TWARS (This Week at Reef Seekers) - July 23-30 . . . LIVE FROM YAP (again)

[Ken Kurtis]

LIVE (AGAIN) FROM MANTA RAY BAY IN YAP (please scroll down for details)​

We're just wrapping our week 2 of our 3-week Yap adventure . . . WEATHER HAS NOT BEEN KIND - Lots of rain but more importantly, lots of wind. Normally this time of the year, the winds are calm or non-existent and you can dive pretty much anywhere around Yap. Not so with us. We got two days of good weather and then the deluge started, including one evening with thunder and lightning. Yikes!!! But, we've still been managing to get in three dives each and every day. Not always the dives we'd hoped for, but we're seeing good stuff nonetheless. Water temps on my computer (which might read a tad high) are showing a constant 85 degrees with one shallow site showing 89. Viz is variable based on whether we're in a channel or out on a reef but we've had a number of dives where the viz approached 100 feet. And there are good photo ops as you can see here:​

NICE LITTLE TOUCHES - Yap only re-opened in January and then United reduced air service from two days a week - which in and of itself wasn't adequate - to one day a week. (The good news is United is going back to twice-weekly in early August.) So it means that not many divers have come back to Yap and according to Bill Acker, we're the first large group they've had this year. So there are definitely some gearing-back-up issues but anytime we have a problem, the good folks and staff at Manta Ray Bay find a solution. And we've got a fairly understanding group of divers so they're rolling with the flow. We've got two boats for our group of 9, so it's 5 on one boat and 4 on the other with Bill and I rotating as the extra diver on the boats each day. Their standard package is now three dives/day which includes lunch on the boat and that's been nicer than I thought. It means I haven't gone to my beloved Ganir very much for the Regular Ramen and a Pepsi, but I've made do. (All the lunches are pretty good and filling.) They also hand to you after each dive what is jokingly referred to as a "burrito" which is a hot facecloth wrapped in tinfoil to cleanse your face after the dive. That's been appreciated. And the staff handles all the gear for you, including rinsing your stuff every day after the dives and hanging things back up in the dive locker. WE'VE HAD SUCCESS WITH THE TWO "M"s - Those would be Mantas and Mandarinfish. For a variety of reasons we haven't done that many manta cleaning station dives - and got skunked twice when we did - but we had a really nice encounter with Queenie at the Goofnu station and we followed that up with a good Mandarinfish dive - there are now two Mandarinfish spots where you can be a fish sex voyeur - and you can see the results of those below. (That's Tamar Toister under the manta and a lonely Mandarinfish, looking for love in all the wrong places.)​

MAKING DO WITH MY CAMERA - As you can tell since I'm posting photos daily - checkout the Ken Kurtis FaceBook page if you haven't already - I've been making do with my not-connecting-to-the-cam strobes. We have one more diver coming this week so I had Ikelite ship a new cable to him that he will bring to me. Of course this afternoon after the dives, I started prepping the strobes for the new cable and . . . guess what??? NOW they fire with the old cable. Go figure. But such is the challenge anytime you travel and things go wrong. You learn to deal either by having duplicate/backup gear or getting creative with solutions. And even though it's tougher to shoot with the Sola video lights than with powerful strobes, I seem to b doing OK, including what I will modestly claim to be one of the best Flame Angel shots I've ever taken (they're notoriously skittish and dart around a lot):​

IN CLOSING . . . - that's where things stand as of Sunday night in Yap. (There's a 7-hour time difference between here and L.A. and it's a day earlier in L.A. to boot because of the International Dateline. So I'm actually sending this around 6AM Sunday L.A. time.) The two-weekers have another day of diving and then they'll prep for the journey home, the three-weekers have another nine days to go, our week 1 diver (Lou Weisberg) has already left, and our week 3 diver (Tony Hanna) arrives early Wednesday morning and will start diving with us Wednesday afternoon. Oh yeah: The five days without Internet was interesting but not something we'd like to do again. (Car crash in Guam severed the fiber optic cables that feed Yap and other islands.) We'll give you another update in TWARS next week and hopefully you'll put Yap and Manta Ray Bay on your list of places to come dive. - Ken​