PALAU - November 3-10, 2024

(Click here to see some pictures from this trip plus links to the SmugMug slideshow.)

This is the trip that almost wasn’t.

If you’re a longtime Reef Seekers diver, you’ve seen plenty of these trip reports. (Fair warming upfront: This one is looooong.) Part of my goal when I write these is to not only convey to you a sense of what the diving was like, but also a sense of what the overall trip experience was. So I’ll comment on things like the boat we used, or hotel we stayed at, food we ate, and what it took to get there.

That last one is especially important in this day and age when air travel has become such that a missed connection here or a delay there can wreak havoc on the best laid plans. And that was the case in spades on this trip so I’m going to take some time to do some travel reporting and educating before we get into the actual diving.

Some of this is going to come off as tooting my own and Reef Seekers’ horn but it underscores why there’s an advantage to booking these trips and traveling with someone – me – who knows the options inside/out and can craft alternate plans on the fly. I’ve said for years that you might be able to set these kind of itineraries up yourself and maybe even save a few bucks in the process, but there will come a day when everything goes to hell and that’s when someone like me make it all worthwhile because I move heaven and earth and get things back on track. So my whole mindset through all of what you’re about to read was, “What can I do to save this trip for everyone?”

We had 12 people going on this trip to Palau for a week of diving on the Palau Aggressor II (aka the PA2). The divers were: Donna & Cecilia Groman, Katy & Tom Burns, Glenn Suhd, Tony Hanna, Jay Wilson, Matt Levinson, Jan Larson, Patti Wey, John Lumb and me (Ken Kurtis). The usual/traditional way to get to Palau, similar to how we get to Yap, is use United Airlines to go to Honolulu (or Tokyo), then into Guam, and that’s where we hook up with the evening flight to Palau.

The in-bound leg isn’t too bad as you leave in the morning from LAX or SFO (Tom & Katy), get to Honolulu around Noon, and then a 2PM flight to Guam which gets in around 5PM. For Palau, there’s an evening flight from Guam that gets in around 9PM on some days, and a later evening flight that gets is at 12:50AM on other days. You’re tired, but you go to a hotel and get a good night’s sleep and should be somewhat rested the next morning, leaving you time to wander around Palau before you board the PA2 around 4PM that afternoon.

What I really dislike is the return leg, which has you leaving Palau at 2AM for Guam, leaving Guam 7AM-ish for Honolulu, and then a redeye from Honolulu into LAX, arriving a bit after 6AM. The problem with this itinerary – and it’s even more so for someone like me who doesn’t sleep well on planes – is that you get off the boat at 8AM on Sunday morning, spend the day at a hotel in Palau, maybe get a nap, but then leave for the airport around 11PM Sunday night for that 2AM (technically Monday morning) flight. And there’s just no good way to get much sleep because the first flight is short and the second flight is when you’d normally be awake. So you arrive home REALLY tired. I’m not a fan.

Complicating all of this is that Palau (airport code ROR) no longer has any flights that arrive or leave on Sunday. I’m not sure if this is a coincidence of the scheduling or if it’s a rule from the Palauan government. We used to get off the boat Saturday night and take the 2AM Sunday flight which got us into L.A. also on Sunday morning due to the Dateline. No more. Once off the boat, you can’t leave until after Sunday is over. For United, that meant 2AM on what was technically Monday. (Leave the airport late Sunday night and since the flight is after midnight, it’s not Monday.)

Katy/Tom/Donna/Cecilia/Glenn all decided they were willing to put up with that United sked because they also wanted to arrive in Palau a day early, on Friday evening rather than Saturday (you board the boat Sunday afternoon at 4PM and get off the following Sunday at 8AM) so that they would have time to acclimate to the time change and jetlag, and they’d gave an extra travel day in case anything got delayed along the way.

