Liz Rogers Photography

Propellors are one of the best wreck features to find underwater. They’re nice and recognisable and they always hang out in the same place. If they’re still somewhere down there, they’re usually fairly easy to find and identify. And the bigger the ship wreck, the bigger the propellor, right up to some very impressive sizes. There’s something about swimming between massive blades that could have quite easily chopped you up into little bits while in operation. A lot of the regularly dived wrecks out of Melbourne were scuttled and in some cases had their props removed before heading down to the ocean floor. Whereas the Truk shipwrecks went down with everything on board, so whether the propellors are present or not [read more…]

From the photos I’ve already posted here of the Truk Lagoon shipwrecks, you might be forgiven for thinking there was very little for your average reef-loving diver to look at. The insides of the wrecks are dark and rusty (albeit filled with interesting things) and the deeper wrecks like the San Francisco Maru get less light and less coral encrusting them. This post is to correct those illusions – the Truk Lagoon wrecks are covered in tropical coral and very active fish life. In the shot above you can see the small fish swarming around the kingpost pair, ready to dart back into the protective corals should the predatory trevally swim by. Most of the shallower wrecks have at least [read more…]