Devilfish City

On Saturday, I went diving with a group of local friends. During frisbee last week three or four expressed interested in diving, so we arranged with Keith to go diving on Saturday. Joining me was Ryan Kregenow, Sarah from the Peace Corps, and two local dentists Dave and Jirka (which is half of all the dentists in Palau). We were also joined by a visiting peace corp worker and his girlfriend and a visiting socioeconomic researcher, both of whom knew Sarah, who had originally put them in contact with Keith. Having a boat full of people you know is much more fun than a boat of strangers.

Our destination for diving was in a different neighborhood than before. Nearly all of Palau's dive sites are located in the southwest portion of the island chain. Today we decided to try something new and headed to the northwest to the reefs off the coast of Ngardmau in the upper portion of Babeldaob. The boat ride is equidistant to the ride to Blue Corner, we just headed north this time. We rode through the channel on the west side just as I had done the week before when going to Kayangel. The wind was blowing a bit causing a little more chop, but the large land mass of Babeldaob sheltered us from any large waves. There are no assigned seats on the dive boats, so people always move around a lot. I chatted with Sarah for a while and then with Keith about frisbee. Everyone is progressing so well with the basic skills of ultimate in our normal pick-ups games that we might actually try to learn the proper positions and play the real rules.

Our first dive site was Devilfish City. An imposing name for an inauspicious terrain because the only noteworthy thing about the site is the possibility of seeing manta rays at two cleaning stations. I haven't had much luck seeing mantas while diving and summer is not the season to see them, but we were willing to give it a try and hopefully get lucky. We descended to about 65 feet and swam along the coral for a short while until we reached the first cleaning station. We stopped and waited, working on our neutral buoyancy. A wait like that gets boring fast and people began exploring the nearby coral. With no mantas appearing we swam on to the next station, bottoming out around 80 feet. Keith was right, there was not many fish and the coral was not that exciting. At the second cleaning station again there was no mantas. The dives in Palau are always so great that you just expect to see amazing things every time you dive, but there are times when nothing too exciting happens. We ascended and boarded the boat for a lunch break.

There are few regular dive sites in that neighborhood, so for our afternoon dive we did an exploratory dive along a coral shelf that Keith had not visited before. While he had dove nearby sites, this was a first for him. The coral in the area we were in suffered bad bleaching during El Nino in the late 1990s. Only recently has it come back and Keith was interested in seeing how it was progressing. This was a much different dive than the morning because we covered a lot more territory. We swam alongside the coral observing it while following the current. The coral has come back and while I could tell it was still recovering it was much better than the coral we had seen in the morning. The fish were not very plentiful, but we saw some parrotfish and trevally. Keith put his safety sausage up to allow for our boat driver to follow our progress since we were not following a set path. The extra drag kept him in the middle of the pack while Jirka became the leader. We all meandered along stopping when something caught our eye. At the end of the dive we found a green turtle laying on a sandy spot next the coral. Everyone got to circle around and got an extended look as the turtle didn't move. As we began to move on the turtle became startled and swam away. In my opinion, any day of diving that includes a turtle sighting is a good day of diving. We hit 65 feet on this dive, but at the end we swam up over the top of the reef and spent the last portion of dive at only 20 feet. Both dives we stayed down a long time, roughly an hour a piece. We surfaced and boarded the boat. The trip home was pretty smooth and much drier than the week before. Back at the dock we helped Keith unload the gear before heading home. Diving is always exhausting and I spent the night at home before turning in early.