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Best Places to Dive: The Ghost Fleet of Truk Lagoon, Federated States of Micronesia

Mike G. at Greater Cleveland Aquarium.“Growing up, we learn about history through books. We even get to take trips and see battlefields, buildings, and relics. Few of us ever get to see the evidence, examine it, lay eyes on the details and the human element,” begins Mike Gorek. Mike is Senior Maintenance Engineer at Greater Cleveland Aquarium, and we like to say that he’s been here since before we had water. He’s talking about a remarkable dive trip – a liveaboard at Chuuk Lagoon in Micronesia.

“It was a vacation. I got to live on a boat in the middle of nowhere in a country that few people know exists, and fewer could find on a map. Unfortunately for the people of Chuuk, the Imperial Japanese Navy were aware of their existence and went above and beyond to impose their will on the natives of these islands, all for strategic advantage for the Pacific,” says Gorek.

A little background about the island nations of the Western Pacific: Micronesia is a subregion in Oceania consisting of over 2,100 small islands and consists of four main island groups: the Mariana Islands (which includes Guam, the largest island in the region), the Marshall Islands (site of 24 nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll by the United States in the 1940s and 50s), the Gilbert Islands, and the Caroline Islands, which includes the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). These island chains are no strangers to colonialism, and FSM was captured by Japan in World War I. During World War II, Chuuk Lagoon served as the Empire of Japan’s naval base in the South Pacific theater. It can be confusing, but Chuuk refers to the state and the land, Truk refers to the lagoon and dive sites. In February of 1944, just over two years after Pearl Harbor, the United States Navy launched Operation Hailstone to take out the Japanese fleet.

“In the wee hours of February 17th into the 18th, American forces decimated the Japanese fleet. Over 250 aircraft and north of 50 ships were destroyed and/or sent to their resting place on the bottom of the ocean,” Mike says about Hailstone. A generation later, this site of incredible carnage lures wreck divers from around the world. I’ll let Mike tell it.

“For a week some 59 years (after the attack), I stepped aboard the Odyssey to dive the wrecks of Truk Lagoon. We landed on a short runway where, from the plane, there’s no visible land and your luggage is dumped through a hole in the wall with a front-end loader. There were 25 dives over six-and-a-half days, most surpassing 30 meters, culminating with the San Francisco Maru. (Its deck is 165 feet and, while passing through the cargo hold at 186 feet, we still hadn’t reached bottom.) Most of the ships we encountered were merchant ships converted to military use for the Imperial Japanese Navy.

The thing about war you never see is the human element, in this case, sake bottle after sake bottle, medical tools, gas masks, rubber boots, tile latrines and the head on the boats, tools, air compressors, and gauges stuck in their resting places. But beyond any of these relics were human remains themselves—femur bones on an operating table or even a human skull. All these things littered these wrecks through the mid-1980s, though less these days. Ships that stood proud and tall, are now reduced to fields of soft coral playing home to fish, crab, octopus and everything else you can possibly think of.

There were cargo holds filled with trucks, motorcycles, Japanese Zeros and an abundance of surplus parts . . . all just frozen in time. Periscopes on a submarine tender, bulldozers encrusted to steel, waiting for their opportunity. What was really astounding, the biggest take away, was the raw power of black powder. We crawled through two-inch think plated steel mangled from a torpedo blast.”

Initially explored in 1969 by legendary oceanographer Jacques Cousteau and often referred to as the “Ghost Fleet of Truk Lagoon”, Chuuk Lagoon is now known as the world’s greatest collection of diveable World War II Japanese shipwrecks.

 

The Ghost Fleet of Truk Lagoon is the tenth and final in our series of the Aquarium dive team’s favorite dive locations. Thank you for all the readers who’ve kept up and those who come back to the series. If your destination wasn’t on our list, suggest somewhere new we might want to explore.

  • Ray D.

 

Best Places to Dive: Cave of Elephants – Crete, Greece

Diver Ray Danner at Greater Cleveland Aquarium.In 1999, a daring spearfisherman in Greece named Manolis Efthymakis made a stunning discovery. While free-diving 30 feet down, he saw an opening in the cliff wall and did what most of us would not: he swam into it. What he found drew the interest of both the diving and the archaeological community.

Tens of thousands of years ago, the waters of the Mediterranean were low enough that animals walked into this cave, leaving behind fossils of a previously unknown species of elephant as well as a dwarf deer only 30 centimeters tall, or roughly three apples high. (A Smurf deer!) While many of the elephant bones, named Elephas chaniensis after the nearby city of Chania, were removed to museums, some things were left behind to attract divers to this cavern wonder.

The underwater entrance leads to a 100-foot-long tunnel large enough for divers to swim side by side until they reach a cavern filled with red-colored stalagmites and stalactites. Pitch black except for flashlights, divers then tread water to take in the views and pose for photographs while being careful not to kick one of the stalagmites growing beneath their fins. The swim back through the tunnel is notable for the eerie blue glow of the triangular opening back into the Mediterranean Sea.

I had the opportunity to explore this site in 2018 on a family trip to Greece. It followed what was initially a disappointing dive. The northwest corner of Crete, the largest of the Greek islands, is a rocky and arid environment. The town closest to the dive site, Kokkino Chorio to the south, was used in the filming of Zorba the Greek. Our first dive was totally devoid of any life except for a small silver fish we helped free from an old fishing net. The second dive into the cave was incredibly memorable and has been noted as one of the best cave dives in the world, although that is somewhat misleading as there are breathable air pockets within the cave, you’re always within site of the entrance, and there is no sediment to kick up on the bottom that might obscure vision underwater. It’s perhaps more accurate to call it a cavern dive.

