I recently got back from my trip to Palau, and wanted to share some of it with you.

Now, even though I was there for work most of the time, I did get a chance to go diving.

The first place we went was a place called "Turtle Wall", which aptly lived up to its

name.

Now, all species of sea turtle in the United States are on the endangered species list,

so they are protected in the United States. However,

the same is not true down in Palau. It's actually open season on them during certain

parts of the year. People actually kill them and

make soups. After seeing them swim around like this and seeing how cute they are I can't

understand how anyone would go out and kill them.

Now, the Republic of Palau is a small island nation about a two hour flight from Guam.

We work with them a lot with search and and law

enforcement so I get the opportunity to fly down

there once or twice a year. Now, their main industry is actually tourism, specifically

for people coming down for SCUBA diving. It's

literally ranked as one of the top places in the

world to go SCUBA diving. In fact, during my last trip back to the states, when I was

flying out of Norfolk there was a whole SCUBA dive

trip that was going on the same flight as me from

Norfolk to Guam, and then on continuing on to Palau just to go SCUBA diving down there.

Kind of shows how popular it is.

Now, I asked the dive master what made Palau so much better for diving than anywhere else

in the world. His answer was one word: Currents.

See, Palau is uniquely situated. There are a whole bunch of islands that are very closely

spaced together. And the currents in that area are also very strong. The islands actually

help shape and funnel the currents into a very narrow portion. So when you go to those

narrow portions, all the nutrients in the water are

all funneled into one tiny space. So all the tiny fish like to congregate in that tiny

space to get the nutrients, and the larger fish go

after the smaller fish, and so on and so forth.

Of course, that also means the area is home to predators as well.

Now recently Palau has put into effect a lot of new fisheries laws aimed at protecting

their natural resources, including the first in

their kind; creating a shark sanctuary throughout their exclusive economic zone. It's illegal

for any one to catch, kill, or harvest any sharks.

Now Guam and the CNMI have also recently introduced shark protection laws and the US is

considering implementing it nationwide, although that law hasn't taken effect yet.

Have no fear, the sharks that were here weren't exactly large enough to be too much of a

concern. They were nice to watch floating around, and hopefully not get too close to.

And getting too close to wildlife is actually one of my pet pieve while SCUBA diving. See,

one of the commonly accepted tenants for SCUBA divers is that you're not supposed to do

anything which may hurt, damage, harass, or interact with the wildlife. You know, touch

any of the coral, which takes long to grow -you

don't want to break pieces off. You want to be

careful with your buoyancy, so you stay off the reef and don't affect anything. and

generally try to be as minimally invasive as possible.

Which is why when we saw these Japanese guys with their TV cameras, we were kind of

disappointed. Clearly, based off the size of the cameras and everything, this was actually

for TV, but still, they;re going around harassing

this manta ray pretty strongly, which we all thought was a pretty boorish thing to do.

Well, I hope you guys liked this and I'll see you next time.