Truk Lagoon – Shinkoku Maru

012913-1-6-shinkoko-maruMy first comfortable dive after realizing I had perforated my eardrum. I borrowed an earmask from Kirstin and it saved my holiday! It keeps air over the ears so equalising is done without any water getting in, brilliant!        

This is the wreck of a fleet tanker. It sits upright and is accessible from 13m for the bridge, the deck sits at 18m and the seabed is 39m.

As with almost every wreck in Chuuk one dive isn’t enough to see everything so we chose the engine room. We entered from the stern deck, through some skylights and into the engine room. The first thing I noticed were the nuts and bolts which were the size of my fist! For some reason I found this quite exciting, could be I’m a bit of a metal nut!! Next we saw gauges and dials with their labeling intact and quite easy to read. After examining everything in some detail we were led back out to the deck where we found a bit of a current had picked up. 012913-1-12-shinkoko-maru

We moved to the deck guns which were covered in corals and barely recognizable and then to the telegraph where Steve took my picture. On turning around I spotted a 10ft grey reef shark, at about the same time as most of the other divers and we all hung and watched it swim past the railings then come back around to be certain we saw it.

Along the deck and around the railings there were a lot of soft and hard corals, anemones the size of dinner plates, some black feathery corals on the end of long stems and a nudi branch.

Then back to the surface with a safety stop and returned to the boat.

 

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