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Rongelap safe for human habitation again.
A small population of Marshallese have
repatriated Rongelap to re-establish an
historic way of life, lost for so long.
Because it’s safe for the islanders, it was
also safe for the Indies Surveyorto explore
the passes, slopes, walls and reef crowns
around the atoll.
Our crew had surveyed charts in
advance for more than a dozen dive-sites,
most unnamed, and many likely never to
have seen a diver. And over the next fivedays we would shoot the rapids at passes
on incoming tides, visit never-before-
dived vertical walls and explore coral
gardens that rival any in the world.
We arrived at Rongelap ahead of
schedule. The seas were calm, and good
juju resulted in a pair of large yellowfin
tuna from handlines trolled behind the
Surveyor, begging the question of which
comes first – breakfast sashimior diving?
The tuna could wait.
We iced the catch, kitted up and rolled
into impossible 50m visibility at 8am. We
were greeted by grey reef, then silvertip
sharks as we descended through 35m.
The quarter-moon phase generates
a mild current, and we drifted across
a beautiful spur-and-groove reef towards a
distant pass. I was shooting wide-angle,
but noted the 7cm Helfrichi dartfish
hovering above small, sandy pockets on
the slope, which was now near-vertical, at
30m. I saw too many fish that were new to
me and my image library, so decided to
shoot macro on the next dive.
Bottom-time and nitrox waning, I
worked my way toward the crown of the
slope, where the coral coverage was dense
and diverse. Finally, I saw them. At 20m, in
a wide sandy bowl, a pair of beaded
anemones were hosting families of three-
band anemonefish!
I had the wrong kit, but hoped to get
a few shots by carefully placing the glass ofOddly, while 70 years of oxidation have
taken their toll on the Japanese ships,
many aircraft are surprisingly clean, with
little marine growth. My favourites are the
planes still standing nose-down on the
bottom, as if on a final dive-bombing run.
After three days of diving Kwajalein
Lagoon’s wrecks, it was time to sail north
to Rongelap Atoll. Its history is even
darker than that of battle-torn Kwajalein,
and a taste of real exploratory diving.Rongelap Atoll
On 1 March, 1954, the US military
detonated a 15-megaton thermonuclear
device on Bikini Atoll, codenamed Castle
Bravo. The 4.5-mile-diameter fireball,
forming within one second of the blast,
was visible on Kwajalein, 250 miles away.
The blast vaporised two Bikini islands,
blew a crater 76m deep by 2000m wide
into the atoll’s ring and formed a
mushroom cloud reaching nearly nine
miles into the sky.
As islanders through the archipelago
reported “the Sun rising in the west”,
contaminated residue from the cloud
began dropping radioactive debris, up to
2cm deep, on Rongelap and its
unprepared population, 95 miles east.
Sixty years, billions of dollars and
decades of clean-up have now renderedAbove, clockwise from
top left: Mitchell B-25
bomber at the aircraft
graveyard; crosshatch
butterflyfish; 100% coral
coverage on a gold-standard
Rongelap reef.Below, clockwise from
top left: Pocilloporacrab;
reticulated butterflyfish;
commensal shrimp;
Helfrichi dartfish.divErNEt.com