Truk Lagoon dive trip

[phxazcraig 123]

In March 2023 I went on a Backscatter-sponsored trip to Chuuk/Truk Lagoon for 10 days.   Getting there involved flights from Phoenix, Arizona, to San Francisco, Hawaii, overnight in Guam, and a short flight to Truk.  Note that a typical layover in Guam is more than 12 hours, and if you have a layover more than 12 hours you have to pick up your checked luggage.  (Sigh.)

I stayed at the Wyndham in Guam, and I cannot recommend it.  Incidentally, you are checked at whatever airport takes you to Guam (either direction) for a Covid-19 vaccination card.  If you don't show one at the counter, they don't let you on the plane to Guam.

In Truk I stayed at the Blue Lagoon Resort (BLR), which seems to have the dive traffic locked up other than Liveaboards.   It's a very large operation for Truk, and it seems the only hotel anyway.   It's a bit of a weird experience staying that as it is a very nice resort with some flies in the ointment.   For instance, nice room, but miserable mattress.   Incredibly terrible lighting inside with a single dim bulb on the ceiling and a tableside lamp.   Nice bathroom, mostly no hot water.  (It does get hot, but it doesn't last long as people get up.  Don't count on it.)   There was excellent internet - in the lobby.   But the internet for the rooms was sketchy (in the room) at best, mostly working ok in the middle of the night.   Worked a lot better if you took the laptop outside the front door...    The food:  an impressive and ambitious menu and food that was well-cooked and tasty.  But served with about the worst, most clueless waiters one can imagine.   Your order might be taken a minute after you sit down, or 30 minutes later.  Your food may come out in 10 minutes, or in one case 70 minutes after you order.

But the reason you come here is to dive, and to dive shipwrecks.   I suspect there are wonderful reefs in the area for macro shooting, but all of my dives were on shipwrecks.  Some of those ships had nice soft and hard corals growing on them after 78 years, but I never got to a reef.

The diving here was just completely unlike anything I have ever been exposed to, mainly because all the dives are so deep.   EVERY divemaster I saw carried a full spare tank with him, for extended decompression stops.   ALL the dive boats also hung a full tank, usually Nitrox, on a line under the boat at 20 feet.  MOST of the divers - unlike me - were diving with either dual tanks (plus a spare) or a rebreather (plus a spare tank).   This entire area is set up for hour-plus dives to 100 feet or more with extended deco stops, trimix gasses, spare air bottles, and allowances for divers short on air.  

As a single-tank diver, my dive times were generally around 35 minutes.   As I (and two other single-tank divers with me) had short dives, I also ended waiting on the boat for a while for the other divers to finish.  Typically I would have a 35 minute dive, then sit on the boat for another 90 minutes for the deep divers to get back on the boat.   Eventually we got to the San Fransisco Maru dive (deck at 170 feet), and my BCD (Oceanic Islander) was deemed inadequate to hook a spare tank to.  Something about cloth d-ring loops and the tank getting ripped off it.   So I was sent to another boat with a fairly new diver to do the 'shallow' dives, meaning decks at 100 feet or less.   That turned out to be a great thing as well were able to do our dive then NOT have to wait on the others for 90 minutes.  I talked the other two single-tank divers into joining us for the remainder of the trip, and we were happy about it.

As you might imagine with such long, deep dives, you couldn't get in a bunch of dives in a day.  The entire operation is set up to take people out once in the morning (leave 9am) and once in the afternoon (leave 2pm).   Some of the dives involved long boat rides to and from as well.   And no shore diving here.   The dive shop was very busy before each dive as all the rebreather and nitrox divers (most of us doing one of the other) set up their gear and took nitrox readings.   You get your tank(s), borrow a gas analyzer, measure your nitrox % and write that plus your name on a sticker on the tank.  Somehow the dive operation records each tank of nitrox, and you pay for it at the end of the trip.  No surcharge for air.   The cost wasn't much.  I think it was $8/tank, if I recall correctly.    Rebreather people paid a lot more, particularly for O2 (I think), and some had $1000 bills at the end of the week.

The dive boats were all similar, with no tank holders and dual 40HP Yamaha outboards.  They were minimal and reasonably fast.   Gear sort of under your bench seat.   No room for a spare set of tanks with a full boat, but then the whole operation was designed to come back to port after every dive.

As for the dives, for single-tankers like me, you were limited to about 6-7 ships, and the Betty Bomber.   We had 9 days of diving, and I skipped a couple of afternoon dives due to ear issues.   I dove some of the ships (Fujikawa Maru and Shinkoku Maru) three times each, and others twice.   The deep divers went on more wrecks, but even repeating the same wreck isn't a big deal as it is hard to see everything in one dive.

