The internet was pretty bad there, so this is a repost of some stuff, mostly during the trip. It will be a while until I have the rest of the photos done, since I am off again shortly to California.


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Hello all, a quick hello and update from Truk Lagoon. We were aboard the Truk Odyssey for the last week without any internet (oh the horror!) but as of today we are at Truk Stop resort. The connection here is wireless (I did not expect this) so things are returning to their natural order.

The heat and humidity is pretty high, being only 7 degrees off the equator. However, the diving this week has been fantastic. The visibility however, is really only moderate, but there is a ton to see. I don't have time much for more right now, as we are over the international date line (we are 15 hours ahead - it is Sunday morning right now. Getting ready for a dive briefing shortly.

I will leave you with a few images from the first week. When I have time I will post a more detailed report.











The diving these past couple of weeks has been nothing short of spectacular. If anyone is considering a trip here, I would highly recommend it. There is tons of marine life in addition to the history behind the dozens of wrecks that are scattered about the lagoon. Some are yet to be discovered still. However, with the warm salt water and the multitude of divers that visit the area each year, the wreck has been deteriorating significantly, even in the past few years.

There is diving for both technical and recreational divers on most of the wrecks. Most wrecks start in the 60-70 ft range and bottom out just at the limit of recreation range. However, due to the size of the wrecks, technical decompression dives are your best bet to see much of what the wrecks have to offer. There are other wrecks which are technical range only as well. We did a 200 ft dive on the Aikoku Maru this morning on trimix. This seems to be the exception, though, as most of the wrecks we have dove have plenty to see in the recreational range. Many of the ships are designated "Maru", which is a merchant ship carrying supplies. Because these are not meant to be in battle, they were only outfitted with basic weapons and were ill equipped to defend themselves under attack.

Here are a few more pics from this week.

This is called the "wine cellar", which is in a cargo hold of a merchant ship. The bottles are cases of Sake, which are also littered around other areas of this wreck.



This is a deck gun of the Aikoku Maru, which sits at around 160 ft. The wreck was sunk in full battle as you can see the deck gun pointed upwards.



Orange cup anemone, super macro at 2x



Unexploded 14" diameter bombs. It was a little unnerving diving around unexploded munitions. Some wrecks had chordite everywhere.



My favourite anemone fish so far



The diving around here really lends itself primarily to wide angle photography. Most of the warm water trips I have done I have pretty well balanced out the shooting between macro and wide angle, but with all the wrecks and the history behind them, I've been shooting primarily wide angle on the majority of the dives. At the time of the battle which resulted in many of the sinkings (operation Hailstone) the configuration of many of these merchant ships (maru) were very similar. As we dive the wrecks from day to day, many of them seem very similar, but each wreck seems to hold something unique and different, despite their apparent similarities.

The visibility on the wrecks varies. The shallower stuff (to about 100 ft) had viz that varies, but has been mostly around 40-50 ft. Pretty good by our standards, but apparently not the best by Truk standards, The deeper stuff (150ft+) has been considerably better with about 80-100 ft. This makes for better photography and video, but as we all know, with the deeper stuff, there's going to be less time.

We've been mostly doing only 2 dives a day, starting with a deep dive (down to around the 200 ft level) with runtimes in the 2 to 3 hour range depending on your bottom times, then taking 3 hour surface intervals, then doing a shallower dive in the 100-120 ft range max. And by the time we are done, it's late afternoon and while we can do night dives, it is less convenient from the resort. I did night dives every night from the liveaboard last week as it was easy to do.

The state of Chuuk (the name "Truk" is likely a mispronounciation that somehow stuck along the way) is pretty impoverished. People have very little here and the resort itself is almost like an island of luxury compared to the rest of Chuuk. Families are living in small concrete homes with no electricity and running water. Sometimes 15 to a small house smaller than a typical condo. Alcoholism is running rampant and the education system is next to non-existent, were it not for the charity of various groups like the Jesuits who have taken over an old Japanese communications base and converted it into a private school. The government is totally corrupt. There was an attempt to clean things up a while back, which resulted in several high ranking government officials including a superior court magistrate being convicted of various crimes including murder. If you can believe how corrupt it is, the convicted magistrate appealed his sentence to allow for him to be free in the mornings to try cases at court and go back to jail for the rest of the day, Stuff we could not even imagine would happen at home.

