Panaga Divers - Trip to Truk Lagoon 2005
Dale Chenery, Al Findlay, John Elder and Ian Jones (Piasau Boat Club) would like to thank Dave Outhwaite for suggesting the trip, and subsequently organising it. What a fantastic experience!
Panaga Divers first visited Truk Lagoon in 1992, and then again in 1994. Now known as Chuuk, the capitol of Chuuk State in the Federated States of Micronesia, Truk Lagoon is home to 60 or more Japanese shipwrecks that were sunk by the Americans 61 years ago. The Panaga Divers Truk Trip of 1994 (right) |
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Chuuk, only 2,500 miles from Bandar, takes four flights and 41 hours to reach!
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Truk Lagoon is THE world class wreck site. It's not as deep as you think,
although it can be if you want. Look at the 30 dives we did in eight days.
Only five were deeper than 40 metres. Mind you, we were on a four dive per
day schedule.
The whole story, not just of our trip, but the tragedy of Truk Lagoon, touched us all. It is a world class wreck site, an underwater museum, but also, it is the final resting place for many hundreds of people. It was satisfying to note that in the 11 years since my last visit to Truk, there had been no obvious pillaging of the wrecks. |
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Below is your webmaster's account of the trip. It's my views and interpretation only, however, I think we were all agreed that we enjoyed one of the best diving experiences of our lives.
It
all started at 6 am on Saturday 5th February, when Al Findlay and Dale
Chenery picked me up. After a very dry month, we had just had a cloud-burst with
10 cm of rain in two hours. This had the interesting effect of fusing half the
lights in the house, however, I had already packed and it didn’t affect our
trip to Piasau Camp (Miri) where we joined Dave Outhwaite and Ian Jones at
Ian’s house. Two taxis were booked to take us to the airport and there
followed a long-winded, but uneventful three flight trip via Kota Kinabalu and
Manila, to Guam. Security was stringent, but not a problem at the latter two
locations, so we gratefully recovered our bags and took a taxi to the, let’s
say, basic Harmon Loop Hotel; well what can you expect for GBP 20 / night;
certainly not food as it happened. We tried a bar nearby which seemed to be
about a hectare in extent, filled with deafening music and rejects from the cast
of Terminator 2. We left after a few beers.
Guam (US territory) is very American and famously has no birds since they have all been eaten by the imported brown tree snake. We hung around a mall until we released that this was an illegal activity, so we just killed time until our evening flight into Truk, or Chuuk as it has been called since independence from the US. Packed mainly with divers, the 737 landed at Truk at 9.30 pm. At Truk we met the first only really bad queue of the entire trip as two custom officers, not to be rushed in the execution of their duties, laboriously studied our return tickets and immigration forms. After the baggage reclaim free-for-all, we were driven over appallingly bumpy roads for 30 minutes through a landscape of decay and lethargy that fortunately was barely visible in the gloom. The 100 divers split into four groups, those staying onshore at Blue Lagoon Diving, and those joining the rival liveaboards ‘Odyssey’, ‘Truk Aggressor’ and ‘S.S. Thorfinn’. S.S. indeed, for Thorfinn really is a steam-ship, a converted ex-Norwegian whaler of 1,100 tons. The steam engine itself weighs as much as the other liveaboards.
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S.S. Thorfinn (1951) rides bow light, since the bunkers are rather low on fuel. |
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The
other two vessels were right beside the jetty, however, Thorfinn was
‘somewhere over there’ a brown-skinned Micronesian indicated vaguely. Our
tender was aground, so having loaded it, we then unloaded it, pushed the boat
off, and re-loaded it. We headed into the darkness, a stiff breeze whipping salt
spray across the passengers, a feature of these vessels that we would come to
hate. After 15 minutes of this, we
came alongside the huge vessel that was to be home for the next eight days. It
was 11.30 pm, some 41 hours after leaving Panaga and we were tired. The only
other two divers on board, an older American couple, had travelled from
Anchorage, Alaska in 28 hours!! After this slightly inauspicious start, we were
greeted by the legendary Captain Lance Higgs, 60-something Canadian. Ex-tug boat
skipper, ex-diver, ex-salvage boss; a man with more stories about Truk than
anybody else, he lifted the atmosphere immediately, and in the comfort of the
well-appointed saloon, he tried to brief us on safety, accommodation and diving,
but typically wandered off onto stories of the shipwrecks that we'd soon be
diving.
