Dive San Francisco Maru, Truk Lagoon - Scuba diving on Japanese WWII wrecks in Truk Lagoon, Chuuk, Micronesia.

**A light tank on the fore deck of the San Francisco Maru.**

The San Francisco Maru is an older style freighter, 117 metres long, lying upright at 60 metres in the Fourth Fleet Anchorage to the east of Dublon Island. It was used to carry munitions and they are still there!

Aftship

It was a long descent to the superstructure in clear blue water. Ten metres below me, I saw Neil and Paul swim past the remains of the funnel and down through the engine room skylights. I changed direction and dived straight down through the skylights before stopping my descent in the engine room with squirts of air into my BCD.

There was not much to see in the engine room, except for the hole in the port side caused by the boiler explosion. We swam into Hold 4 where Neil took pictures of the mounds of cartridges. I followed Paul to the rear of the hold where there was a pile of artillery shells. My computer was displaying warnings and beeping about the depth of 58 metres and the deco of 3 minutes at 3 metres. That was enough decompression time for me, so I emerged between the hatch cover beams and swam up towards the superstructure. Because of the lengthy decompression requirements, twin tanks would provide a significant safety margin for these dives.

Foreship

We glided down to the superstructure, then over the three little tanks, and around the bow gun, which is on a circular platform. The others went over the side to the bottom to see the steamroller at over 60 metres and became fairly ‘narked’. Rod and I went down into Hold 1 with the mines and detonators and found that there was a fair amount of empty space. Apparently, local divers retrieve the mines for use in fishing by explosives. There is a narrow entrance to the lower hold but I returned to deck level because the top layer looks like it could fall in at any time. I dived into Hold 2 and looked under the trucks. I reached 54 metres at the bulkhead where there seemed to be an entrance to Hold 1, but I was not going in there! My computer showed deco of 4 minutes at 6 metres, 7 minutes in total. With only 100 Bar in my main tank, it was time to go.

Neil, Paul and Michael appeared as I ascended past the two tanks on the starboard side, and up past the bridge to the anchor line. I waited until I reached 40 metres before using the pony bottle. There was only 50 bar left in the main tank which was not enough to make a safe ascent without the extra 24 cubic feet in the pony. I made a slow ascent with stops at 10, 6, 3 metres, before climbing aboard after a thrilling 26 minute dive.