Day 12: Shark Dive

Day 12 – Shark Dive

Dive 1 – Yap Caverns: We departed the dock at a little after 8am, today’s dive destination for the first dive was Yap Caverns. It was the clearest dive to date in Yap. It reminds me of a maze, you start at an opening in the wall and you just follow the path, with walls on both sides. There were a couple of places where it would fork off, but we just followed the guide. If you did not want to be in the maze then you could just go up to get out then spend your time along the wall. The caverns depth was only about 30 feet, but there were plenty of things to see. There were only a couple of places where you would need a light, otherwise there was plenty of daylight to swim by. The boat was moored on the edge, so we spent the whole time, 70 minutes, in the general area. I did see more nudibranchs which I have not seen before. Overall it was a great dive.

The boat slowly moved north, during our surface interval, toward our next dive site. During this time Mike Musto, our leader from Caradonna Dive Travel, gave us a little review for tomorrow’s exam. We also, had some fresh banana bread to eat.

Dive 2 – Cabbage Patch: I did this dive last time I was here in 2006. It was still a great dive, the only difference this time is we went north with the current whereas last time the current took us south. I found more nudibranchs and four crown of thorns. At the end of the dive we found some popcorn shrimp and an anemone crab. I hope my pictures turn out. Again we had a 70 minute dive, with warm blue water.

For our surface interval this time we anchored at SILAS (surface interval lunch and snorkel) lagoon. We had lunch and I took a small nap. Then we were off for our final dive of the day, the last dive in Yap and on this trip.

Dive 3 – Vertigo: This dive was a shark feed dive. They set us up on the edge of the reef then dropped a milk crate with fish. The sharks were all over it. Once the frenzy was over I got a little closer to take some pictures. I was right in their path, I had some of them get so close to me, that I used the camera strobe to push them off. They were not big sharks; most of them were gray reef sharks and a couple of black tips. On this dive I used Liz’s camera being it had a wide angle lens and a video mode. We spent a little more than an hour on this dive. Toward the end we all swam around looking for other things to see, I took this time to try and find some shark teeth. No luck, but I did find a large moray eel out looking for a meal. It was interesting doing our safety stop with a bunch of sharks swimming around us.

This was a great trio of dives to conclude our diving. The only thing that would have made it better would have been Liz joining me. She was tired and took the day off from diving. Time to get rest we have our big test in the morning then after lunch we are headed out for our island tour. Good night or I guess good day or morning to some of you. Happy bubbles.