Monday 22 December Diving in Palau

Our first few days in Palau were spent flexing the credit card, unused for three months in Indonesia, our flexible friend was beginning to feel left out.  No worry and we've been on a spend, spend, spend spree; clean diesel for the engine seems to have cured the problem with loss of engine power, boat parts are on their way from the States as are replacement batteries for computers, etc from Amazon.com as we take advantage of standard US postal rates.  It would have been rude not to go shopping and indulge in foodie treats (and basics) rarely seen since peninsula Malaysia, items such as cheese, pork, Dijon mustard and olives.  Can you suggest a dish using these four items?
Shopping and food apart, if you're visiting Palau on a yacht there's only one place to be and that's the small bay in front of Sam's Dive Tours and the Royal Belau Yacht Club.  (Belau is the local name for Palau.)  Sam's and the yacht club are the same business. We've rented one of Sam's mooring balls for a month at a reasonable cost.  Two days after we arrived there a typhoon alert was issued.  Sam's dock master, Q, moved us to a heavier safer mooring, further from the dock but tucked in a corner and under high cliffs.  With two mooring lines and an anchor forward and three lines tying our stern to trees on the cliff we were prepared for strong winds.  As it happened Palau was lucky and the typhoon veered north away from us.  In our sheltered spot we had rain to wash down the decks and no more than 10 knots of wind across the deck.
With the typhoon alert over it was business as usual and time to get wet diving two Japanese WW2 wrecks in the harbour.  Both are within a short dinghy ride and have a conveniently attached buoy to mark the spot and a line to descend on.   Wrecks make a change from reefs; I enjoy the life growing on the wrecks and David enjoys exploring the structures and finding the guns.
There is another dive site called Chandelier Cave within 50m of our mooring ball.  This is a cave (surprise) with four air filled chambers to surface in.  Each chamber is a hall with 'chandeliers' of stalactites dripping from the ceiling, each is fed with fresh air because you can breathe freely within them and the water is crystal clear.  It's quite beautiful and a different sort of dive.
Having done the close stuff we booked a three dive day package with Sam's Tours to go out to the premier sites, the ones which are written about in the dive magazines, Blue Corner, Blue Holes and German Channel.  We began the day with an exhibition of manta rays at a cleaning station in German Channel, followed with a dip into the Blue Holes and a drift along a deep wall to the sharks schooling on Blue Corner.  The last dive was hanging out in the current at Blue Corner.  Attaching ourselves to a piece of rock with a reef hook we were able to fly like kites above the wall and watch grey reef and white tip sharks, huge dog tooth tuna and barracuda also hanging out waiting for dinner to swim past.
Back at Sam's we took our kit off the boat and grabbed another nitrox tank for the optional fourth dive of the day.  Along the jetty from the bar, every day at dusk colourful Mandarin fish emerge from their daytime hiding places to do a ritual mating dance.  Until now neither had ever seen a Mandarin fish but here they are in less than sparkling water, in less than 4m depth coming out to play. In just seven dives we've covered caves, wrecks, mantas, sharks and mandarin fish. Amazing stuff.
We've just come back from ten days cruising an area called the Rock Islands.  One needs to buy a $50 ten day visitor permit for each person and a $40 boat permit from the local authority to visit which restricts you to ten days.  It's not a large area – just ten miles to reach the western limit, Ulong island.   From here we could access Ulong Channel and do a couple of drift dives.  This is a pretty dive, the current quite gentle giving you time to look at the coral and to see the fish and easy to tow, or be towed by the dinghy, which we take with us on a long line.
After our day at Ulong the weather changed for the worse and for the next couple of days we had take shelter in a less exposed anchorage.  The rain was falling so consistently we stayed on board.  When the rain stopped we could go out and dive two more Japanese WW2 wrecks.  One called, the Iro, is very good.  Seventy years after it sank it's still intact and with some good coral life growing on it.  We also dived on Cemetery Reef and found the visibility poor and the coral dead.   It seems all coral in less than 20m has been affected by bleaching caused by too warm water.  It's hoped it will recover but for now Cemetery Reef is living, or dying, up to it's name.
Now with three days to go to Christmas we're back on our mooring ball at Sam's catching up with boat jobs and chores and considering how we want to celebrate this year.
Happy Christmas