P-MAN IV - p. 6              

Palau’s Oceans

All you have to know is that people come from all over the world, for good reason, to dive in the crystal clear turquoise ocean surrounded by Palau’s barrier reef. Here the water is 10 degrees warmer than Hawaii’s. All but the most thin-skinned individuals (I’m talking epidermis not personality) can dive all day with only a lycra suit. Whether interested in sea life, coral formations or shipwreck diving, Palau has it all. The ocean around the Palau Islands is, for the most part, too beautiful just to see, even in person—you need to submerge yourself in these waters to know them.

At least that is what the tourists tell me. BentProp expeditions tend to go where things are not quite as pretty. For example, sometimes we have had searches underwater near mangroves (e. g., see P-MAN II Report). Here the waters drain out of these swamps with the outgoing tide and turn the otherwise high-visibility ocean into a skim-milk-with-curds consistency. A few years back, in such a channel, Chip Lambert and I went down with tanks and, lacking contrast, we both dove straight into the silty white bottom. Such is the nature of these searches that if they were easy, some one else would have found these crash sites a long time ago. So, P-MAN IV divers rarely saw tourists, except for some of us on our one day off. Not surprisingly, we never came across tourists in the jungle.

After nearly ten years of travel to these islands, I still cannot believe what I see there sometimes. Whether diving among schools of fish and sharks in pristine waters or creating one’s own jungle trail covered in mud, Palau is always spectacular. As for P-MAN IV, it is worth mentioning that natural obstacles never stopped any one of us. And no matter how exhausted we might have gotten in the field, we could not forget those who had fought throughout Palau and the rest of the Pacific during WWII. During our mandatory rest stops in the jungles (I would think a dangerous luxury in combat), we often wondered how anyone, friend or foe, could fight a war under these horrendous circumstances, burdened constantly by weapon and enemy, confounded as well by heat, rain and geography and, all the while, trying to remember for whom and what they were fighting.
 

Page last modified 27 April 2005