Fujikawa Maru

“Blog blog blog, blog blog your dive

Blog blog blog, blog blog your dive

Blog blog blog, blog blog your dive

Blog your dive!“

- Carl, to the tune of "Barbara Ann" by the Beach Boys, as I’m writing this post

Almost every shipwreck in Truk Lagoon contains the word “Maru.” It’s Japanese for “merchant vessel,” and it indicates a ship that was originally designed for something else but commandeered by the Imperial Japanese government for their world-conquering ambitions. The Fujikawa Maru is one such ship, having begun life as a passenger-cargo vessel and then been requisitioned by the Japanese Navy in 1940. She is one of the most-dived wrecks in Truk Lagoon.

We steamed out to the wreck in a little boat with dual outboard motors. At a point seemingly in the middle of nothing, our Chuukese guide stood up on the bow and signaled for the driver to cut the engine. Holding a rope in his right hand, he donned his SCUBA mask and jumped into the water. Each wreck in Truk Lagoon is marked with a mooring – a long line extending from the wreck itself to a float 15’ below the surface. How the guides find the moorings without any surface cues is beyond me. What’s perhaps even more impressive is how our guide attached the boat’s line to a loop on the mooring 15’ below in a single breath-hold dive – and got it the first time.

With our dive gear in place, we splashed into the sea and descended down the mooring line. The Fujikawa Maru is a massive ship, one of the largest in Truk Lagoon, so we had our pick of where to go first. We swam to the stern and descended to the sand, where a jagged, gaping hole marks the point of entry of the torpedo that sank Fujikawa Maru. It’s big enough for a person and all their dive gear to fit through, so one by one, we entered the ship through her decades-old wound.

Once inside, we found ourselves in a large, cavernous hold. Daylight streamed into the wreck from multiple angles, and we chose our next direction to swim. Making our way forward, we eventually made it to the one of the ship’s large holds, which still contained numerous crushed 55-gallon fuel drums. A thick layer of sediment covered the metallic barrels, and I was careful not to stir up the silt with a wayward kick.

A Japanese Zero. Photo by Christine Dubois.

We swam upward, between the metal slats that covered the hold, forward along the ship, and then descended into the next hold. This one held spare airplane parts – wings and propellers for Japanese Zeros. The long, flat wings were haphazardly strewn across the floor of the hold, their metal sheeting missing in spots to reveal the interlaced wire frame underneath. The hold was dark except for the lights that each of us carried, and occasional flashes indicated the other divers were taking photographs.

Emerging out of the hold, we swam to the very front of the Fujikawa Maru. On her bow was a mounted gun, with a barrel about as long as I am tall, pointing over her starboard side. The guide signaled to identify the bow gun, and while the other divers kept their distance to appreciate its size, I observed the gun on a completely different scale. The long barrel was covered in corals and sponges – dark brown stony corals and soft beige corallimorphs, bright red sponges and long, stringy green wire corals. Small blue fish surrounded the sunken weapon. It was gorgeous.

A yellow-spotted anemone shrimp (Ancylomenes
luteomaculatus) in an anemone. Photo by Christine Dubois.

The top deck of the Fujikawa Maru revealed its role as an artificial reef. If I had to guess, I’d say there were probably 30 species of invertebrates and at least 10 types of fish. As we entered our decompression phase at the end of the dive, we swam upward along the ship’s kingpost, which was absolutely teeming with life. Clumps of yellow stony coral dotted the vertical structure, and a giant yellow anemone sat atop one of the posts. Squishy soft corals with clear bodies and purple polyps hung from the crossbar, and the whole structure was surrounded by the same small blue fish. I paid close attention to my depth gauge, not wanting to become too absorbed in the biology and lose control of my buoyancy. Slowly and at the proper time, my head breached the surface of the glassy-calm sea. It was an amazing dive.

My source for the historical information and artifact identification in this post is: MacDonald R. 2014. Dive Truk Lagoon: the Japanese WWII Pacific shipwrecks. Whittles Publishing: Caithness, Scotland. 265 pp.