bottles, glasses etc
Who's gonna do the washing up?
More china
There's a fly in my soup
A bottle, a door handle and what looks like the top of a lantern or similar.
Drinking and door knobs dont mix
The stern holds of the Yamagiri contain some nice shells.
Does it look big? Hard to tell, isnt it
That's not a shell
THAT'S a shell
Originally thought to have been 18" shells for the Japanese super battleships Yamato or Musashi, they in fact are 14" shells, so must have been for their older ships such as Kongo or Fuse class ships.
There is a very nice tomato clownfish near the props!
You say tomato, I say Yamato.
There is one other thing on the Yamagiri that is worth mentioning. If you go down towards the engine room and then sneak up through a hole into another room, you will find wedged in what looks like the ceiling (the ship is lying on its side and so it is in fact the wall!) the skull of a Japanese sailor. Clearly he was blown to bits and parts flew in all directions. I have a picture of it, but thought I might offend some people's sensibilities if I posted it. What a thoughtful person I am. PM me if you want to see it!
Now, you may be wondering why I have not shown more pictures of telegraphs, bridges and all that stuff. Well the answer is twofold. Firstly, the weather was not kind to us after day 2, and the clouds were grey and the sun did not get a look-in. Available light was not brilliant down there - the tank shot at 130ft on the Nippo was taken on Velvia (believe it or not!) at f2.8 at 15th of a second - so the conditions were not great for that sort of thing. And secondly, if you have been to Bikini you will know why I've not bothered!!!!
Wrecks are not only great for those who like their ships, but also act as artificial reefs, particularly those that lie away from the shoreline and reef systems. The Shinkoko Maru is a case in point. As a ship she is not that different from say the Nippo or Fujikawa, but as a reef she is surely one of the most beautiful wrecks in the world! Lying upright, she is a typical freighter with a central bridge superstructure and stern structure with funnel. She has a nice infirmary and bow & stern gun. (The gun covered in soft corals at the start of this report is from the Shinkoko. However, she is completely covered in a bewildering array of soft corals, sea fans, whip corals, had corals, sea anemones and a myriad of fish & invertebrates. There are dozens of anemones on the forward section of the boat between the bridge and foc'sle and the whole thing looks like a ship on drugs! The deck lies in 60-70ft of water, so you can make a dive last a long time. A totem pole mast rise forward othe bridge to about 20ft. Shock horror I did 4 dives in one day to make the most of this wreck, including a night dive - the first I have done for almost 3 years! What a brave & fearless chap I am! But it is worth it - Shinkoko Maru is one of the best wrecks I have dived on for wildlife, and the following pictures were all take on her:
A clownfish nestles cosily in his home.
His friend pops round for tea!
What a subtle colour!
Anemone having a bad hair day!
Moving in a bit closer
An array of clownfish at home 1
An array of clownfish at home 2
An array of clownfish at home 3
An array of clownfish at home 4
See-through shrimp
Soft and luxurious. Someone should try and reproduce the feel of an anemone's body - it would make very velvety bed sheets!
Close-up of a feather star
And another
Mr Moray on the foray
The only way is down .
Nice bit of art!
At the end of the week we went at did a shark feed dive. We only had about 10 sharks, but it was an interesting change from bits of metal.
Are you sure we didn't meet in Tahiti?
Now you may be saying to yourself that Ian would be fine; after all, he had his video camera. Well, things were going wrong for poor Ian again. You see, the colour corrective filter that he had in his video housing, which could pushed in front of the camera lens by way of a manual lever, depending on whether you were filming with or without lights. Well, it scratched everytime it was swivelled in front of the camera. "I'm going home. " Oh Gawd, here we go again. Of course, Ian realised that there was only one person to blame for this - and that person was not Ian. Back to being a bear with a sore head. What a misery! Finally Niall managed to cobble together something with a spare filter (right colour correction, wrong size) he had, but Ian seemed eternally ungrateful, and seemed incapable of thanking Niall, which we kindly did on his behalf. Oh, and one of the zips on his dive bag bust on the flight from Honolulu to Truk. Niall mended that too, with some small cable ties. Thanks? Nowhere! But the worst thing of all was that every minute Ian was not in the water he would moan constantly at a nice middle aged couple I had on the boat about all the things that had gone wring on this trip and every other trip I had done. As if they cared! It seemed that Ian was more than an accident waiting to happen - he was actually an accident that happened at regular intervals. But NONE of it was EVER his fault! Oh no!
Anyway, on Saturday afternoon we trotted back to port, and had a bit of a knees up on Saturday night before disembarking on Sunday morning. We spent the rest of the day and that night in the Blue Lagoon Resort, which is about as long as you would want to stay at the BLR, to be honest, as it is a pretty non atmospheric place, despite the location on a little headland with a nice beach. To make matters worse, I had come down with some kind of bug, and felt like ****. Also, my neck, which has caused me on going problems for 15 years, was causing me some amount of pain. (Go on, get the violins out you lot!)
Late on Saturday night the other 3 people who were only doing the Truk section of the trip headed off to the airport for their 0230 in the morning (nice!) flight to Guam. Poor old Mark then had a continuous journey from Guam to Honolulu to Houston to Orlando before returning to Haiti. The others had a stopover in Honolulu, which helped!
Well, despite the weather being 65% bad and only 35% good, we had a great time in Truk. The boat was great, the food on board was superb, the crew were all top notch and the beer was included in the price! The diving is spectacular, especially if you like a combination of great wrecks, interesting artefacts and out of this world marine life. Would I recommend it? Yes, but if you don't like wrecks, don't bother!
The Next Installment:
Go east, young man! (After all that's where the Marshall Islands are!)
