Words cannot begin to describe the coolness of this dive trip. My first diving in the Pacific, with its 18-fold species diversity advantage over the Caribbean. Seven days booked on a luxury liveaboard. My buddy Derek flying out to meet me in Micronesia. The legendary Palau, with eye-popping sheer dropoffs to the abyss utterly teeming with fish large and small, and its distinctive mushroom-shaped islets, their limestone bases undercut by eons of wave action.

I arrived in Palau a couple of days before Derek, and stayed at the luxurious (and expensive) Palau Pacific Resort. I did a two-dive day with the resort's dive operator, Splash, which were close inshore and had limited visibility. Nonetheless, I was ecstatic seeing so many species of fish and invertebrates I'd previously seen only in books or aquariums. Splash wasn't very warm and fuzzy, but ok.

Once Derek arrived we boarded the Ocean Hunter, which was to be our home for the next week. The boat is not very impressive to look at, she's a converted motorsailer, 65 feet long, built in Holland in 1979.

The Ocean Hunter is owned and operated by Israelis Navot Bornovski and his wife Tovah. Navot was traveling while we were there and we didn't get to meet him, but Tovah was super sweet. The Ocean Hunter takes only six (yes, six!) divers. We were fortunate (and smart) to have reserved the aft stateroom, which is much more luxurious than the forward berths and has a private shower and head. The Ocean Hunter, due to its small size and maneuverability, is able to drop its divers right on top of the dive sites, as opposed to ferrying them back and forth in zodiacs as the bigger liveaboards in the area are obliged to do. The small number of divers makes possible a very personalized diving program - if you want to do six dives a day you can do six dives a day. Two of our fellow divers onboard were German students who seemed to have unquenchable thirsts. Ocean Hunter arranged a launch to bring out several cases of their favorite beverage in the middle of the trip while we were offshore! The food onboard was fabulous, prepared by a Philippino chef. The boat never felt cramped or uncomfortable, and the crew was wonderful.

There are no superlatives adequate to describe Palau's diving. Suffice it to say there was some of pretty much everything. I loved the drift dives; the boat would drop us off, we'd "fly" for miles over the reef, and the boat would pick us up. The walls are colossal and awe-inspiring. the marine life incredibly prolific. The wall tops are about 50 feet down, and the bottoms are near the lowest point on earth, the Marianas trench. Currents at the wall tops are such that divers have to anchor themselves to the reef with hooks and lines, but the sharks that parade endlessly back and forth only a few feet away swim through it effortlessly.

We made a stop at Jellyfish Lake for a snorkel with uncountable land-locked jellyfish who, in the absence of natural predators for ages, have lost their ability to sting. Well worthwhile.

Palau is close to Yap, renowned for its resident manta ray population, and Truk Lagoon, world-famous for its bay full of coral-encrusted sunken WWII warships.

Here are my dive log entries for the trip: