Palau: a scuba diving paradise

I spent a week in 2004 diving around Palau, on a small liveaboard named the Ocean Hunter I.   The Ocean Hunter I was a small motor-sail boat setup specifically for diving.  With just three cabins, there were only six divers on the boat, with a crew of three: the skipper, a dive master, and a cook.  And since the boat was so small, it could get in and around the Rock Islands where bigger liveaboards can’t go.  The diving around Palau was the without question the best diving I ever experienced: 80+ meter visibility, incredible diversity, reefs, walls, blue holes, caves, Palau has it all.  It’s truly a diving paradise.

The crew of the Ocean Hunter I was awesome, and the food was nothing less than excellent!  Entry and exit for dives was easy; directly off the back of the boat.  We typically did two morning dives and two afternoon dives, with some additional dives at select sites.  All the divers were experienced and capable, so our dives were mostly 60 to 70 minutes; sometimes more!  I really had to focus on conserving air diving with these folks!  

I don’t remember the order, but my log book includes dives at: Blue Corner, German Channel, Turtle Wall, Ngedebus Wall, Blue Hole, Jellyfish Lake, Mandarin Lake, Peleliu, and Chandelier Cave.  Blue Corner was epic, and is a ‘reef hook’ dive.  The currents are overwhelming, so you enter upstream and drift down to the dive site, where you hook into the reef using a reef hook.  Once hooked in, you relax and hydroplane the current, and watch the diverse underwater world pass by.  

Jellyfish Lake was interesting.  Normally, jellyfish are a scourge to divers, but the jellyfish in this particular lake have been isolated from the ocean—and their natural predators—for eons.  With no predators, they’ve lost their defensive stingers, so you can dive in and swim amongst them without getting stung.  Very cool, and very amazing creatures.  

Mandarin Lake, as its name implies, is home to mandarin fish.  These are incredibly colorful scale-less fish of the warm water Pacific.  

I enjoy history, and consider myself pretty well read about WWII.  But when we took a land break on the island of Peleliu, within just a few minutes I found evidence—such as the overgrown remains of a crashed US fighter aircraft, and two separate shot-up US landing crafts—of a major WWII battle that I had never heard of.  I asked our boat crew and they said yes, there was a big battle here, but that’s all they knew.  Once I got back home, I started researching.  

I was dumbfounded to discover and read about The Battle of Peleliu.  It turns out that for the US, this was the site of the bloodiest amphibious battle of the Pacific Theater.  Not Tarawa or Guadalcanal, not Iwo Jima or Okinawa, Peleliu was the bloodiest.  The battle raged for over two months with several US Marine and Army units suffering 70% casualty rates!  The losses are almost unimaginable, particularly since Peleliu had no strategic value in the war.  It was defended by an isolated garrison of just 11,000 Japanese troops, with no heavy artillery, no attack aircraft, and no naval attachment.  Why didn’t we just bypass the island, isolate it, and starve the enemy to surrender?  

Instead, nearly 30,000 US troops fought in the battle, supported by five battleships (Pennsylvania, Maryland, Mississippi, Tennessee and Idaho), and 19 aircraft carriers; all part of the 129 ship naval attack force that was supported by 740 other ships.  American military commanders predicted a quick four-day rout, that turned into a two-month fight with horrendous losses on both sides.  The terrain of Peleliu was so formidable that, famously, one Japanese Lieutenant and 34 troops held out in its caves and tunnels until 1947, when they were finally convinced that the war was over.  

All the photos below are mine.  You can Click on any photo to launch a slideshow starting at that point.  The corresponding island-side photos from this trip are on my Travel: Palau & Guam Page.  If you like these UW photos, you might also enjoy my Scuba: Caribbean Page, and my Scuba: Truk Lagoon Page.  I also have a page dedicated to my more comical UW fish photos, which I call my Comic Fish Page.