The Shotan Maru is an 87-metre freighter which is sitting in a valley with a sand hill on the starboard side.  The ship lies upright at about 50 metres in the Fourth Fleet Anchorage to the east of Dublon Island.

The plan was to dive to the stern gun, then explore the rest of the ship as far as air and time permitted.  We descended over the superstructure and headed down towards the stern gun. The gun is said to be a 3-inch and is covered in sponges.  My computer said depth 44.6 metres, with no decompression time of only 8 minutes!  I swam back along the aft deck where there is extensive bomb damage and the mast fallen over onto the sand hill.  Neil came out of a rear door in the superstructure and I went in, through the passageway and out the front.  

There are two anti-aircraft machine guns near the engine room skylights. I swam to the top of the funnel, then to the forward mast and up the anchor line for a dive of 31 minutes.  The other divers went well into deco to see the trucks on the hatch cover beams over Hold 1 and the two windlasses on the forecastle. They used their pony bottles to prolong the dive.