I did some research and found there was another way to get into Palau that I thought made more sense and that was with China Airlines. They had a flight that left LAX on Thursday just before midnight, went non-stop to Taipei, long layover in Taipei (7 hours, but I’d heard the airport is fabulous, along the lines of Singapore), and then non-stop into Palau, arriving Saturday afternoon around 5PM. Perfect!!!

Even better was the return which left NOT in the middle of the night but at the entirely reasonable hour of 3PM Monday afternoon. (Remember, no Sunday flights in or out of Palau.) You flew back to Taipei, had another extended layover there, and then got a non-stop into LAX that arrived at 7PM (also Monday due to the Dateline). Go home, get a good night’s sleep, and be rested for the next day. Perfect again!!!

So the rest of us booked the China Airlines flight and would meet up with the United group Saturday evening in Palau. Perfect yet again!!! What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

What could go wrong was the worst possible thing as China Airlines on the Thursday morning of the day we were to leave cancelled our LAX-Taipei flight. It seems there was a large tropical storm that churned through the Pacific and was hitting Taiwan. The actual plane that would have been our LAX-Taipei fight never left Taiwan so there was no plane to fly us there. So we had to scramble.

The first call I made was to China Airlines – they were as nice as could be BTW – and they let me know that one possibility was a flight out of Ontario International Airport (Riverside County) which also left late Thursday evening and which would connect with our Taipei-Palau flight. They thought but weren’t completely sure that that actual plane left Taiwan before the storm so the return to Taipei should be happening. But there was no guarantee that the plane would leave Ontario on time (it turned out it ended up leaving three hours late) because the storm still had to clear Taipei. Yikes!!!

On top of that, switching everyone to this flight was fraught with other problems. We all booked individually so each person would have to call into to re-book and they were running out of seats. On top of that, none of us had ever flown out of Ontario so we were totally unfamiliar with the airport. We’d need to be there around 9PM and since we were all coming from West L.A. locations, we figured it was a 90-minute with no traffic but we’d probably need to allow for a 3-hour drive because it would have been rush hour traffic which would be a nightmare. And most of us either took a taxi or Uber to LAX so the cost of a long drive to Ontario in rush hour traffic for a flight that might not leave and then what would we do . . . wasn’t too appealing.

I convened an emergency Zoom call late Thursday morning for everyone on the China Airlines flight and laid out the only other option: cancel China Airlines (they were very good about refunding everyone in full) and book United Airlines on the dreaded sked. That was even more complicated because – remember how Palau doesn’t have any flights in on Sundays??? – it would mean we couldn’t leave Friday but had to wait until Saturday morning and we’d end up arriving in Palau at 12:50AM Monday morning rather than Sunday afternoon. The PA2 was scheduled to leave Monday morning at 6AM so by the time we got to the boat, we’d only have a couple of hours to sleep, assemble gear, and get ready to get wet. On top of that, the United ticket, because we were booking so close to the actual flight, was going to cost us double what we paid for China Airlines.

So it was either that or cancel the trip all together. But then I also reminded everyone that this is where trip insurance can really pay off. It should cover additional expenses incurred due to travel delays. So the extra cost for the United ticket should be covered. That we couldn’t get a refund on our pre-trip hotel overnight should be covered. So it would be inconvenient, but likely not end up costing much more in the long run. Everyone decided to go the United route.

That created more issues. Patti and I were able to quickly book LAX-HNL-GUM-ROR leaving on Saturday morning and arriving Monday morning. But then that flight option disappeared. As you can imagine both the LAX-HNL and the HNL-GUM flights are fairly popular. So we still needed to deal with Jay/Tony/Jan/John/Matt.

But I also knew there was a way to get to Guam by going through Tokyo and there were actually two options for that, one flying through Narita (NRT) and the other flying through Haneda (HND), then into Guam, and then down to Palau.

So Jay/Tony/Jan/John ended up booking a Friday morning departure through Haneda. But that resulted in a 19-hour layover in Guam – that pesky no-Sunday-flights-into-Palau thing – so they also had to get a hotel room in Guam (covered by travel insurance), could spend some time exploring Guam, and would meet up with Patti and me in the Guam airport for the Sunday late night flight to Palau. Matt was able to book a Saturday morning departure from LAX through Narita that arrived two hours before the flight to Palau.

