P-MAN X Update #17 - Bena Sakuma was right
08 March 2008 - Saturday

Over a period of several years, we've had exactly zero luck getting our friend Bena Sakuma to show us a site he's been telling us about. As he always described it, there are some parts of an aircraft high up above the water, below the face of a vertical cliff on a small island, and just below the cliff there are some parts in the water. We've cruised around the island by ourselves a couple of times, but have never been able to spot the wreckage, and have surely been stood up by Bena more often than any of our other Palauan friends. He's always had a valid reason for not showing up, but we'd almost given up on his site.

Turns out that before he left Palau a week ago, Rich Wills of JPAC was able to find another Palauan who knew about the site and took Rich there. He gave us the coordinates of the site, and also took a bunch of photos that they took during their visit.

Armed with that info, it was fairly easy for us to identify the spot. There are some small pieces of structural aluminum in the water among the rocks at the base of the cliff. And right in the middle of the pile of rocks is a more-or-less complete radial engine. The cylinders are scattered around the three-bladed prop, and one landing-gear leg lies almost beneath the engine. This stuff is wedged in a fairly small crevice that's pounded by the surge, making it difficult to take a photo. Here's the only decent shot I got of the prop. I was lying on top of a rock with one leg wedged in a crack, holding on with one hand and the camera in the other, being bounced around by the surging water. Most of the photos are pretty blurry from motion - definitely the worst set of underwater photos I've ever taken. But without the camera lent to us by Mark Evans, there wouldn't be any photos at all...thanks, Mark!

Definitely a Bent Prop. Best guess is that the aircraft
hit the face of the cliff, and that the engine and landing gear
fell down into the water, leaving at least one wing
and other large chumks of debris on a ledge above the water.
© Reid Joyce 2008

Grover climbed up to the shelf above the engine and explored some more wreckage that came to rest up there. Much of the aluminum shows signs of an intense fire. Some parts that aren't so badly burned still show signs of the kind of red primer that is characteristic of Japanese aircraft of the WWII era. Our conclusion is that this was a Japanese aircraft.

After we secured from this snorkel/cliff-scramble site, we headed over to Ulong island and had lunch on one of the few beaches in the Republic of Palau.

After lunch, we headed back to the southeast end of Toachel Mid, to do some more exploring around the cave where we found some aircraft debris a few days ago. We had timed this visit to happen at low tide, so Pat was able to walk along the base of the cliff with our metal detector, stopping occasionally to pick up metal objects and decide if they were worth photographing.

Pat walks through the low-tide shallows with the metal detector.
© Reid Joyce 2008

Several items seemed to deserve documentation, but none helped us to positively identify the aircraft type. One object is intriguing, and several of us feel that we've seen something before, but we can't quite put our finger on what it is. Can any of our readers help?

It's metal, and about the diameter of a silver dollar,
if anybody remembers what one of those looked like.
Rounded outer edge, with a rounded, five-pointed star
cut out of the middle. If you know what this is,
please drop us a note. © Reid Joyce 2008

While I photographed stuff and occasionally helped Pat root up some metal objects buried in the sand, Grover climbed up on top of the island, where he found absolutely nothing. And while all that was going on, Flip and Laura snorkeled along parallel to the island in slightly deeper water. Except for a few chunks turned up by the metal detector, nobody found anything useful.

We wrapped up the day by heading out across the very shallow area to its edge, where the Toachel Mid channel empties out at its southeastern end. There we did more "trolling for sharks" by dragging Grover, Flip, Laura and me beside the boat and moving along the very edge of the shallow shelf, so we could scan the slope down into deeper water to see if anything of interest had perhaps slid down the slope. With the tide coming in there was pretty good visibility, and an amazing abundance of colorful fish. But we found nothing other than a couple of pieces of wood that looked like maybe portions of the gunwale of a small wooden boat.

We had dinner at Carp, a restaurant within walking distance of our hotel. One of their specialties is fruit-bat soup, which Laura has said she's willing to try. Just not this time. She wants to go back some time when Joe can come along and be her spiritual guide during the great fruit-bat adventure. For those few of you who haven't encountered this delicacy, it's basically a bowl of broth with a whole fruit bat floating in it - teeth, hair, eyeballs...the whole thing. Pretty cool. We'll be sure to take pictures when that happens.

- Reid
 

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