This mornings dive was on he Amagisan Maru another cargo passenger ship around 137m long and one of the largest in the lagoon. Bombed and torpedoed in the American attack she sank at the 6 th fleet anchorage close to Uman Island and is about 30 minutes From the Blue Lagoon dive centre and a bit longer on the way back as we stopped a couple of times as the outboards were slowing down with a bit of water in the fuel. Any the dive is another deep one at around 60m to the seabed with the wreck sitting on her port side and stbd side at about 30m the engine room was easy to penetrate through the skylights but some what silty inside, there were however some quite interesting swim throughs and equipment to look at if you were brave enough to enter. Following the engine room the accommodation can be entred with many artefacts such as bowls and cups left in the galley. The holds contain a car and radial aircraft engines as well as som munitions. The ship has both a bow and stern gun which make for nice photographs as they are well covered in coral & matine growth.
Returning to the shot line we were accompanied by about 1dozen bat fish who seemed quite entertained by swimming through out bubbles as we moved up the shot line and hung for out 70 minutes of decompression stops.
As this mornings dive was another quite long one I've sat out this afternoons dive as I will be here for a bit longer than the rest of the divers so here are some odd facts about Chuuk.
Being an American protectorate, the use US dollars and drive on the right, all well and good but most of the cars seem to be japanies imports so are right hand drive which makes for some odd motoring. The blanket speed limit seems to be 25mph but with the state of the roads your lucky to get any where near that. The Blue Lagoon resort is only about 2.5 miles from the airport but getting here took 20 to 30 minutes which will give you some idea, I'm sure they are in a much worse state than they were 3 years ago when I was here last.
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