Week of Diving in Palau – my top dive spots

 Top Dive Sites of the week and a couple just ok ones too
The Scuba Diving in Palau was spectacular. The currents were mild, the water was warm, and the variety of fish life from large pelagic to small reef fish was great. It was some of the healthiest coral that I had seen in quite sometime. Needless to say we didn’t really have any horrible dives but my favorites are below.

1. Ulong Channel
2. Blue Corner (http://www.scubadiving.com/2013-gold-list )
3. Blue Holes
4. Ulong Sandbar
5. Teshio Maru (Wreck Diving)

The Blue Corner certainly lived up to its billing as one of the top dive sites in the world with a huge amount of underwater life and great walls. However, the Ulong channel really performed well for us. We had two great dives with wonderful panoramas of sharks, jacks, trevally, and huge schools of fish followed by a swift but fun drift dive down the channel where we got to see a huge wall of lettuce coral, GIANT clams, an octopus and only managed to lose one wedding ring and bang a single diver on the head with a tank. That just made it expensive.

The Blue Holes was a really unique dive where we dropped into a great cave and enjoyed the light streaming into the cave from the 4 holes. We then got to enjoy a wall dive to Blue Corner where we hooked in and watch the show of sharks and snapper schools.

Ulong Sandbar was in my top five because it was some of the healthiest coral and had some unique macro life like a leaf scorpionsfish, banded boxer shrimp, as well as schools of snappers and Moorish idols.
Teshio Maru was a unique dive and our one chance to see a World War II wreck. It was very well intact and had great coral growth on it, where we saw an octopus, an orangutan crab, and the guns and sake bottles left over from when the ship sank. Well worth it and made me wish we had done another wreck dive.

Although we had no horrible dives the two weakest dives were Shark City and the first 90% of the dive at German channel (this did turn out to be one of the best safety stops ever though with two Manta Rays and a giant school of fusiliers) and I would still recommend both of these dive sites as they had some good sites and amazing potential but the currents and marine life were light the days we dove at these two spots.

See photos from the week below: