The Search for the Giant Coral

For the 81-mile trip to the Manu'a Islands, I decided to try a different motion sickness drug, which turned out to be a big mistake (Bonine for any of you looking for a drug review). For over 3 hours, I had my head in a bucket and was begging Paul to put me out of my misery. I didn't want to suffer the day-long drowsiness associated with Dramamine, as we were going to be making a couple dives right when we arrived in Ta'u. Despite the hours of torture, I sucked it up and donned my dive gear as we approached the island. I could barely stand, but I wanted off that boat more than anything.

One of the main goals of this trip was to gather data and film one of the world's largest corals. We were given some GPS coordinates for the location of the giant coral so we jumped off the boat and proceeded to look around. Given that it is a giant coral and we had a location, we thought we wouldn't be able to miss it. We dropped down and started swimming. We immediately passed several large corals of the same species (Porites spp.), and although they were big, we did not see the so-called giant. It was still a great dive... we saw a humphead wrasse, a blacktip reef shark, guineafowl puffers, and a school of about 200 3-foot long barracuda. I was convinced right then that the scuba diving was going to be far better than the typical dives on our island, Tutuila.

We made a second dive and found several more Porites corals. Again, a single giant did not stand out, but they were huge with 20 meter circumferences. Paul has adopted the name a fellow researcher on the trip, Doug Fenner, gave to the dive site, "The Valley of Giants." We ended the day thinking our GPS coordinates were either wrong or we just had to accept that the giant coral wasn't as large as we anticipated. We called it a day and headed off to the lodge on Ofu.