Incidentally, a couple things about wreck divers surprised me, as I had never done wreck diving before.   First, until relatively recently, there seems to have been a few decades were the prevailing attitude was find-and-plunder a wreck.   That is, if you saw something interesting on a wreck, you just took it with you.   Second, wreck divers seem obsessed with a single goal - get to the engine room.  Much like birders shooting duck photos,  they were very focused on achieving that goal, and they were happy as clams when they did it  (almost every wreck). Me, I liked the corals growing on the ships.

Water visibility was moderate, or a bit less.  Plenty of silt in the water in general, and of course sometimes it got stirred up pretty well inside the wrecks at times.   Water temps were 83-84 mostly, sometimes 81-82.  I took a new 5 mil, and I was never cold.  3 mil would have been good for me - and I get cold very easily.  Air temps typically 77-81F every day, sometimes quite humid, sometimes not.

Here are some photos.  The rest are at my web site at https://www.cjcphoto.net/truk2023.

 

 

 

 

[oneyellowtang 112]

@phxazcraig

Thanks for the write up...

I dove Truk (Chuuk) with my father in 1982. We also stayed at the Blue Lagoon Resort... it was basically the same way ~40 years ago. The only think on the menu that was consistently good was the "catch of the day..."

Back then it was all diving on air - short, deep dives. We did 1 dive a day, and usually 10-15 min stops at ~20ft (they would hang tanks from the boat).

The other big difference was that most of the wrecks had a dozen or so sharks (grey reefies) around them almost all the time. I've heard they are gone now...

Did you get a chance to snorkle right off the beach at the resort? There used to be a broken up pontoon bridge in about 15 feet of water, as well as an old japanese tank. 

Also - I believe the Truk Stop hotel is is still open and operating - lower cost than the BLR, still offering decent service and their own dive operation.
 

Edited April 9 by oneyellowtang

[SwiftFF5 136]

Thanks for this write up @phxazcraig - very good info.  I suspect that Truk isn't for me, based on this.  Just not my style of diving.  I much prefer to take my time, and get lots of bottom time in, even if that means that I stay shallow-ish.  However, there is one wreck off the coast of Tripoli that (for personal reasons) I would really like to dive on.  Unfortunately, it is very deep, so I would have to become certified at tech diving.  So, it will probably not happen, I'm afraid.

[Barmaglot 262]

4 hours ago, SwiftFF5 said:

However, there is one wreck off the coast of Tripoli that (for personal reasons) I would really like to dive on.  Unfortunately, it is very deep, so I would have to become certified at tech diving. 

Would that be HMS Victoria, by any chance? That'd require far more than just tech certification...

[TimG 62]

10 hours ago, SwiftFF5 said:

I suspect that Truk isn't for me, based on this.  Just not my style of diving.  I much prefer to take my time, and get lots of bottom time in, even if that means that I stay shallow-ish

Snap! 

[phxazcraig 123]

Tried a quote, couldn't edit it properly so ...    Anyway - about sharks on the dive.   One wreck, I think it was the Yamagiri Maru, had a reef shark swimming around as we started the dive.  Only one I saw.

Near the BLR was the remains of an old US LST.  Probably broke down during the war and was abandoned on site when the war ended.

The food - perhaps I was misunderstood.  The food was GOOD.   The service was SUSPECT, or TERRIBLE at times.  There were lots of comments about how it would have driven any experienced restaurant manager crazy.   But I enjoyed all my meals.  No complaints about the food, just getting it.

Unfortunately, the museum at the BLR was closed when I was there.  I would have liked to see that.

 

[Architeuthis 179]

Thanks for this interesting report...

 

How did you manage to get 16 photos into a single post? Can you please give the details on how you reduce the data?

 

Wolfgang

 

[phxazcraig 123]

12 hours ago, Architeuthis said:

Thanks for this interesting report...

 

How did you manage to get 16 photos into a single post? Can you please give the details on how you reduce the data?

 

Wolfgang

 

To be honest, I wasn't thinking about limits.  I pulled the images from my web page, as opposed to the source jpgs for the web page, so the size was reduced from the original some.  I think I just selected all at one time, and that's where they ended up.

[SwiftFF5 136]

On 4/8/2023 at 9:15 PM, Barmaglot said:

Would that be HMS Victoria, by any chance? That'd require far more than just tech certification...

 

Sorry, just saw this now, and yes that is the one.  And I do realize that it is very, very deep.  Thanks.  FWIW, my mother was a Tryon.