For
a capacity of 22 divers, Thorfinn only had the seven of us, so luxury of luxury,
we had individual cabins!
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History
of Truk:
Truk is one of the largest of many coral atolls that lie in the west Pacific.
Its potential as a safe haven was not lost on the Japanese, even as early as the
1930’s, and they occupied the Lagoon. Conditions were authoritarian, however,
the islands were cultivated properly for the first time in their history, and
the Japanese showed the Trukese how to live beyond subsistence. The aircraft
carriers that launched the assault on Pearl Harbour in 1941 came from Truk. Once
the Americans had regrouped and started the painful slog back across the Pacific
to Japan, they had to take out Truk as a strategic base. Early in 1944, an
American reconnaissance plane was spotted by the Japs, and they had time to
evacuate the fast warships, however, the slower merchant vessels were condemned
to stay in Truk for they dared not run the gauntlet of the encircling
submarines. During February 1944, the Americans obliterated the Japanese
merchant fleet in one of their most successful attacks of the war.
From that moment, Truk falls out of history. For the Japanese survivors, there would be no rescue, so they intermarried with the Trukese and settled back to subsistence living. After the war, US aid reached the island that was now US territory, however, the money went to the administrators and not to the islanders.
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Against
this sad story, and history of death and destruction, the Lagoon appears to be a
tropical paradise. One can well believe this from the safety of the ship and
certainly, Truk is a wreck diver’s dream. The water has virtually no current,
is 29o C all year round with visibility sometimes exceeding 40
metres. I
slept badly the first night. I was tired from the inactivity of the journey and
absolutely dying to start diving. This we did at 8am the following day. Lance
operates a five dive a day schedule, although four was enough for most divers.
You have a cooked breakfast, dive at 8am, snack, dive at 11am, cooked lunch,
dive at 2pm, snack, dive at 5pm and then an excellent cooked dinner. A night
dive was on offer at 8pm, although the opportunity was only taken once. It seems
to be a punishing schedule, however, Lance operates a unique system of safety
stops. Two minutes at 18 metres, three minutes at 9 metres and then 10 minutes
at 6 – 4 metres, must be carried out on each dive. It’s all based on the
elimination of micro-bubbles, and Lance has an impressive track record to back
it up. After four dives, even in such balmy conditions, one gets chilled,
however, the top deck Jacuzzi takes care of that!! I’ve not known such luxury
on a dive boat before. Our
first dive may actually have been our second best dive of the trip. The Fujikawa
Maru (all Japanese merchant ships are Maru’s), widely reputed to be one of the
best wrecks in the world, lived up to its reputation. Stunning 30+ metre vis.,
on this upright, intact wreck that one could see from the surface. Masts rising
to 9 metres enlivened the safety stops. Subsequently, the best dive of the trip
was also on this wreck but approaching dusk. We saw dolphins, sharks, rays,
barracuda and huge tuna all on one dive. It was hugely atmospheric as the sun
began to set.
I used a wide-angle lens, without which it is hard to convey the
correct impression of the wrecks. Between dives we filled in our logs and edited
pictures. The ‘ethnic repartee’ each morning between Ian and Dave got to
such a pitch that the crew turned out to listen to us. |
S.S.
