Palau
Big Drop-off
Step off shin-deep reef into a vertical abyss that drops nine hundred feet into darkness.
One moment you are floating above shin-deep reef, watching anthias flicker over the coral. One fin-kick later the bottom is gone: the wall falls away beneath you towards nine hundred feet, and the blue below your fins simply refuses to end. You are hovering on the edge of an abyss, and the abyss is busy with life.
Big Drop-off, also called Ngemelis Wall, runs along the southwest side of Ngemelis Island about 24 miles from Koror, and it does what its name promises: the reef edge sits barely beneath the surface, then drops straight down towards nine hundred feet. What holds divers is not the void but the wall itself, dressed in soft corals of deep violet and hot pink, sea fans and leather corals, with pyramid butterflyfish and square anthias in clouds and grey reef sharks, hawksbill turtles and whitetips cruising the open water. Guides run it as an easy drift between three and 120 feet, gentle enough on many days for novice divers, while snorkellers work the sunlit rim during lunchtime stops. Halfway along, a chain and ball left by a 1940s naval operation still hangs on the wall, a small rusted footnote in all that colour.
Solo
Hovering on the lip of a wall that falls nine hundred feet rearranges any sense of scale. The drift is gentle enough that you can simply hang there and let the site do the work.
Couple
The step from shin-deep reef to bottomless blue is a shared jolt neither of you will quite describe afterwards. Snorkeller-and-diver couples both get the wall: one from the rim, one from inside it.
Friends
An easy drift with enormous scenery suits a mixed group: novices manage it on calm days, and the deck debrief argues over who saw the leopard shark.
- The wall drops straight down to 900 feet from a reef rim barely beneath the surface on the southwest side of Ngemelis Island.
- Soft corals in deep violet and hot pink coat the wall, with sea fans, leather corals, clouds of pyramid butterflyfish and grey reef sharks in the blue.
- Guides run it as an easy drift between three and 120 feet, workable for novice divers in moderate current, and the sunlit rim doubles as a lunchtime snorkel.
- A chain and ball from a 1940s naval operation still hangs on the wall among the corals.
Lunch comes out of the boat's cool-box at anchor in Ngemelis's lee, and the wall's sunlit rim is the after-lunch snorkel.
Back in Koror, toast the wall with a cold Red Rooster amber, brewed in town at Micronesia's only craft draft brewery.
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