And while all of this was happening, Donna/Cecilia/Tom/Katy/Glenn all made it to Palau as planned and were on the PA2 late Sunday afternoon, also as planned. Patti and I made it to Guam Sunday evening and Jay/Tony/Jan/John met us at the Guam Airport around 9PM. I love it when a good plan, even a hastily-assembled alternate one, comes together.

Except there was one more wrinkle: Matt’s flight out of Narita to Guam was delayed three hours so he missed our GUM-ROR flight, had to spend an extra day in Guam, and then took the late Monday night flight that got into Palau Tuesday morning. It meant he missed a day of diving and also meant that we dove some close-in sites Monday so we could spend Monday night on the normal PA2 mooring in Koror and get Matt from the airport and onto the boat.

So on Tuesday morning around 2AM, we FINALLY had everyone on the PA2 for this trip. LOTS of moving parts to make this all happen and a LOT of e-mails, phone calls, and texts back and forth to both the Aggressor so they’d know what was going on and to members of the group so they’d know what was going on. But again, it seems to me to underscore the value of doing this with people whose goal is to find the ways to make the trip happen despite all the obstacles throw in our path. Whew!!!

Now let’s talk about the actual diving part of this trip . . .

Normally, you arrive in Palau either on Saturday or Sunday and board the boat Sunday around 4PM. This gives you ample time Sunday evening after dinner (you first meal on-board) to set up and relax before the first dive Monday morning at 7AM. Our group that flew in on United was able to do that. The group on the cancelled China Airlines flight didn’t get to the boat until around 2AM Monday morning, so it was a bit more hectic for them. And our final diver didn’t arrive until 2AM Tuesday morning after missing the Guam connection (and the first full day of diving). But at least we got everyone there eventually.

This was our eighth time in Palau and our eighth trip on the Palau Aggressor II (henceforth PA2). The boat is a catamaran, 106’ long by 30’ wide, with nine staterooms accommodating eighteen divers. (We had 12 of the 18 spots.) The main deck is whether you’ll find all of the staterooms. #1-8 are identical but #9 is slightly smaller (and $200 cheaper) and opens directly on to the dive deck. The back third of the main deck is the ample dive deck which includes a large camera table in the center (and a deck head which was welcome relief after each dive). The second deck has the main salon and galley, some hanging-out space, and the wheelhouse and crew quarters. The upper deck is a covered sundeck with hammocks and tables/chairs.

All the diving is done from the dive skiff, a 35’ long (roughly 10 feet wide), custom-built boat that’s even with the main deck and then raised and lowered via a hydraulic lift. All of your dive gear lives on the skiff. You simply board at the back of the main deck, go to your spot (which is constant throughout the week), make sure your tank is full, and once everyone’s on-board, the skiff is lowered into the water and off you go at speeds that we estimate at upwards of 30mph from the two outboard engines. (It’s fast!!!) The PA2 stays on a mooring – usually German Channel – and the skiff gets you to and from dive sites faster than the mothership ever could. The shortest run to a dive site was only a few minutes and the longest was about 15 minutes.

Each dive seat/station has two slots for BC/reg/tank plus an area to store fins/mask. Entry from the skiff is a backroll (although I did a forward roll each time). Those on the outside enter first, and then those on the inside slide into position and follow. It was actually fairly quick to get all 18 of us in the water for each dive. At the end of the dive, a rope runs down the length of the port side of the boat so multiple divers can hang on as there’s a single ladder to come back on board. Some divers took off their tanks in the water and then came off (sans fins) and others just took off fins and came up still wearing tanks. Because you can only do one diver at a time, getting back on, especially when multiple divers surfaced together, took a bit longer than getting everyone in. But overall it worked out well.