Thorfinn is very much the ‘mother craft’ with small, twin-engined aluminium
dories to ferry divers to the wrecks. These dories were frankly unsuitable as
dive tenders. The Lagoon is afflicted by a short, sharp chop raised by the
persistent trade winds and the dories would slam into every wave, jarring and
soaking the boat occupants. At least towels were provided to deflect the worst
of the spray. Towards the end of the week, we started to chose the closer wrecks
rather than suffer the hammering of the dories. Their engines were pretty
unreliable and worn as well. Normally, part of each trip was made on one engine with the
crew valiantly pulling the start cord of the port motor whilst in gear. Whether
this was designed to start the engine or to provide extra thrust was not always
clear. That said, the dive guide and his crew demonstrated an amazing ability to
find most (although not all) of the wrecks by memorised transits. The crew’s
nonchalance as he dropped over the side of the boat with just a mask and the
boat’s line to tie onto a submerge buoy about eight metres down was
impressive. Lance explained that his company has received a large grant of
somewhere around US$ one million for the re-furbishment of the ship, welding
some hull plates and providing purpose built RIBs for the divers. None of us
will be sad to see the last of those wretched dories.
There
appears to be quite some professional rivalry between the liveaboards, and I can
imagine that the skippers of the ‘Odyssey’ and ‘Truk Aggressor’ were as
scathing as Lance was about them. However, it is true that Lance’s policy of
mooring the ship remote from the wrecks cannot damage them, whereas the ‘Truk
Aggressor’ has definitely damaged the wrecks in the past by anchoring into
them. The superstructure of the ‘Fumizuki’ was dragged off in the early
1990’s by incautious anchoring. The lack of the Maru indicates that the
‘Fumizuki’ is one of the few naval vessels that failed to escape from the
lagoon.
We
dived ships upright, on their side and one famous tanker quite upside down.
Sharks were seen quite often, as were rays and barracuda. The dolphins were a
bit of a ‘one off’ although we heard them the next evening as well.
Visibility varied from 8 to 35+ metres averaging about 23 metres. The sea
remained constant at 29o C. Notably less humid than Brunei, the
weather was much the same with fierce sunshine interrupted by fierce rain. The
S.S. Thorfinn proved itself to be an extremely comfortable base, although the
same could not be said of the dories. Nitrox was available, but only to advance
order and then only to low percentage mixes (<= 36%); no use as a
decompression gas. Topping up Nitrox tanks with air was unsuccessful as the
system allowed Nitrox to mix with the residue in other tanks. Potentially a very
serious mistake when some divers were reaching 65 metres on air. Here, however,
I should dispel the notion that Truk is for deep divers. Certainly, you can dive
to 65 metres and there are many dives around 50 metres, however, the ‘Fujikawa
Maru’ lies in 35 metres. I would say that experience with depths over 40
metres would allow a diver to sample 90% of what is on offer.
Lance,
his friendly crew, his amazing stories will be missed by us all. We had the
chance to see the steam engine in action mid-way through the trip, and what a
rare sight that is these days. People would pay money just to see it. In many
ways the engine was not just the soul of the Thorfinn, but the soul of Captain
Lance as well.
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We left the Thorfinn on Monday at 2 pm to spend the mandatory 24 hours de-bubbling at the Intercontinental Hotel where the Blue Lagoon operates. I’ll not give a detailed description of the return journey except that it went well, in that it was uneventful and our baggage made it along with us. That’s the best that can be said of air travel these days. We left the Thorfinn at 2pm on a Monday and arrived back in KB at 7am on the Thursday. So,
would we go again? I first went in 1994, and the memories must have been
so vivid that I clearly remembered many details of that first trip. I
doubt if I’d go next year, that would be too soon. I’d certainly like
to try one of the ‘Truk Aggressor’s’ deep weeks. Gradvin Aisek (Kimiuo's son - 1994), Manager of Blue Lagoon, and expert Divemaster. |
The sun sets over one of the world's largest coral atolls - a deceptive paradise
Many thanks once again to Dave Outhwaite who suggested the trip, and organised the whole thing. If you want to visit Truk and stay on Thorfinn then contact
Maricar
Pelingon
Shoreside Booking Office
Seaward Holidays Micronesia, Inc.
Operator of Truk Lagoon's S.S Thorfinn
Tel./Fax Nos.: (691) 330-3040/4253
Ship's Mobile Nos.: (691) 930-1274/76
Website: www.thorfinn.net
