Phosphor 1

We left the small boat marina on Kwajalein Island just before sunset on Saturday, May 19,1984.  Four divers and a "boatwatch" starting a trip into the night.  Tim was driving the boat, it was his 16 ft. Boston Whaler named "Das Boot".  Tony and Tim would be one diving pair and Dave and I would be the other.  Mark would be staying on the boat to make sure it was still there when we came up from the dive, as he had on so many of these trips (He seemed to get as much from our wreck diving expeditions as any of us, even though he had never tried scuba).

It only took a few minutes to get to the floating red ball that marked the ghost ship's location.  Tim passed the buoy slightly, turned to the right and approached it toward the northeast, against the current and against the wind.  Mark reached over the bow and grabbed the tie-off line from the buoy, then tied it to a cleat on the boat.

We waited a few minutes before beginning to gear up for the dive.  We had deliberately arrived early in order to easily find the buoy, so it wasn't very dark yet.  The lagoon was calm and flat and the steady breeze was light.  Against the darkening, clear sky the surrounding islands on the horizon became black silhouettes, except Kwajalein and Ebeye, which began to light up with their usual mercury/sodium-vapor glow.

As the sky and water darkened we began putting on our dive gear.  Then we waited, divers ready for the deep except for masks and regulators.  With the disappearance of the last gleam of twilight we pulled down our masks, put the regulators in our mouths, and rolled backward over the side into the darkness.

I was first to go.  The weight of my gear, like a ghostly gravity, pulled me toward the deep.  I sank tank first for 12 or 15 feet, watching the dim sparkle of the surface slowly disappear.  Then I turned on my dive light, and with a twist and a kick I was heads down and on the move.  Downward and into the current, into the ever darker depths.  Dave was right with me.  The sponge encrusted buoy cable was a convenient, certain route to the wreck, so I put myself on a parallel course and continued swimming down.

The beam of my diving light only illuminated a 10 foot long, narrow cone of water.  The rest of the lagoon was the blackest of black.  To be completely and totally immersed in such liquid darkness is like no other experience.  The darkness didn't just surround me, it permeated my being.  I was running blind in a realm where there really are monsters!

I swam deeper and deeper.  Soon the top of the ship's superstructure came faintly into view beyond the beam, and then I was there.  In the beam of a flashlight the wreck appeared mostly dark, rich red, being almost completely encased in various red sponges.  Thousands of other kinds of plants and small creatures filled every gap between the sponges.

The ship was the Akibasan Maru, a Japanese merchant freighter sunk by U.S. Navy bombers on Jan. 31, 1944 during one of the American attacks on the Japanese at Kwajalein Atoll.  A bomb or torpedo hit split the hull from the rail nearly to the stem at the #5 cargo hold.  The Akibasan Maru then settled upright on the 160 foot deep bottom of the lagoon, balanced atop two small, deep coralheads.

At 375 ft. long, it wasn't the largest of the big freighters in the lagoon, but it certainly was big enough.  There were two cargo holds forward of the superstructure and three more aft.  Inside the superstructure was a beautiful engine room and lots of other, smaller rooms and compartments to explore.

World War II had brought it here, the bombs had brought it down, and forty years in the ocean had changed it's form.  Now it was something neither it's builders, it's sailors, or it's bombers would ever have imagined.  Despite the bomb damage and the 40 years under the ocean it still had the basic shape of the ship it used to be, but everything else about it had been changed by the ocean.  It had been assimilated.  It wasn't just in the lagoon, it was part of the lagoon.  Having been at anchor when sunk it still faced into the prevailing current.

I swam over the front of the wheelhouse at the top of the ship and then three stories down to the forward deck.  As we swam forward we began to notice swirls of green phosphorous organisms excitedly glowing in the wake of our fins.  We swam toward the bow, watching the waves of phoshor and exploring the forward decks.  Both of the forward cargo holds were filled with a strange "fog", so I couldn't see down to the aircraft parts that were scattered about the bottom of the #2 hold.  Some of the pontoons there still had Japanese Kanzi characters painted on them.  I had seen the strange fog several times there before and was never sure if it was some leaking, chemical cargo or something biological.  We had planned to go only as deep as the main deck, 100 feet down, so the holds were too deep for tonight's dive anyway.

