Where else in the world can you get off work and go scuba diving or play 9 holes of golf, all before dinner at 6 pm? Okay, so maybe there’s a few places, but it’s probably more expensive and more time-consuming with driving to get there and back, etc...Yesterday, I flew down to Kwaj in the morning and flew back to Roi in time to catch up with my man for a dive. We were on a search and rescue mission, of sorts, to save a lost dive tank that rolled off the boat we were sailing on this weekend when we keeled to the right in the wind. How would we know where to look, well, we were fortunate enough to have a couple of hand held GPS’s on board, and my boyfriend quickly tagged the approximate area of the lost tank when we turned around to retrieve a BCD that had also taken a plunge into the water. We had no idea what might be down there, how deep it was going to be, or even if we’d be able to find the tank, but we were certainly going to attempt it. It could be a grand adventure; after all, you never know what you’ll find at the bottom of the sea!
After all the dive gear was packed on the boat, we set the GPS for our “Lost Tank” destination and took off. Once there, we tossed out the anchors, and the line kept going and going and going. Hmmmm, must be deep and probably a sandy bottom since we didn’t appear to hook any large heads of coral. Luckily, my savvy better half had brought an extra anchor; one of the original two on the boat looked a little beat up. He tied two together and let it out some more. I monitored the GPS to see if we were dragging anchors and drifting back. There was not a whole lot of chop or current, but we were steadily, but slowly moving away from the target, although not enough to abort the dive. We dove in to place the anchors in a more secure spot, if possible, and assess the situation.
Once underwater, it was fairly murky, especially for the waters out here. There were a lot of salps floating in the water on the way down and no bottom in sight. Salps are barrel-shaped jellyfish like organisms without the defense stinging adaptation. In this particular spot, the salps were floating all around us in little colonies, and they gave off a phosphorescence glow that really stood out in the dark blue water and drew my eyes to them as I descended. It felt like swimming in a deep blue outer space. As we slowly descended by the anchor lines, the bottom began to come into view, and it was as we suspected, mostly sandy and pretty deep, around 100 feet. There were a few pieces of coral (one of which the anchor had finally hooked on) and bottom growth and a few fish here and there, but not much else, which made our chances a little better for finding that lost tank.
We set out on our agreed upon search pattern finding little for most of the dive. Then, suddenly, something oddly man-made appeared through the silt in front of our masks. From the outline, I thought it was a small plane as there are lots from WWII in these waters, but as we moved closer, we saw it was a small LCM or “landing craft mechanized” unit used to transport troops and equipment to shore or a dock during the war. It was a smaller version of the ones we now use to transport the Marshallese workers back and forth from the base to their home island, and it was propped up from the back on a fairly large mound of coral. How exciting! We found something probably no one else knows about yet. No luck on the tank this dive, but we are not giving up yet! And the best part is, we got back from our dive just in time for dinner before the chow hall closed at 6:45, and then fit in a couple of games of pool at the bar before bedtime. Only on the atoll can you pack so much work and fun into one day!
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