All the dives were guided but you weren’t required to stay with the Aggressor guides. The only limitations were no deeper than 110’, no longer than 60 minutes bottom time (including safety stop), and come back with 500psi. Aggressor usually had three guides on each dive: one at the front, one at the back, and one in the middle who would usually end his dive about 40 minutes in to get back on the skiff and help people aboard.

The general schedule was for four dives a day Monday-Friday and two dives on Saturday. Night dives (after dinner) were added in on Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday. Over the course of a week, you could do as many as 25 dives. But to do this, you needed to run on a somewhat tight schedule and this was how it was set up for this trip:

     6:00AM – Breakfast

     7:00AM – Dive 1

     10:00AM – Dive 2

     Noon – Lunch

     1:30PM – Dive 3

     4:30PM – Dive 4

     6:30PM – Dinner

     7:30PM – Night dive (not too many people did these)

It took a day or two for us to get used to the rhythm but it definitely works. And the crew was very good about showing on a big whiteboard on the dive deck not only what the sked for the day was, but what the sites would be and sometimes whether it’s wide-angle or macro for the photogs.

Everyone seemed to really enjoy the food. The only complaint was that some of the food was lukewarm by the time we got to it. By the same token, there’s a large microwave in the salon area that you can use to heat things back up.

Breakfast was a combination of help-yourself buffet and made-to-order eggs, lunch was full buffet, and dinner was a plated served-by-the-staff meal. Lunch and dinner always started with a soup, there was almost always salad available, and each meal had a dessert offered. This isn’t a trip where you should plan to lose weight as there are also snacks served between dives 1 & 2 and between 3 & 4. You definitely won’t go hungry. Beer and wine were available at no extra charge as were soft drinks, lemonade, iced tea, and coffee.

The diving was varied. Water temps were a consistent 86-87º on most of our computers and everyone was commenting on how warm the water was. While warm water is always nice for us, it’s not always a good thing for corals. Although the reefs IMHO seem overall to be healthy, there was coral bleaching visible on every reef we dove, sometimes extensively so. I’m sure this is due to the elevated water temps – on previous trips we’ve generally had 82-85º temps – which will take their toll on the corals. A couple of degrees may not seem like much to us, but it can be devastating to coral polyps.

We saw the usual variety of Palau critters: plenty of sharks (Palau became the world’s first Shark Sanctuary in 2009), no mantas, many Napoleon Wrasses, schools of Midnight and Black Snappers, schools of Barracuda, lots of anemones and Anemonefish, and an assortment of Butterflies, Angels, Damselfish, Surgeonfish, Coronetfish, and other tropicals as well as a single Crocodilefish. I’m not good on coral ID but many varieties of hard coral, plenty of soft corals, and some enormous sea fans. There wasn’t a lack of things to see (and photo).

Visibility was varied and highly dependent on where we were. Since we were waiting for our final diver, Monday was spent relatively close to Koror. We dove the wreck of a Hafa Adai (a good check-out dive site), then Double Reef (nice dive, colorful fish, calm turtles), and the Iro Maru wreck (huge freighter sunk in WW2 – 470 feet long – with great life on the three kingposts). Viz on the two wrecks was 15-25 feet but 60-70 on the reef. The Iro provided me with a great photographic challenge and it had nothing to do with what we saw on the wreck.

I dive with a Nikon D750 in an Ikelite housing. I’ve had the camera since 2015, right after they first came out and I love it. Full-frame camera, fast focus, good exposures, easy to use. (And you’ll all see the results in the photos I post on the SmugMug page.) However . . .

I’ve been having some camera issues over the last year or so. This is likely to be expected for a camera that’s now nine years old and which gets a lot of use. I average about 125-150 shots per dive, 20-25 dives per trip, 5-6 trips per year which is around 15,000 shots/year so over the time I’ve had the camera, I’ve easily taken over 150,000 shots, which is what Nikon estimates as the shutter life.

