[Page 3] Of Palau Diving, Jellyfish Lake and sunken WW2 planes
Diving in PalauPalau diving is famous for 2 things ... high current and blue water !
Dives basically involves looking for areas of high current convergence, finding a hooking area, deploy your reef hook, inflat your BC and stare out into the blue waters watching the fish action.
Usually there would be a "ball" of smaller fishes (snappers, fusillers ..etc) with all the big boys (burraccuda, giant trevelly, grey reef sharks, potato cods) preying on them.
Shark are slow by comparison. You can actually see the grey reef sharks "exerting and finning real hard" to keep up with the school of Bonito tuna. Besides the famous Blue Corner and Peleliu Cut, I like Siaes Corner where there were lots of sharks and lots of big action.
We did 3 dives in the German Channel with 100% manta sighting in the cleaning season. This was suppose to be a low season, I guess we are very lucky
Short movie clip on "Mantas in German Channel"
Besides high current diving, we dove a variety of underwater cavern, Blue hole, Chandelier Cave (series of 4 underwater caves), WWII wrecks and the Mandarin Fish lagoon.
Check out the rest of the underwater pictures in the photo gallery.
28 Jul 2010 - Jellyfish Lake
First of all ... the Permit to the Jellyfish lake cost USD$35 !!
It is a 10-15 mins climb up and down a rocky, mossy hill to get to the lake. Some other friends described the climb as tedious but we found it quite managable.
This is quite a highlight for us to free dive among the stingless jellyfish in a zero current lake !
One of the advantage of the Live-On-Board was that we were able to go to the lake at 7am in the morning. We have the entire lake to ourselves, prior to all the day trippers.
We heard horror stories from other travellers of 100s of people in the lake, so I guess timing was everything in making it a magically experience of being surrounded by 5 million jellyfish instead of 5 million other people.
30 Jul 2010
All good things must come to an end and it was finally time for us to disembark. I guess everything added up to the experience ... Palau was a wonderful and unique destination, the Ocean Hunter III was a fantastic way to explore it. Add in great friends and a fantastic crew and what you get is a most memorable experience.
30 Jul 2010
Got off the boat at 0800 hrs. We had time to kill before our flight in the evening.
The original plan was to visit dolphin pacific , however as the US Navy was in town, everything was fully booked. Even rental cars and kayaks were out.
In the end, we took a boat trip to Airai ...
Stone Money of Yap
Quartz-like stone used to carve the stone money. In ancient times, it took the folks about 8-10 year to crave the stone "coins" and transport them back to Yap.
WWII seaplane
Trip to town to visit the Museum
Goodbye Sailor (great name for a swimming dog )
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Flight out of KOK -MNL in the evening. Transit in Manila Airport Hotel for the night ... Back in Singapore on the 31 Jul evening.
Time to start planning the next trip !!
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