March 23: Palau Day 2

We woke up to a beautiful morning just outside our hotel room.

After we had some breakfast we loaded up, headed over to the dive shop to rent our scuba gear and headed over to the dock for our boat. Once we got all the gear loaded up and set up for our first dive we had to wait for one of the boats to fill up on gas so we snorkeled around the dock.

Just in the small area that we snorkeled we saw some pretty cool marine life. There were quite a few giant clams, but only a few of them had grown to be medium to large size.  We also saw a banded sea snake hanging around some rocks.

Once the boat came back from the gas station we figured out that we all needed to get permits to dive and snorkel in Palau so we had to wait while Dr. Chang went to get that. By the time we finally left the dock in was probably close to noon.

It took us about 45 minutes to get to the dive site, which was Blue Hole. Blue Hole is one of the most famous dives in Palau and it lived up to the reputation. Unfortunately, when we went down my phone died on me, so I wasn’t able to get any pictures. The dive itself started out as a wall dive and then dipped down to the floor at about 100 feet where we went into a kind of cavern. When you looked up you could see three big holes that were open to the surface, hence the name Blue Hole.

Blue Hole

We saw a wide variety of marine life from pelagic fish like Ulu and black tip reef sharks to reef fish like clown trigger fish to brightly colored soft corals and anemones. Unfortunately the whole afternoon was overcast so the lighting wasn’t too good and the dive wasn’t as spectacular as it could have been, but it was still pretty epic.

When we finished with the first dive we came up and had a good Adventist lunch of Big Franks and after we finished some of us snorkeled while we waited to head to the next dive. The second dive was only about a 2 minute drive from Blue Hole in the opposite direction from Blue Corner (another famous dive site). Before we got in it started to rain on us, so this dive did not have the best lighting either. When we first went down I looked inside a little head of coral and saw a small crab just looking up at me. He was white on the belly and as you moved up his body it faded to a bright orange and then a dark orange and he had lots of tiny purple dots all over him. I was pretty annoyed at that point that my camera phone had stopped working.  This dive was a pure drift/wall dive and we saw a similar range of sea life as the first dive, but it seemed like there was almost more of it this dive. There was a large purple anemone that had some Clark’s anemone fish swimming around inside of it that was pretty cool. We also saw a larger banded sea snake in the very beginning of the dive and a fair sized school of bonito swam by us in the middle of the dive. About halfway into the dive a couple of reef sharks showed up and kinda swam around us for about 10-15 minutes. Our guide took us up above the wall and sat our whole group down. Once we sat down quite a few fish started coming up and swimming around us. After about a minute a huge Napolean wrasse started swimming around us and apparently once people sit somewhat still around that area the fish come close because they think they are going to be fed. We spent several minutes hanging around and then we made out way up for the safety stops and back on to the boat.

The boat ride back to the dock was a pretty rainy one and most of the people were getting a bit cold. Once we got back we unloaded everything and took it back to the dive shop and then went back to the hotel to shower up. After we cleaned up we headed into town for dinner. We ended up going to a restaurant that one of our guides, Tristan, had recommended to us as having good Palauan food. It was called The Penthouse Restaurant and it was inside of the Penthouse Hotel. I started with demok, which is a taro leaf soup with coconut milk and then I had a mangrove crab in a spicy sauce. Unfortunately coconut crabs are out of season, but the mangrove crab was really good and it was really meaty.

Demok

The spicy sauce on it was kind of sweet and not too spicy and it tasted really good with rice. When we finished dinner we came back to the hotel and crashed.

Mangrove Crab