The camera has two SD card slots and for quite some time now, slot 1 has given me CARD ERROR but the same card in slot 2 worked just fine. So I’ve ignored slot 1 and only used card slot 2. But lately I’ve been getting CARD ERROR there too (or it just shows as “E” for “empty”). Switching to a new card helps for a while but then the error starts popping up again. Turning the camera off and then back on – underwater while it’s in the housing – sometimes helps but it’s obviously a pain to do that. So I’ve known for some time now that the cam was likely on its last legs.

On the Iro, I got off about a dozen shots and then the camera simply stopped firing. I could see that the lever that hits the shutter button was engaging, but the shutter wasn’t firing. Grrrrrr. Nothing like spending an hour underwater holding a big camera unit that isn’t working. So I decided that I’d sit out the next dive and try to “fix” the camera. And that’s when things really went south.

I took the camera out of the housing and wanted to see if I could manually depress the shutter – in other words, was this simply an alignment problem where the housing lever wasn’t hitting the camera correctly – and that’s when the shutter button gave its last gasp. It’s just a little round piece of plastic that sits on top of a spring. But something gave way, the button went flying up in the air, the spring went flying, and even though I was able to retrieve both of them, it was impossible to reassemble them in a working manner. This is where knowledge of how you system works comes in handy.

I could see that the round plastic button pushed down on anther release button deeper in the camera. The spring wouldn’t do me any good but by putting a piece of tape over the hole where everything was, then putting the button over the hole, then putting another piece of tape over that (so the button was sandwiched between two pieces of tape), the housing lever would push on the top piece of tape, the button would trigger the shutter release, and the bottom tape provided enough tension to push the button back up.

Problem solved. It wasn’t 100% perfect and there were still times when either the camera wouldn’t fire or I’d get CARD ERROR and then 10 minutes later everything was magically working fine. So for any of the pictures you see in the SmugMug slideshow, bear in mind not only the usual amount of work that goes into producing them but all of the added elements for this trip that makes each one of them a minor miracles.

By Tuesday morning we had our final diver on board and could go to the “regular” spots. For the PA2, this means heading for their morning on the north side of German Channel. Sitting there gives you access to all of the major Palau dive site besides German Channel: Big Drop, New Drop, Blue Hole, and (of course) Blue Corner.

Blue Corner is probably the most famous of all of the Palau dive sites and it’s also what the Aquarium of the Pacific has based their big Tropical Reef exhibit on. There’s almost always current there as three different currents converge on the site. That makes this one of the premiere hook-in sites where divers use a reef hook to hold position.

A reef hook is a barbless large metal hook with a 5-6’ line attached to it. You attach one end of the line to your BC, preferably somewhere in the middle, and then you find a place on the reef with some rock or dead coral and plant your reef hook there. Once planted, you let the line play out, put a little air in your BC to elevate you, and now the current won’t push you around and you can stay in position and observe the animals, usually large sharks, that are cruising just off the wall in the current. This is what it looks like when divers are hooked in:

This was a great dive to start off the meat of the trip. On this dive at Blue Corner, we had 100’+ visibility; dozens of sharks cruising off the wall, some Napoleon Wrasses (including a couple of large males), big Groupers, schooling Barracuda and Humpback Snappers, and a lot of smaller fish all around us getting cleaned. That’s one of the main activities at Blue Corner and the fish aren’t going to let a few divers upset the natural order of things.

Best of all, the current was rather mild so instead of dropping in along the edge of the wall and drifting into one of the hook-in spots, we actually dropped way in the back, made our way across the rocky/coral plateau of Blue Corner (which is fairly protected from the current) and then essentially came up to the wall from behind and hooked in. That’s not a path you get to take too often so it was a nice way to dive this spot and you get a better appreciation of how large the site is, a perspective you miss when you simply hook in along the wall in a strong current which then carries you away when the dive is over.

Later that day, we dove Big Drop, Turtle Cove (which lived up to its name), and German Channel. All offered great visibility and lots going on but German Channel was sort of a bust.

