![]() The dancing shafts of sunlight shooting straight down through the perfectly clear water to the bottom were so beautiful that my throat tightened. The morning had been rainy, but the clouds parted serendipitously at noon just as we descended into a wide hole - one of four - that was 80 feet deep. Last March, a day after a dive at Blue Corner, I joined a group led by Fish and Fins, a local dive operation, to a spot a few hundred yards away called Blue Holes. While the big fish are the big attraction, some of Palau’s 76 official diving spots offer extraordinary natural beauty. is not only expanding its network of no-fishing areas, but has also challenged other island nations to do the same. ![]() But in Palau, the big fish are still very much in evidence, and the government of President Tommy Remengesau Jr. The Philippines, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea have greater varieties of fishes (3,000 versus 1,500 in Palau) and corals (700 versus 450), but a laissez-faire attitude and a population explosion in those places have left their reefs largely depleted of anything sizable. Large swaths of the nation’s southern islands, called the Rock Islands, where most of the diving takes place, have been off-limits to commercial fishermen since 1997, and poachers are regularly sent to jail. This rich marine population is no accident, but the result of Palau’s history of conservation. Two-foot oval travellies, junior cousins of the tuna, are also capable of great speed, but at Blue Corner, they just cruise by in no great hurry.Īmid all the heavy hitters - apex predators to marine biologists - are not only the triggerfish but also dense schools of slim fusiliers, nearly a foot long, their backs an intense shade of lemon yellow, and the four-inch queen fish, which have the color and intensity of a spark. More common, the silver, deadly looking barracudas, the Ferraris of the reefs, travel in schools during the day and hunt alone at night. Then come - usually alone - the blue-green, five-foot Napoleon wrasses, decimated throughout the Pacific by the extraordinary prices paid by rich Chinese in Hong Kong for live ones (up to $10,000), but, like the sharks, protected in Palau. The white-tips seem utterly unafraid of people and swim right up to you before turning away at the last second. You’ll usually see one or two at any given moment, maybe 20 to 30 during a dive. ![]() ![]() Then you start to notice the big guys just outside the drop-off, like the model-thin white-tip sharks, the heftier gray reef sharks, both about five feet long, and the smaller black-tips. Thousands of five-inch, deep blue and gray red-toothed triggerfish propel themselves by frantically waving their enormous dorsal and ventral fins, to comical effect. The first thing that overwhelms you is the sheer density of fish around you. The current is strong, so you attach yourself to a line and hook and then attach the hook to a lump of dead coral, relax and watch. It’s a slope followed by a sharp drop-off, and it’s one of the most famous dive sites on the planet, the Via Veneto of the underwater world. PALAU, an island nation in the Pacific Ocean, roughly 500 miles east of the Philippines, is a diver’s dream, nowhere more so than at a piece of coral reef called Blue Corner. ![]()
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