Truk (Chuuk) Lagoon 2025

[Bullshark]

Kensho Maru

[Bullshark]

Kensho Maru

Marine Life

These pictures show how it looks inside the ships. With no sunlight nothing grows, it just silts over with the sand. Shipwrecks are tremendous fish nurseries. Many places you can see 'small' groups of a hundred of these virtually clear small fish. They just hover and hide from larger fish. There are often schools of several different species of fish around the ships.

This fish picture from inside the cargo hold shows how divers usually enter the ship. The light coming through the upper decks on the right is where the cargo hatch used to be. You swim between the beams that are about 4' wide but can be much narrower because of the coral growth.

[BBfanboy]

Could not find a better photo of the ship when it was still afloat, but I did find this 3D scan of the wreck:

Kensho1-1038x576-288016152.jpg (51.96 KiB) Viewed 310 times

[RangerJoe]

She was the only ship in her class, in other words, she was a unique class!

https://combinedfleet.com/Kensho_c.htm

Here are her laid down date, launch date, completion date, and movements. It only took 4 months to build her to launch and then two more months to fit her out and complete her.

https://www.combinedfleet.com/Kensho_t.htm

She had a diesel engine, not boilers. So she should have been a efficient sailing ship with relatively little smoke produced. Not to mention, no boilers to clean and reline!

[CaptBeefheart]

Excellent, Bullshark! You have some great shots. Thanks for sharing.

I had the opportunity to do a five-day live aboard dive trip in 1998 on the Truk Aggressor. I'd have to check my Hailstone book to figure out the exact vessels, but I dove 11 of the 36 wrecks in the lagoon. Some memories: An AKE had a lot of 18.1 inch shells, an AS had a lot of torpedoes and spare periscopes, an AK had thousands (or millions?) of machine gun rounds and pretty much every wreck had a lot of sake and/or beer bottles. That's one way to keep morale up.

The trip itself was a lot of fun. We flew in from Guam on Air Mike. Us divers were all people who went to the same grad school or close friends thereof. The captain, a guy about our age (30s) from North Carolina if I remember correctly, said he knew we'd be fun once he saw us drink as much booze on the first evening as most groups do on the last evening. We also had a Super Bowl party. In exchange for some free dives, the local USAF weather station captain would do favors for the Aggressor. One favor was getting us a VHS tape of Super Bowl XXXIII the day after the USAF team watched it, which we would have watched on the Tuesday evening.

Although the engineer had to make a couple of unscheduled supply runs on his skiff to replenish stores of Budweiser and JD (the local store was somehow part of the commissary system), which were in danger of depletion, we spent very little time on the ground--just to and from the airport.

Kudos to Bullshark for describing the ground experience!

Cheers,
CB

[Bullshark]

Woah, that's a name with an Avatar of the mini tank on the San Francisco Maru. 37 - 62m deep. 120 - 186' deep.
It's the deepest one on my list above and the boat would not take recreational divers. Another group did it from shore.
They go down for a few minutes and slowly start coming up. A "bounce dive". All the other ships you have 15 - 20m to explore.

However Capt in 2025 diving on Pacific Master (1st boat) is a little different: no rum ration, 2 choices in a blue can Bud Lt or Dester. BL is real popular in the Islands, I guess price, low alcohol tolerance, and a hot, tropical climate, make it no. 1. SS Thorfinn had Tanduay Philippine Rum and some scotch, and one choice of beer: Heineken.

Divers don't drink much anymore, so there where no complaints and hard to find more than a few in a group of 20 that even had a beer after dinner. Very, Very Int'l crowd on liveaboards these days. Usually split 4 ways, Chinese, Aussies, Europeans, US. About half the Pac Master group where tech divers with $10k worth of gear. They would get 1 1/2 hrs on the San Francisco Maru, the hi - lite of their trip. Pure oxygen is great for a hang over but that's not how they looked at it.
Eating meals with these very cerebral (older professionals) tech divers all they talk about is their equipment. The sensors, the mix, the maintenance etc. They only talked about the dive if they could show their pictures, otherwise it seemed their experience is about their equipment and not the ship they just explored every inch of the interior.

[Bullshark]

Over the decades, there is very little to loot anymore. There are artifacts that have been moved to the top deck and re-arranged constantly. Some 12mm and 40mm shells, cooking pots, 1930's telephone, fans, and yes Saki and Beer bottles.
All the China has been looted, One ship had a little arranged as a tea service.

The Brits like to say those Japs must have been real pissheads. Every ship had a few bottles on top, and the Saki came in a magnum size, so easy to see. I am not so sure, I think they kept it for a special occasion, that's why there are so many un-opened. On some of the dives you go to the sand next to the ships that sunk at anchor and don't find any artifacts in the sand. So they were not chucking the empties over the side, or they are long since buried.

I did find trash from this century including an IPhone charging kit, must have blown off a boat. Even on the liveaboards, people of every nation are focused on their phone. You can have 20 people, from every nation in the salon waiting for dinner and all I see is the top of peoples heads looking and tapping on their phones. Even the staff. I guess if you are only social with your phone people don't drink socially. And what really, really pissed me off is that I could not get Saki during the entire trip.

As a great pompous US general once said,

Old Divers, they... they jussst, crust over and fade away...

And become WITP Grognards!

[Bullshark]

Could not find a better photo of the ship when it was still afloat, but I did find this 3D scan of the wreck:

Kensho1-1038x576-288016152.jpg

https://dive3d.eu/truk-lagoon-chuuk/

I think this is the website BB got this from. Someone stitched together their photo's to make 3D models of the wrecks.
Really show all the details, bomb holes, torp holes and damaged metal and how the metal is laying on the bottom. The sometimes huge propeller or two is always a must see as you swim behind these ships and the models really give you some nice detail. On several ships you swim through the bomb holes into the hold, or the other way around.