The big allure there is that it’s a cleaning station for mantas and sharks. On this day, we got skunked. Now there’s no question that many times on dives at cleaning stations, you have to be willing to invest time and sit and wait. Sometimes you’re rewarded, sometimes you’re not. Years ago, I was sitting at this same cleaning station and watched a large Grey Reef Shark come in, open its mouth, and dozens of cleaners came up off the reef and went INSIDE the shark’s mouth to do their job. Amazing. But this was not to be an amazing dive, although it was a pleasant one.

Wednesday started off at German Channel again, hoping that an early morning dive would be more productive than our previous late afternoon dive. Sadly, it wasn’t. Skunked again. But such is the nature of diving. It’s not a menu where you pick the things you want to see. Sometimes nature cooperates, sometimes not. And that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy whatever else is going on around you.

Our second dive of the day was Blue Hole. This is a huge cavern that you enter at a depth of about five feet through a hole in the reef floor and then continue on down to about ninety feet and now you’re inside an enormous cavern. It’s an interesting dive in that there are other entries and exits and you get a nice play of light inside the cavern itself, but the real allure (for me anyhow) is that you exit the cavern and now kick along the reef wall and end up at Blue Corner. The kick down the wall is probably a good 300 yards or so and sometimes there’s a current to help you along but on this day there wasn’t. But arriving at Blue Corner is a nice way to end the dive as the wall you’re kicking along blocks you from the main current, so you simply come up and hook in, and now you’re in the thick of things.

We finished up the day with another nice dive at Blue Corner – but there wasn’t a lot of activity due to low current – and then Barnum Wall.

Thursday we were able to head over to Peleliu which has some monster currents and was a major World War 2 battle site. As a group, our first dive was at Peleliu Corner with a very strong current that kept us flying most of the time. We hooked in once or twice – in videos, our exhaust bubbles are going at a 45º angle – but for the most part it was a drift. I happen to know from some research I’ve previously done that the fastest some can kick is around 3mph and we could barely hold our own against this current so I’m guessing it was around 2mph although it felt like 10.

The second dive was a choice of either doing West Wall – a pleasant spot – or paying $70 for a 3-hour land tour of some of the battle spots. I’ve done this tour three previous times so chose to do the dive but four of our folks went ashore and all said it was a very moving and worthwhile experience.

We finished up Peleliu at Orange Beach which has a lot of discarded ammo and the like as it was a major landing spot for Allied forces, and then we crossed back over the channel to end the day at New Drop, where we found good vis and the usual assortment of Palau marine critters.

On Friday we started at Ulong Channel and I thought this was the best dive of the trip. The way you normally dive this is by hooking in at the high spot on one side or the other of a u-shaped channel and watching the parade go by. Then you unhook and the current carries you down this long channel where you sometimes find nesting Groupers and eventually you pass by an enormous section of Cabbage Coral, and end up in an open area where the boat picks you up.

I’ve dove Ulong many times, sometimes with a screaming current and sometimes with no current, but this time the current was simply perfect. We dropped in a bit after 7AM and the current was very mild but enough to keep the dozen or so sharks circling the channel entrance interested. The visibility approached 100 feet, the sun was behind us, the sharks made many close approaches, and you couldn’t have asked for a more enjoyable twenty minutes watching the marine life parade by. Once we unhooked, it was a leisurely 40-minute drift down the channel, past the fish nests, drift by the Cabbage Coral, and end up at the pickup point. Quite pleasant.

Our next dive was another unique spot in Palau, Siaes Tunnel. This is an enormous cavern whose floor is about 120’ deep and which slopes upwards. If the PA2 was a submarine, you could easily drive it through. The tunnel exit, around 80’, spits you out to a wall and now the current carries you down to the hook-in point known as Siaes Corner. There were already divers hooked in there when we arrived, so we simply drifted behind them, got out of the current, and explored the plateau.