Although we did not see any other signs of life on our dive, the waters around Crete and the Cave of Elephants itself is often a refuge for the Mediterranean Monk Seal (Monachus monachus) which is a critically endangered species of seal with fewer than 600 surviving members around the world.

 

Cave of Elephants is the fifth in our weekly series of the Aquarium dive team’s favorite dive locations. Stay tuned for the rest of our list or suggest somewhere new we might want to explore.

 

  • Ray D.

 

 

Best Places to Dive: Forfar Field Station, Andros Island, Bahamas

Diver Steph Q with a sand tiger shark at the Aquarium.We dive for a variety of reasons. To commune with nature, to unwind, to explore. Our “pale blue dot,” as astrophysicist and author Carl Sagan pointed out, is just a “very small stage in a vast cosmic arena,” but perhaps by diving in we can learn to better appreciate that fragile ecosystem largely invisible to us as we commute between school, work and the grocery store in our busy daily lives.

Greater Cleveland Aquarium diver Stephanie Quinn took a formal approach to learning about our dot when she enrolled in a study abroad program during her senior year at Ohio University. Stephanie and her future husband spent a week at the Forfar Field Station, an educational and scientific non-profit organization that has served as a resource to over 50,000 thousand students ranging from middle school to graduate students and researchers. Most field study trips last a week and involve groups of 10-45 students with a focus on marine science, geology, botany, climate change or other scientific fields including social science. Imagine a classroom along the shoreline where students put their learning to the test by plunging into their environment.

“Forfar Field Station is a rustic former dive resort nestled in a beachfront coconut grove on the east coast of Andros Island,” according to their website. The largest of the Bahamian islands, Andros is host to rich diving opportunities for the students, including “coral reefs, offshore cays, sea grass beds, sandbars, blue holes, subtropical terrestrial habitats, Bahamian settlements and more.” The waters nearby are filled with colorful reef fish, including blue tang, angelfish, parrotfish and butterflyfish.

“It was the best diving,” Stephanie recalls. “Crystal clear water. Great biodiversity. We dove both there (Forfar Field Station) and Small Hope Bay during our study abroad. We then went back to Small Hope Bay for our honeymoon.”

Stephanie joined the Aquarium’s dive team in 2015 and has been a certified diver for 22 years. She lost her logbook, but estimates she has roughly 75 dives outside of the Aquarium. According to Aquarium Assistant Dive Safety Coordinator Matthew Ballish, she has more than 1350 dives in the habitats here.

Sagan, in his well-known speech, said that astronomy was a humbling experience. “To me,” he said, “it underscores our responsibility…to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” These words were meant for the study of the stars but could apply just as well to those that look under the sea.

Forfar Field Station is the first in our weekly series of the Aquarium dive team’s favorite dive locations. Stay tuned for the rest of our list or share your favorite place to dive with us.

– Ray D.

Best Places to Dive? We Know a Few

Diver Ray Danner.Scuba diving and Cleveland, Ohio . . . sort of go together like peanut butter and monkey wrenches, right? I challenge you to find one of those “101 Places to Dive Before You Die” books with a cover that isn’t turquoise, tropical and filled with colorful reef fish. And yet Cleveland has its own extensive dive community. Lake Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes, has hundreds of shipwrecks to explore and is serviced by several dive shops that teach classes, sell gear, and organize trips all over the world. Northeast Ohio is home to around 4.5 million people and an untold amount of scuba divers who love to explore the waters in their own backyard as well as adventure to distant places to see what there is to see in the 70% of our planet that is underwater.

“What is your favorite place to dive?” is usually the first question posed to a diver. Could there be a better place to ask that question than of the staff at Greater Cleveland Aquarium? Not to toot our own horn, but we pack a ton of dive experience into the historic Powerhouse.

The Aquarium currently has 25 divers on staff; that’s not just the dedicated dive team members but also diver-certified aquarists, Life Support Systems staff and some of the Guest Experience folks regularly answering your animal questions. The numbers are dizzying. We did 1,265 dives in 2022 totaling 99,162 minutes. That’s almost 69 days or 10 weeks underwater. We could have watched Avatar: The Way of Water 5,204 times last year!

The Aquarium team has logged 22,246 dives since the downtown venue’s doors first opened in 2012 through the end of 2022, and we have well over 300 already this year. In fact, there’s a good chance that someone is underwater at the Aquarium as you read this blog post.

Best places to dive? Yeah, we have a few. I asked around and started a list. What follows will be a series of ten dive locations around the world as recommended by our team. Some are tropical, some feature shipwrecks and one is even under ice.

We hope that the discussion stirs a passion in everyone to explore the world while you can. There’s so much to experience and we love to talk about all the curiosities we’ve seen underwater. I think I speak for all the staff here when I say that we advocate for the protection of the species and environments that we’ve seen firsthand and feel there’s no better way to learn and love what’s out there than diving in and encountering it, face-to-face. I’ve been diving since 2017 and have been a Greater Cleveland Aquarium diver since 2018. I have more than 1,000 dives here and 65 or so out in the world, including the Florida Keys, Bahamas, Honduras, Niagara River, Tobermory and Greece.

So, if you see someone at the Aquarium and you’re curious, don’t be shy. We love to talk diving and follow this blog series to add some of our recommendations to your “must-experience list.”

-Ray D.