We began our Philippines trek by passing out of Truk Lagoon yesterday morning, moving by exposed reef upon which the remains of a motor vessel, broken in half, lay as a reminder to the incautious navigator. The boat immediately took on a steady roll as it reacted to the open ocean waves that had traveled thousands of miles, waves from which the lagoon protects us during normal operations. The roll of the vessel was a noticeable symbol of the undertaking ahead; I’ve never made a crossing this long before.
Three pairs of crewmembers each take two four hour watch shifts, monitoring the boat as she slugs along at a steady nine and a half knots. Good time to get to know someone, sitting in the pilot house in the middle of the night, watching the radar and the GPS for four hours. My partner is a Filipino mechanical wizard named Mike. He is the engineer; for my money the most important person on the boat besides the chef, and since we don’t have a chef on this cruise, Mike is it. He is a trained jet mechanic who also used to run a garage in Chuuk’s capital, but now he slums it on the Odyssey; I imagine marine diesels are tinker toys compared to jet engines.
This morning I did a few minor projects around the boat, getting her ready for drydock. Upon completion, I checked in with the captain, who told me not to start anything else as he planned to slow down and dump us for a dive as we passed over Mogami Bank, a shallow area on our route, the remains of an atoll that is now just a submerged reef. Don’t bother looking for it on a map. The other instructors and I ran around getting ready like kids for the first day of spring break. As we stood on the dive deck in our gear, prepared to jump into the ocean with no land in sight in any direction, the New Zealander, Mark, a perfectly wonderful, upbeat, competent human being pops his reg out of his mouth, looks over at me, grins like a kid, and sums it all up by saying, “Middle of flippin’ nowhere, bro.”
In we went. Crystal visibility to the bottom, a flat reef in the sand at about a hundred feet. I was the last to begin my descent. J.J., one of the instructors, started rapping on his tank and pointing out sharks cruising the reef, three to five foot reef sharks moving in a distinctively sharky way below us. I was engrossed until, still in fifty feet of open water, I noticed movement behind me and turned around to greet the bottom dwelling sharks’ four larger six foot cousins who had come up off the bottom to greet me. Not aggressive, mind you. We call it curious in the dive business. I continued to drop.
The coral was in pristine condition at a hundred feet. Big table corals, soft corals, anemones, all alive with colorful reef fish. The butterfly fish here are abundant, with species that we would wait months to see in Kona showing up in droves. Also a big school of unicorn fish hanging out above the reef, not afraid to let us get in the middle of them. And always the sharks, poking around behind us and shying away when we turned towards them.
We spent about twenty minutes in open ocean reef dive bliss before heading to the surface. I can’t, of course say for sure that we were the first people to ever dive that spot, but if not, I bet we were pretty close.