Given all this, I am surprised that the internet connection here works as well as it does. It has been spotty, but I've been managing to get through periodically.

Anyhow, here are a few more pictures from our dives.

The next three pictures are from the wreck of the San Francisco Maru. This is a wreck that sits about 210 ft to the silt. Here we have one of the cargo holds showing a wall of undetonated land mines. The cargo holds go down to 200+ ft. These sit roughly about 180 ft at this point.

Here is an old fire engine being transported in an adjacent cargo hold to the mines.



Down the wreck a bit in another cargo hold is a whole load of ammunition, I'm no expert on what type of ammo this is, but you can see boxes and boxes of the stuff, with loose rounds lying everywhere. There must be in the the order of millions of rounds sitting in the hold.



Here is a portable deck gun we saw on another wreck. The divemaster said it might be a howitzer, but I'm not sure about that.



We dove a bomber of some sort (B1??) this afternoon. Here is a top down view of the plane.



And inside the fuselage. Inside a lot of these wreck and cargo holds are all sorts of baitfish just hiding out. So much you can't even scare them off to get a clear picture most times.



And of course some requisite fish pictures. Pacific marine life is new to me so I don't know all the names. The las one, of course is another clown fish.





Here are a few more shots from the San Fransisco. The first is of some old cars that were being transported. The hold area here was pretty tight so the fisheye lens was really the only lens that could have taken this shot.

Here is a level of a cargo hold with bombs scattered all over the place. You can see square ends of the bombs with the four fins. Kind of scary swimming around in the holds with these things beneath. There wasn't a lot of room from the ceiling of the hold to the bombs.



The next photo shows some longish crates of something. Not sure what might be in them, but there are some depth charges in the pile. The round objects just beneath the square crates.



This shot is on the deck of the San Fransisco (approx 165 ft), showing one of the tanks. It is a similar shot to the cover of Dan Bailey's book. Same tank, similar angle.



And of course some pretty reef fish, all in the shallows.

Don't know who this guy is.



Don't know this guy either.



These are domino damsel fish. They are everywhere living in these coral formations. They hide inside the coral when they get scared and slowly come back out.

Great stuff Warren! keep it coming.

Now..that's what I called a dream destination. Awesome write-up and pictures on Truk, Warren.

How many dives was done over your trip?

Great shots.
I had been thinking about going there but I talked to some people and they said it was not advisable to go ashore. Now I like to wander around after a hard days diving and check out the local watering holes. Apparently this is not a good idea?

Oh well back to Palau I guess.

Wow nice pics Warren.

On my list of places to go.
Wonder if I can talk a producer on shooting a HD doco on them.

Thanks! I think I did a total of about 28 dives over 2 weeks of diving. Mostly 2 a day and the occasional night dive. We were all on CCRs, which shortened up our deco time versus open circuit. A Lot of the wrecks were fairly deep, so our profiles ran about 30 minutes of bottom time at around 180 - 200 feet for the deeper ones.



We were warned about traveling about the island at night, and especially alone. We were able to travel about during the day to short distances from the resort without any issues. The locals seemed really friendly, so we had no issues. We took an island tour through a contact of the resort owner, so we were comfortable there wasn't going to be any issues. I was lucky enough to have several police officers in the group of divers we traveled with, so if there was any trouble, we had some decent muscle in the group - but it was pretty uneventful from that perspective. Being on a liveaboard the first week, there was no going ashore until the second week when we were at the resort. On the liveaboard they had a night watchman as it wasn't uncommon for the boat to be boarded at night by the locals to take stuff, but we had no issues here too.