Koror Lagoon Wrecks

The freighter's bow emerges from the green at fifteen metres, its hull furred with coral. In one hold, steel helmets have rusted into a single fused mass; in another, depth charges lie lined in their racks where crewmen stacked them in 1944. A lionfish hangs motionless in a porthole.

Koror's sheltered anchorages made the lagoon a Japanese fleet harbour, and on 30 and 31 March 1944 the US Navy's Operation Desecrate One filled it with bombs, torpedoes and mines, sinking dozens of vessels in a matter of hours. They are still there, and eight decades have turned the aftermath into a layered dive ground minutes from town. The Jake seaplane rests in about twelve metres, corals over its wings and its propellers tellingly unbent; the Helmet Wreck, a ship whose name nobody knows, carries fused helmets and racked depth charges between fifteen and thirty-five metres; the tanker Amatsu Maru, Palau's deepest Japanese wreck, grows thick stands of black coral at forty. These are relics of a violent morning as much as reefs, and they are dived accordingly: full days pair wrecks to certification, exteriors first, penetration only with wreck training. Taken together, it is one of Micronesia's largest collections of Second World War shipwrecks.