SCUBA DIVING
This Page Last Updated : 05 December 2004 19:27
As most of you know, next to rock climbing, my favorite activity is probably SCUBA diving. By far, the coolest place that I've ever gone diving is the Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands. The Kwajalein atoll is the largest atoll in the world. An atoll basically being a large collapsed volcano that is now flooded, but still has some land above water. This is why the islands in an atoll are usually in some sort of loop, or circle.
The Kwajalein atoll has a small footnote in history for the fierce battle that took place during World War II. Just about every tree on the main island was leveled.
Now-a-days, it of course looks much different. The main island is owned by Raytheon and is now known as the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Test Facililty. You can see that the island is shaped like a boomerang and is barely big enough to fit the airstrip. You can literally stand at either end of the runway and throw a rock in the water!
I had the pleasure of being assigned a couple missions there. It is a very small island, so there isn't a whole lot to do there that doesn't involve water. If you like aquatic activities, then you'll enjoy it, if not, then it might be a little harder to enjoy your time there. Of course, the fact that it is a tropical island means typical tropical weather and climatology. I think they should have Jimmy Buffet songs playing over loudspeakers around the island...
What I enjoyed most, of course, was the SCUBA diving. Inside the atoll, is shallow. It only goes to about 200' if I remember correctly. Outside the atoll, on the other hand, it drops off into oblivion and the bottom is quite literally many thousands of feet down. There are many, many wrecks inside the atoll that are easily reached using recreational limits.
Perhaps the most famous of the all is the Prinz Eugen, a WWII German Heavy Cruiser that was instrumental in sinking the HMS Hood. It was turned over the United States after WWII and used for nuclear tests at the Bikini atoll. It survived, not one, by two atomic blasts during tests there, and was being towed to Kwajalein for examination, when it got caught in a storm and started taking on water.
The tug captain, in an effort to saved the ship, purposely ran it aground, hoping that it would not sink. Unfortunately, it still managed to capsize, and sits where she turned-over, 60 years ago. The bottom of her stern sits above water, not from from a small island to the North, Northwest of the main island, Kwajalein. You can see the small island in the picture above, and below, you can see the pictures of her hull still protruding from the water.
Some years ago, the Germans requested one of the screws for a museum in Germany, which the United States complied, so Two of the three screws are still attached, though one is just below the surface, and the other is clearly visible. (The picture of the 2 people below is taken from another website, but you can clearly see the one screw and the shaft where the Germans took the other.)
This is what it looks like as you approach it from the North.
This is me, sitting on the stern of the dive boat.
This was the most fascinating dive I have ever experienced! I was truly in awe at the size of this massive vessel. What's amazing, is that the enormous section of the ship that is above water is maybe 10% of the whole ship. The Bow sits at around 200' (if I remember correctly).
COMING SOON...
A descriptive story of my dive on the Prinz Eugen.