September 6, 2010- Diving the Abyss and More Planes...

     Heading down into the Abyss (named so for the stunning drop into dark blue nothingness next to the wall of coral you’ll find when you dive here), we saw schools and schools of little deep purple fish which turn at times flourescent depending on the angle of the sun entering the water.  Just like yesterday, the Abyss is a gorgeous wall dive with a variety of flowering soft corals and lots and lots of fish.  We were lucky enough on this dive to see a silver tip shark and a turtle swim by.  The best thing today is that we started out swimming against the current, so on the way back, we were able to simply relax and float by groups of parrotfish, Emperor Angle fish, and many, may smaller fish I couldn’t even attempt to identify as I have not yet had enough experience with this.  If you want to stop for a second to see something closer, it’s good to wear gloves underwater, as you may have to put a finger or a whole hand on a sturdy piece of coral to keep you from slowly sliding past everything.   Hopefully, one day, I’ll be able to write in more detail about all the coral and fish on these dives so it can come more alive for everyone when I write, but for now,  you just have to trust that it’s a myriad of a triggerfish, anenome fish, angelfish, grouper, butterfly, and trumpet fish just to mention a few.  

     Next, we hit a spot my boyfriend and I have only dove once before, and it was marked two planes as one day my sweetie was coming back from an afternoon on the water and looked down to see the image of two planes on the unusual glassy lagoon surface, so he tagged it on his GPS as a waypoint to check out later.  It is not an unfound dive spot, we just don’t know what it is called officially, so today we decided to investigate further. The first time we actually dove it, we discovered not merely two, but at least 4 planes that appear to be dive bombers like the SBD Dauntless dumped in the airplane graveyard which is quite aways from this particular spot.  Because there were 4 that we found last time, we figure it may be what is simply called “4 SBD’s” by the scuba club website, but if that’s it, they have it all wrong because we found closer to 10+ planes down there today, albeit some are practically hidden completely by sand now.  

     At around 30 feet on a sloping sand bank, there are numerous partially buried planes with some of the most interesting coral attached.  As we were hanging out at this shallow depth checking out the coral on the planes, we noticed another plane to our right, and each time we got closer to the plane nearest in our vision, we would find another one until we had made a complete circle of numerous planes in various conditions, some sitting perfectly upright with no sand covering them at all and others with wheels up in the air upside down or completely buried in sand except for a small piece of wing or cockpit sticking out.  Some of the planes were over 100 feet deep at the bottom of the sandy slope, so as we made our way back to higher ground, we discovered we still had time left to check out the sea life covering those first planes, and boy are we glad we did!

      We saw a nervous turkey fish (or it may have been a lion fish as they can look similar) lying sideways next to the corner wing of a plane trying to hide and blending in quite well, I must say, then there was the most fascinating piece of what I at first believed was a hard green coral growing in the sand next to the wing of another plane.  Once I checked it out close, I found it was an anenome like I have never seen before.  It was a soft pink color in the center, but had much fatter greenish blue tentacles growing out of the center unlike the delicate, skinny limbs of most of the anemones I have seen.  As I motioned to show my dive partner, he discovered a very tiny harlequin shrimp rooting around in the anenome, then I spotted a larger one.  We watched them for awhile, completely fascinated. It’s rare to find a plane shallow enough to have much dive time below to really visit with the fish and a plane shallow enough to have so much life growing around it, so this was perfect.  Every time I say that I can’t imagine a better dive than today, tomorrow proves better, and this is what makes diving so worthwhile and addictive on the atoll.  Happy diving those of you who have the privilege to dive here!