The Aikoko Maru was the AMC carrying ammunition that completely vaporized the bow and TBD pilot. It shows the limits of the scanning technology because there are still a mass of deck plates on the bottom. The Fujikawa maru has a tank on the top deck that is difficult to see in the images. It has no cannon, stowed inside the tank for travel. There are two 47mm guns in front of this tank that do not show up on the scan either. Also these two AT guns have been mis-labeled as howitzers because that is how it was labeled in the '90s.

Chuuk might be one of the few places that you can get so much info from the net and youtube to plan your dive, or to see these ships without getting wet.

[Bullshark]

She was the only ship in her class, in other words, she was a unique class!

https://combinedfleet.com/Kensho_c.htm

Here are her laid down date, launch date, completion date, and movements. It only took 4 months to build her to launch and then two more months to fit her out and complete her.

https://www.combinedfleet.com/Kensho_t.htm

She had a diesel engine, not boilers. So she should have been a efficient sailing ship with relatively little smoke produced. Not to mention, no boilers to clean and reline!

4 months to build and no signs of collapse. Must be the all the US scrap metal they used, or as the Aussie's say, naw, must be all that Aussie Iron Ore!

For the Kensho like all these ships the requisition date, or the date the military took control, was either right after
our embargo in 1940, or October 1941. Western Intelligence did not even pick up this change of ownership and changes in ship traffic before the war. Not even the civilian ship building program that all were later sunk.

Great websites also RJ. I like to check the accuracy of the devs and I just checked and in my mod and in Stock:

Kensho Maru 1,650ton xakl. 1 x 3-4" deck gun mounted on the front, 10 kts

on CF.com 4,861 ton. 15 - 17 kts (probably had same gun)

This is the first one the devs got wrong that I have found.
Uh Oh "Lucy's got some splainin to do"!

[CaptBeefheart]

Interesting tidbits, Bullshark.

Our group was more of a work hard, play hard kind of group. Nobody was older than 40. We pretty much exceeded the limits of recreational diving every day and the crew set up tanks at safety stops, with more tanks for the deepest dives, of course. Most of us didn't have wreck certs, but the ship's captain/divemaster gave us excellent briefings and we learned as we went. There weren't any serious incidents. You only need to hear the story of some poor sod having to pay $3000 for a DC-9 or 737 to fly at low altitude to get him to the nearest hyperbaric chamber on Guam once to put the fear of God into you. Since I was a pretty heavy breather, I usually didn't push the limits too much down deep and I wouldn't go too far into the vessels, but others might come up 30-45 minutes after me, depending on how long they used the safety tanks.

I ended up renting a dive computer since we were doing 4-5 dives a day (deepest one first), and I knew it would be too hard to manage the tables the old fashioned way. That kept it simple. Of course, there were no cell phones in those days, so people socialized like normal. Nobody was serious enough about diving to compare equipment or anything like that. I recall paying about $2200, which included most equipment (barring the dive computer) and all food and beverage.

The captain was quite adamant about not taking souvenirs, and as far as I know we all respected that--not even a machine gun round. The Japanese sent Shinto priests and cleared out all human remains by the mid-60s as I recall. There was plenty of ordnance in some of the wrecks, but as long as you didn't start pounding fuzes with hammers, nothing was likely to explode. Also, the captain told us a tale of how some Chuuk natives once pulled up a torpedo onto a beach to extract the explosives for whatever use and the warhead blew up, killing about eight of them. That put the kibosh on messing with ordnance.

I highly recommend the experience to all divers with a Pacific War interest.

Cheers,
CB

[Bullshark]

They banned fireworks here because everyone was shooting them straight and not up.
They probably wanted the gunpowder from the torp to make fireworks. Easy right?
Hard alcohol sales are banned from Dec 24 - Jan 2.

The Beetle Nut grows very well here. All natural caffeine for free. The crew made a shore run and brought back a
whole branch with 30 nuts that were going to ripen. They only work for the cigarettes and maybe to get away
from their wife and family?

Diving science has not changed at all since your (our) days. We always knew that very small bubbles at 120' become very big on the boat. You come up slowly to remove the small bubbles and this is best between 30 - 15', usually about 10 mins, and everyone's computer agree's or tells you taking those pictures of the trucks and John Deere Bulldozer (captured) means a few more minutes at 60', that you were going to do anyway or at least part of the ship was still that high. They have a chamber here now and all divers have mandatory dive insurance, and mandatory computers.

Nobody is wreck, cave, or deep dive certified, everyone is Nitrox certified. We sometimes used 28% mix (Air is 21%) and that just gives us a few more minutes to explore, but no deeper than 120'. No lines are put down, they would damage the ship. By law a guide has to bring a group of no larger than 5 into a ship. Lots of room to make gentle U turns so you are always swimming forward. Pretty cool spinning down stairwells of ships on their side. There is no current and very little to get tangled up in.

The ships were built very centralized from the Superstructure in the middle or rear, straight down to the engine room. So no wiring or piping forward or aft, just vertically. That's also where the passenger compartments are, and I saw one split toed rubber sole to have seen enough. An easy design to follow down the stairwell straight to the engine room.
Some cleanup was done, in places (maybe a lot?), but very easy diving. Recreational divers have not changed. A five minute briefing is plenty, only once because we are doing the same ship twice. Gear up and go, and just play follow the leader. NO one was on their phones studying the wreck or worried about not getting enough time at 100'. Everyone had plenty of air after a 45m deep dive. Super conservative these days and everyone trusts the conservative computer, loosely based on the Navy dive tables.