Palawan and "Star of Scotland" | 2009-02-21

Four of us went out on Giant Stride for another dive on the Palawan yesterday. We broke into two teams of two, Maciek + Christopher and myself + Ari. Unfortunately, our designated photo/videographer wasn't in attendance.

More information on the Palawan can be found on Nick's January blog post, but suffice it to say it sits upright in about 130 feet of water, with the highest structure reaching approximately 100 feet.

Since we didn't have information on current, we'd told Captain Jim to consider it a live boat; he was to come get us if we flew a bag.

We descended the anchor line to find it looping width-wise across the deck with the actual anchor caught on the upper edge of the port hull. We spent about 8 minutes cleaning it up: moving lifting the chain up and over the walls, and freeing the anchor. While the water itself was fairly calm, there were some upwelling eddies near the vertical walls of the ship. If you got to close, it would pull you into the wall and shoot you up and out before sucking you back. It took some care to properly free the anchor chain in those conditions.

After the working portion of the dive was over, we proceeded to swim towards the stern and then toured the main deck of the ship back towards the bow. Viz was in the 20-30 foot ballpark.

After about 35 minutes on the bottom, we headed up the line for deco (Oxygen) which was uneventful until the very end, when a curious juvenile Mola Mola (sunfish) decided to join us at about 5 feet. We decided it was worth extending the deco a few minutes to enjoy its company. It was my highlight of the day.



After surfacing, the boat turned back north for the about 80 minute trip up to Santa Monica for our second dive on the Star Of Scotland. As far as I'm concerned, the Star doesn't exist ;).

Maciek was the only diver who'd been on the Star, and in his experience the average viz is only about 5 feet, so when we splashed into a good 20 feet of viz we were all excited. The Star (supposedly) sits broken in about 70 feet. We descended the anchor line and all was uneventful until, in the words of Christopher, Maciek "disappeared" into what can only be described as a 30' tall eruption of silt. We quickly got into a tighter formation as the viz shrunk to an arms length as best and about 6" at worst. Chris tied his reel to the anchor, and we swam out in touch contact in the direction Jim thought would be most promising if we didn't immediately see the wreck. After letting out about 100' of line, we ran a circular pattern and came up with nothing but a hand signal for "the exit is that way."

After cleaning up the line, we followed the anchor chain back along the sea floor and headed for the surface.


One out of two ain't bad.

-MB