Thorfinn / Truk Lagoon
Truk Lagoon (now known as Chuuk) was another wonder first seen during a 1973 familiarization trip with Continental Airlines out into Micronesia.
Continental had offered diving before I got there, but when I arrived, the airline was planning a new campaign of aggressive promotion to get divers to come to Truk. I joined the effort with enthusiasm.
A kind and hard-working native man named Kimiuo Aisek ran the dive shop, and we became good friends. He showed me the hills where he and his family had hid during the Operation Hailstone air attack on the Japanese transports in the lagoon. His descriptions were both chilling and inspiring. We dove a number of the wrecks on that visit, made an agreement, and for several years I sent and took groups of divers to see Truk's best (and sometimes its deepest) wrecks.
One year, we had a cyclone that circled and hit the island twice while I was there escorting a group. Despite howling winds, horizontal rain and the fact that Kimiuo's dive boat was an old World War II landing craft with no shelter, we never missed a dive. It had to rank as one of the ugliest dive trips in history, but we all enjoyed it. The hotel back then had an early video game in a big floor console, and we played Pong while watching the rain come down in sheets and torrents.
After a few years the owner of a big live-aboard, the S.S. Thorfinn, approached me to offer live-aboard diving in the lagoon as well as offering diving at Ponape and Oroluk Atolls to the southeast.
As a specialist by then in live-aboards I began offering divers either shore-based or live-aboard exploratory diving. We all did an awful lot of diving during those adventures!
For wreck divers, Truk is one of the planet's most impressive gatherings of wrecks. It is especially effective for photographers because the wrecks are both in benign diving depths and ( usually ) clear water conditions.
Here's a story from my 25th anniversary return trip in 1999 and a YouTube video on diving in both Palau and Truk.
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Oldies but Goodies !!!
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Maintenance by Patricia of Visual Ad Wrx
Modified 02.06.17