| P-MAN X Update #12
- Trolling for sharks; Japanese cave; ancient Palauan cave;
underwater aircraft wreckage Our friend Max met us at Neco bright and early this morning to join us on the boat and try to navigate us to an underwater "wing" that he's often seen southeast of Malakal. We drove the boat over to the area, which was very shallow, and did a series of search grids just looking over the side of the boat. The visibility was pretty good, but Max was unable to locate the object, which he described as being about 20 feet long. Eventually we decided to do some "trolling." That's when we put two trailing lines over the side of the boat, one on each side, and one or two divers (snorkels only) grab each line and allow the boat to pull them along while they scan the bottom below. We had two divers on each side, one at the bow and one near the stern. We did that for about a half hour, took a break for a few minutes, and did another half-hour shift. No joy. Max just couldn't quite recall exactly where the object is. We've decided to go visit our friend Matt, who's now flying one of the two helicopters in Palau, and see if he's willing to fly over the area under ideal light conditions to try to spot the "wing." He has a great eye for stuff like that and has given us some good leads in the past based on that eye. Moving on, we decided to start the process of visiting all of the "red circle" locations from the map sent to us by Minoru Kamada. The circles represent U.S. crash sites reported by the Japanese soon after the end of the war. We headed back toward Koror and did some more trolling at one of the red-circle areas, with no joy. We discovered that we didn't have a GPS waypoint for a nearby site, so we decided to defer surveying it until we have good coordinates for it. We moved around to the other side of a nearby island and located another circle area. Turns out that we did some surveying in this general area (but not this specific location) in 2000, using a magnetometer. The area isn't particularly deep (less than 50 feet) but it's very silty and murky, and it would be easy for wreckage to sink out of sight on the bottom. We may save this location for side-scan sonar. We continued to a couple of places out on the southeast end of Toachel Mid, the channel that separates the islands of Babelthuap and Koror. We did some more trolling at one of these sites with no finds, and decided to blow off the other site, since it's shallow and clear and there's a lot of boat traffic through the area - and anything that was not easily salvaged after the war would be common knowledge to hundreds of local boaters. Finally, we headed over to today's last site, which appears on the map to be either on or immediately adjacent to one of the small islands at the outer end of Toachel Mid. We searched around the perimeter of the island without noticing anything except a couple of interesting caves. We decided to wrap up the survey but were intrigued by one of the caves, so pulled right up to it and some of us went in to explore. It was pretty clearly a former Japanese gun emplacement, with a little concrete poured at the mouth to make a flat entrance. The cave wasn't very big, and didn't contain anything of interest to us. Just around a little bend we'd noticed what appeared to be a smaller natural cave, and Grover decided to wade over to explore it (the water there was only four feet or so deep). He came back shortly and announced that Laura would probably be interested in the other cave, because it contained some bones!
We all slogged over to the natural cave and headed inside. You have to climb up a slippery, uneven slope to get into the cave, but once inside, you're treated to a breathtaking sight: it's a really large cave with a very high, vaulted ceiling, complete with stalactites, a bunch of low, rounded stalagmites, and tons of nooks and crannies, some of which contain collections of what Laura (and Grover) identified as human bones. Their guess is that they are ancient Palauan bones that were interred in the cave in a ceremonial way.
On the way out of the cave, Joe, who had been waiting at the boat, mentioned that he'd noticed something with rivets, right beneath the boat, in about four feet of water. Sure enough, there were several small pieces of aluminum with aircraft-like rivets, and some parts that look a lot like canopy framework. We photographed three pieces. But there was nothing else evident in the immediate area. Looking straight up, we began to hypothesize that if an aircraft had hit the top or side of the island above this point, small pieces might have rained down into this area. Pat and Grover climbed up onto the island from the deck of the boat, and did some exploring. There didn't appear to be anything else up there. We'll probably go back and search the area with the metal detector and also to climb back up and see if there's other wreckage on top of the island. No breakthroughs, but at least by following the trail of red dots on the map, our first day with the full team managed to turn up some genuine aircraft wreckage. Now the research for this one begins. - Reid |
- Main Site
- Expeditions
- Our Story
- Miscellany