For our next dive, we started on the wall leading to Siaes Corner where a special treat was waiting but around 100’ deep. This was a Decorated Dartfish – I’ve also seen them called Elegant Dartfish – about the size of your pinky and who has gorgeous shades of lavender and red on the margins of an off-white body, as you can see from this picture. They also live deep so the only place to find them is in the 100-foot range. And they’re skittish, so don’t spook them. If you’re lucky, you get this:

This time when we got to the hook-in point, it was available but the current was much stronger than previously, more like rip-the-mask-off-your-face strength. So you had to be careful once you were hooked. But the neat thing was that a group of perhaps a dozen Coronetfish gathered just off to my right and were hanging in the current with us (although they didn’t need reef hooks). And one of them would occasionally come up to me and poke me in the leg as if to say, “Are you seeing anything good?”

We finished the day at a place called Sandy Paradise, not far from Ulong Channel and this provided one of the most unique experiences of the trip as well as one of the most dangerous.

The unique part is that there’s a cleaning station there were the cleaners are quite comfortable cleaning divers. If you stick your hand out, many times they will come over and start cleaning around your fingernails. And if you’re REALLY brave, you take a big breath, open your mouth wide, and see if they’ll jump inside to clean your teeth and tongue. Patti Wey was brave enough, as you can see below, and I was too, which you can also see on a video that’s posted on the Reef Seekers website along with some other pix from this trip.

The dangerous part came at the end of this dive and involved two divers on the trip who were not part of our group but part of the overall PA2 passengers. Husband/wife duo and my impression from the previous days was that the guy was a bit arrogant and wasn’t a very good/cautious diver, although he claimed to be an instructor. On this dive, his actions put both he and his wife in danger as well as almost sank the dive skiff with all of us on-board.

Sandy Paradise in and of itself isn’t a difficult dive. It’s basically a small island with a light tower on it. In the briefing, we were told that the skiff would stay on the mooring on the east side, so the goal was to go out, turn about halfway, and come back to the skiff. And if you missed the skiff, surface and inflate your safety sausage. At the same time, be aware that there’s other boat traffic in the area so surface carefully. And be aware of the current pushing you off the main reef.

End of the dive, 16 of us had made it back to the skiff with no problems. It wasn’t unusual for these two to be the last ones back so initially, there was no concern. Then we spotted where they surfaced and the mood changed.

They had surfaced on the west side of the island opposite where the mooring was. That side of the island was not only fairly shallow, but also had a large surf break. They were on the surface inside the surf zone while what I estimate at 5-7’ waves broke in front of them. Why did they surface there? We found out later that they were . . . two guesses . . . out of air!! So they had “no” choice (other than to have been more closely monitoring air supply). And they apparently were out of air because they went back to the cleaning station to take a few more pictures instead of coming back to the skiff.

I’m assuming they had no surf training not only because of where they surfaced but also because they didn’t seem to be making any move to get horizontally out of the surf zone, which was maybe 50 yards or so wide. They’d duck under breaking waves every now and then but that was it. By the same token, we could see that the waves were fairly regular and consistent, and they were getting pounded somewhat, so they must have been tired too (as well as scared).

We dropped our mooring line and Jake, the skiff captain, moved around to assess the situation. We stayed just outside the surf zone watching what was going on and trying to decide what the options were. We tried to make a couple of moves in but then had to retreat because of the breaking waves. Unfortunately the skiff doesn’t carry any sort of a float with a long line so towing them out wasn’t a possibility. Our only option was to drive the skiff into the surf zone – waves generally break in water that 4/3 their height so I guess the water was about 8-10’ deep, which is deep enough for the skiff – to try to get them in-between breaking waves.

So while we waited at the side, we could also see that the wife was panicking. We finally made a run in and were able to grab her, literally pinning her to the side of the skiff as we escaped the next wave, but we couldn’t get the husband. The skiff crew pulled her on-board in her full gear. She was sobbing and screaming and it took a moment for her to calm down once she realized she was safe. But we still had hubby to deal with.

