10/20/12
It is sad to say but today was our last day of diving. It is amazing how fast time passes when you are on vacation. We met up at the boat at 7:55 a.m. to get an early start to head out to Ulong Channel again. I was hoping the visibility and current would be good again so I could get some video here after the mishap with the camera. Unfortunately, the visibility was not as good and the sharks were not hanging out where they were last time. Instead of drifting down the channel, we criss-crossed back and forth along the wall and found a large school of jacks and also a group of sharks that were hunting some small schools of scads. Because we did not go down the channel I did not get any video of the large lettuce leaf coral formation.
We slowly motored to our next dive site, Saies Corner, which is a corner similar to Blue Corner where they can get some really good currents flowing. After our surface interval we all back-rolled in and dropped down. Again, there was not really much current here either. We were told that the currents really have not picked up here yet because the winds have not changed direction for the season. We did see a few bumphead parrotfish, a gigantic puffer fish, and lots and lots of sharks circling around in what current there was--of course they were just a little to far out of range to get any really good video or pictures of, but they were amazing just to watch.
We then had lunch on the boat as we slowly made our way to our third and final dive of the day and of the trip, a site that is not really known about by many people and is not a regular dive site. This is the site of a Japanese Zero from World War II that was discovered by Mandy in the 1980s and Eric’s dad became involved in an effort to raise and restore the plane to be displayed as a museum piece in Arizona. The plane is pretty much intact laying upside down in the sand at about 50-60 feet. The day before Shallum had mentioned to Eric that he now had the GPS coordinates to its location. Eric and I and Fabio had attempted to find the site when we were here in 2010 to no avail. Back then Fabio, Eric and I swam around for about an hour in a horrible current and extremely bad visibility and never did find the plan.
Since Shallum had the GPS coordinates he sent a boat out and placed a buoy at the site so that we could find it. Once we reached the site Eric gave everyone some history on the site and then Eric and I dropped down first to get some pictures and video before everyone else got there. Everyone really enjoyed seeing the plane and knowing some of the recent history behind it. Eric and I stayed behind after everyone went up and got more photos and video.
Unfortunately, this was the end of the diving portion of our trip. Tomorrow we have a free day for everyone to do whatever they would like to do. I think some people are going to go watch the boat races, some people are just going to hang out and relax, and at least one person was going to go do a kayak tour of the islands. We were very fortunate on this trip to have such wonderful people to dive with and wonderful weather to do it in.
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