Truk Lagoon Trip Days 1 & 2
Welcome to the daily blog of Adreno’s Truk Lagoon Scuba Diving Trip for 2011.
For those divers who have never heard of this amazing place, Truk (actually called Chuuk) is in Micronesia and was the site for operation Hailstone – America’s revenge for Pearl Harbour during World War 2. More Ships were sunk in 24 hours during that fateful day in WW2 than any other day in history. There are over 50 Japanese wrecks sitting on the floor of the lagoon making it the world’s best wreck diving location. The 8 people booked on for the adventure are Alan, Rod, Cameron, Rowan, Mark, Lisa and Nathan with Adreno’s Paul Hogger as the tour leader. The trip runs for a total of 12 fun filled days.
With any remote destination, transiting sometimes doesn’t go as planned and this was certainly true for our travel arrangements. Initially we needed 3 flights to get there...we were wrong!!
The plan was to all meet in Cairns on Thursday afternoon. Mark, Nathan and Rod started early and arrived Wednesday. The group got into party mode in the boys hotel room while Paul visited Cairns’s Beuchat Dealers and the agent for Intova Camera and Torches. We made our way to Cairns International Airport for our 11pm flight to Guam which arrived at 5:00am.We were all pretty tired still after a relatively sleepless flight. Guam is American soil and we treated ourselves to a typical Yankee fast food breakfast which was all that was available. Nathan (who is a chef) found a small food store that sold boxes of Macadamia’s with spam so he had to buy a pack just to have a taste.
With 30 minutes to go before landing in Chuuk the pilot announces that the plane has lost all its major electronics in the cockpit such as GPS, tracking, autopilot and automated landing and take-off procedures making it difficult to land on a smaller runway like Chuuk and impossible to take back off so we turned around and limped back to Guam with the pilot having to make a manual landing which was pretty wild as we had some big mountains to negotiate prior to touching down on the runway.
We disembarked happy to be alive but not happy to be back in Guam again! We had no access to food or drink except for Nathan's Spam Macadamias which were rationed out. We waited for 90minutes to swap planes which also had no provisions and tried again finally landing in Chuuk 5 hours late, hungry and tired. 29 hours after leaving Brisbane we made it - Finally!!! We board a bus for a very bumpy ride on a dirt road that resembles the track to the Tip of Australia which took us to the beautiful Blue Lagoon Resort. We unpack, eat, shower and crash early on Friday Evening.