Then we doubled back and went through the superstructure, forward to aft on the main deck level.  I followed 20 feet or so behind Dave, with my light turned off.  His light scanned his ghostly surroundings as he swam, while the fleeting reflections of his beam eerily lit my way through the clear darkness.  The foot and a half thick layer of wreck muck on the floor was just beginning to stir from the wake of Dave's fins as I swam between it and the hanging shells and tube shaped sponges.  First we traversed a large, open room.  I stopped there for a minute, just to close my eyes and relax, just to drift in the ghost ship's dark glow.  Then we followed a long, narrow corridor with a row of small compartments.  Each room had a heavy, rusting steel door.  I looked in some of them.  They were full of darkness, full of emptiness, full of ocean.  Nothing but rusting walls and a floor obscured by the wreck muck.  The only sound was my breathing, and my bubbles rising into the darkness.

We knew every inch of this ship, inside and out, or we would never have considered entering it's inner realms at night - when there are no deep blue beacons of ocean filtered sunlight shining in through the hatches and portholes.

A hatch at the end of the corridor opened to the rear deck of the ship.  We slowly swam over two dark, gaping cargo holds and some winch equipment, passing between the kingposts and derricks.  We found Tim and Tony at the aft rail of the ship, atop the stern castle.  Tony had found a fish sleeping on deck and was just beginning to harass it.  He grabbed it near the tail and started swinging it around as though it were a club (the fish was about a foot and a half long and shaped sort of like a club).  Amazingly, the fish remained rigid and motionless for at least 45 seconds before it opened it's eyes in a dazed slumber, looked around for about a second to assess it's situation, and then frantically broke free of Tony's grip!

As we all headed back toward the superstructure Dave and I stopped on the deck between the #4 and #5 holds, turned off our lights, and stood motionless with our feet on the deck.  It only took Tony and Tim a minute or so to disappear into the shadows of the superstructure.  Now I could see that the ocean wasn't dark at all!  A ghostly, pervasive green glow was everywhere.  The water itself seemed to glow green.  And the dark shape of the ship was dimly visible in all of it's detail.  But it didn't look like an object in the water, more like a huge ship shaped hole in the water.  I could see the aft part of the superstructure over 100 feet away, and the tops of the kingposts more than 50 feet above me!

I soon began to notice some tiny, phosphorescent organisms drifting by in the slow current.  There were millions of them and they were everywhere!  The smallest were almost microscopic points of light; the largest were baseball sized transparent spheres stiched with and enclosing shimmering tendrils of the ghostly green light.  They came in more shapes than the imagination could conjure, but most were either jellyfish or one of the almost infinite variety of jellyfish-like plankton.  Any slight motion in the water agitated the smaller phosphorescent creatures and triggered them to glow their brightest.  I had also noticed in the distance a few phosphorescent purple clouds, which would quickly appear and then slowly dissipate as they drifted.  We stayed there in the darkness for several minutes, on the deck of that ghostly ship, sailing through an infinite galaxy of phosphorescent life.  Then we took turns swimming by each other while stirring up the water as much as possible, blasting by like burning green comets in some bizarre universe.

I would have stayed there on the wreck all night if I could have, but our bottom time on this dive was to be 25 minutes, and we only had about five minutes left.  We began to slowly work our way back toward the superstructure.

Before long I noticed a small translucent squid in the beam of my light.  It was about two inches long and as big around as my finger.  I watched it for a few seconds, and then, with a flit, it was gone.  At the same instant it seemed to materialize in a different position, six or seven feet away and to my left.  I almost didn't see it.  I trained the light beam back on the squid and swam up to within a couple of feet of it.  Then with a twitch it once again instantly relocated itself, this time to my right and up a couple of feet.  Again I followed with my light.  I suppose the squid had finally had enough of me and my light.  This time when it fled it left a small, purple phosphorescent "ink" cloud bright enough to be seen in the beam of my dive light!  The squid's decoy had worked perfectly.  I was no longer interested in the squid at all.  I quickly turned off my light and watched as the brilliant, purple sphere of light grew and then slowly dissipated as it drifted in the current.

Our slow, reluctant ascent allowed time to look down on the shadow ship below.  How strange that a bombed, wrecked, rusted hulk could be such a beautiful thing.  But it was.  Even though I had made a great many dives on this ship I always hated to leave.  The only consolation was the knowledge that I would be back soon.

Back at the boat, Mark had been watching over the side, enjoying the drifting phosphorescence, the eerie glow of dive lights filtering up from the deep, and the stars reflecting on the water.  None of us had ever seen the lagoon so brightly lit on a moonless night before.  I never saw it that way again.