Kogyo Maru

The wreck lies at 34 m, which sets the shape of the dive before you leave the boat: a working range of roughly 25 to 34 m, a short bottom time and a plan agreed on the surface. She is a 158 m ship, so a single dive covers a section of her rather than the whole hull, and with visibility on the wreck usually running 10 to 20 m you read one part of her at a time.

The cargo holds are the reason to be here. She was carrying construction materials for a runway when she was sunk, and a bulldozer, cement bags and a mixer are still evident inside her, which is unusual even in a bay full of loaded supply ships. There are six holds and the swim-throughs are easy by wreck-diving standards, but this is still an overhead environment at depth, so going inside means wreck training, a torch and finning that does not stir the deck.

Outside the hull the ship reads as a reef. Hard and soft coral and sponges have grown over the plating, groupers hold around the structure and barracuda pass over it, with batfish, lionfish, pufferfish and scorpionfish on the steel, nudibranchs in the growth and turtles turning up on the shallower sections. That upper structure is where the safety stop and the last minutes of the dive are usually spent, watching the fish work over a ship that has been on the bottom since 1944.