We circled back around and could see he was still holding on to his big camera rig. I honestly don’t remember if this part came after we got the husband or as we were trying to get to him but we suddenly realized that a wave that I will estimate at 6 feet tall was about to break right in front of and over our skiff. Jake pointed the nose directly into the breaking wave and it smashed over the top of us and through. The force of the breaking wave was strong enough that it shattered the plexiglass windshield at the front of the skiff. We basically plowed through the face of the breaking wave. Luckily, no one was injured. And we eventually got the husband (and his camera) on-board.

But in discussing it later, we all commented on how had we been turned sideways, maybe even just slightly, that the wave was high enough and strong enough that it could have flipped the skiff over, dumping all of us in the water in the surf zone – or trapping us under the capsized skiff – as well as dislodging all of the tanks that were in racks on the skiff. And those certainly had the potential to knock any of us out. It was a more dangerous situation that perhaps people realized at the moment, and kudos to Jake for getting us through unscathed.

I don’t know if the Swiss couple got a talking to later on or learned anything from it (they certainly never apologized to the group or anything like that) but here are the lessons I think you walk away with:

     • Watch your air at all times and save enough to deal with an unexpected situation

     • Don’t surface in shallow water as there may be surf there

     • If you do find yourself in a surf zone, do everything you can to get out

     • Weights and cameras are extraneous gear that can be replaced – your life is not

     • Fall on your sword, swallow your pride, and apologize to the group as well as thank the crew (and leave a big tip)

Our final dive day – and yes, they dove the next day – was Saturday and that’s a only a 2-dive day. Usually, the first “dive” is Jellyfish Lake, which I had specifically requested as I heard it’s open again after having been closed for a while. But I was told they’d been there a few weeks ago and there were literally NO jellyfish to be found so he recommended we skip it, which is what we did.

Instead, we were going to do Ulong Channel again but I had felt that the dive the day before was SO perfect that there was no way to top it so I decided to skip that dive. (Turns out the current was a little less and it was similar to the previous day.)

The final dive of the trip, after a wonderful and beautiful high-speed run through the Rock Islands, was at Chandelier Caves. I’m not a fan of the caves (which I think are sort of boring) so I tend to stay on the shallow reef in front of them and looking for macro critters in the 5-10’ viz. And I was rewarded, thanks to crew member Jay Naguit who pointed it out to me, with a Signal Goby, which I’d never seen before and which has quite unusual markings as you can see in this picture.

We were back on our mooring Saturday around noon so had the afternoon to have gear lying out to dry. In years past, the boat used to tie up to the dock so you could get on and off as you pleased. But since we were on the mooring, 100 yards offshore, you had to choose to either stay on the boat or take the skiff into shore and then come back later. Not a big deal but if you wanted an internet connection, you had to get off the boat. You also took this time to settle up your on-board bill, which included a $270 port fee (reduced to $220 because we didn’t do Jellyfish Lake), $100 for nitrox, and whatever other things you might have bought from the boutique.

Everyone gets off the boat Sunday morning at 8AM. With no Sunday flights out of Palau, that means you have to encamp at a hotel. We had four of our people go to The Cove (walking distance from the boat but not convenient to downtown Koror) and the rest of us went to the West Plaza at Lebuu Street which we really liked. Fairly new hotel (only four years old), right in town so walking distance to everything (although the jail for storyboards was closed), big rooms, reasonable rates, restaurant on-site, breakfast included, and they took us to the airport later on that evening ($30/person) for our 2:05AM United flight back to Guam and then home.

So it was an adventure in many, many ways. But overall, it was a very good trip. The diving was very good, but perhaps not as good as I recall it from some years ago. Should Palau be on your list? Absolutely. Is the Palau Aggressor II a good way to go? Absolutely. Will we do this trip again? Maybe a few years down the road since our 2025 sked is already set and I’ve got some inklings for 2026.

This is an admittedly very long trip report, even for me. But I really wanted to cover EVERYTHING that happened on this one. Be sure to check out the pix and the videos as well on both the Reef Seekers website and the Ken Kurtis SmugMug page. Thanks for sticking with it to the end.

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