Just Another Day at the Beach

Most of our weekend days are spent at a beach. Although the monotony of going to the beach gets to me at times, it's still a pretty great way to spend the day. The other weekend our friend hosted a birthday beach day at a beautiful spot I had never been to before. It is amazing that after 18 months of living on this little island we still find new places to go to. The tiny village of Amalau is surrounded by the National Park, and apparently the head of the village passed up the opportunity to lease his land to the Park Service in hopes of one day building a resort for all the tourists (hmm, considering we get about 30 tourists a year on this island that stay longer than the 4 hours allowed by the cruise boats, I'm pretty sure we won't be seeing Resort Amalau anytime soon).

Paul and the dive crew went for a dive. The rest of the day was spent playing in the waves, snorkeling, kayaking, getting competitive over some badminton, and grilling out. The highlight of this beach for Emma was the rope swing over the stream.

WWII Battleships

I am very fortunate to be a federal dive instructor and a National Park Service diver. I was recently tasked with the enviable job of flying up to Hawai’i to conduct a refresher training and recertification for NPS divers from the Pacific West region. Class was unremarkable as we reviewed dive physics, physiology, table use, and so on. What was remarkable was that of the 6 planned dives, the first two were going to be made on some of the most inaccessible wrecks in the world, the USS Arizona and the USS Utah, two battle ships sunk during WWII.

The USS Arizona is one of the most historic shipwrecks within US waters. This 608’ WWII battleship was sunk by the Japanese during their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. It was hit by a 1,760 pound armor-piercing bomb that ripped through and ignited the forward ammunition magazine. This direct hit sank the Arizona in 30’ of water in under 9 minutes, entombing 1,177 sailors and marines. The Arizona was extensively salvaged during WWII. Most of the superstructure and 2 of the 4 gun turrets were removed. The remainder of the wreck is basically intact and sits upright in the water. The #2 gun turret is still in place though the barrels of the guns have been salvaged. The #1 gun turret is completely intact. This triple barrel 14” gun is huge.

I knew I was only going to get to make one dive on the AZ so before going diving; I looked over the archeology drawings made 20 years ago by park service divers. I decided to pick one obscure artifact to look for on the wreck to determine how accurate the drawings were over time. So I picked a wine bottle which was supposed to be resting atop the #1 gun turret. Sure enough, as we made our way around the entire ship I found the #1 turret and was happy to find that the wine bottle, a tiny object on a 600’ long ship, was still there.
Visibility was around 10-15’. Much murkier than my tropical Pacific visibility I have become accustomed to. Actually, it reminded me a lot of diving on many of the big wrecks in the Great lakes. The murk is a combination of shallow water, and its accompanying algae blooms giving the water a greenish cast, and pollution. The Arizona itself is contributing to this as it is still slowly leaking oil into the harbor, an environmental issue which is still to be resolved.
After the Arizona, we went to dive the USS Utah. Also sunk on the Pearl Harbor attack, the Utah was a WWI battleship that had been outfitted as a target practice training ship. The Utah sits on her starboard side around the corner from the Arizona. It has several guns still in place and really specks of a time when US workers really took pride in their work. Most of the stainless steel on the ship is still stainless after 60 years!

All-in-all the training went quite well. I only had one pair of divers really screw up (which is a long story for another day). All photos I got from Dave Stoltz, who got them from Brett Seymour, I think. As I was in charge of dive safety I didn’t get to bring my camera with me.

WOW -- it's big!

On day two, we headed back over to the same general spot offshore to Ta'u. Our boat captain, Andy, noticed a blip on his depth finder so Paul and Doug grabbed their masks and snorkels and jumped in to investigate. Meredith and I soon followed and we were all hovering over a very big coral. It was immediately apparent that we had in fact located the giant coral. It was 2-3 times bigger than any of the other large corals we had seen previously. We proceeded to get on our dive gear and head under.

The coral looks like a small mountain underwater. Unfortunately, light and color are absorbed the deeper you go underwater. Our point and shoot camera is better at taking close-ups underwater than wide-angle shots so you'll have to use your imagination a bit with the pictures. However, if some blogger whiz out there could tell me how to post video, we have some great quality film clips I could post on the blog. Anyways, the top of the coral is located in 25 feet of water and the bottom at 50 feet. Our work as research assistants quickly set in, as Meredith and I began measuring this and adjacent Porites corals while Paul was filming. The circumference of the coral is 41 meters. This really is big, as it took a minute to swim all the way around it. It measures over 34 x 22 meters in width and length.

Given the size of a coral, its age can be estimated. This giant coral is over 1,000 years old! That could make it one of the oldest living animals on Earth!

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.