Roll in with Yap’s original dive guide. Bill hasn’t skipped a beat in the last 30 years and is still showing visitors Yap’s magic in the water. Daily dives on the big boat, lead by Bill, headed to the Southern Walls, Yap’s best outer reef diving. Conditions were on our side with calm seas, clear water and exotic marine life interactions. Drifting the slopes and walls turned up some fun dive guide finds, one of the highlights was mating cuttlefish, and throughout the week the cuttlefish laid her eggs inside finger coral. These animals stick around and protect their eggs, which make excellent photographic opportunities – cuttlefish that don’t move. Everyone got a close up interaction for as long as they wanted… and for those of us diving with cameras in our hands, we came home with happy SD cards everyday. Among these special encounters we were shown ghost pipe fish, scorpion leaf fish in every color, mantis shrimp, tuna strafing the reef, feeding grouper, most of the reef fish id book, sharks getting cleaned, turtles, nudi’s as well as pilot whales resting on the surface from the boat. Yap Caverns, Magic Kingdom, Buenavista and Cabbage Patch appeared in everyone’s dive logs on Bill’s south boat trips. Vertigo was a daily attraction for the smaller boats and the week’s shark diving culminated with a shark feed dive, something not to miss in Yap – one of Micronesia’s best shark shows. The diving was special for several people, Geri Murphy has been diving and photographing Yap since the beginning, who said during the event “Yap looks better than ever.” Since the days of Yap’s mantas gracing the covers of Skin Diver magazine, to today, Geri has always loved Yap for the diving diversity, amount of fish and the big animals that interact within inches of divers. Yap diving has shined for 30 years with daily big animal dives, rich outer reef walls, channels and dive guides showing us the whole food chain underwater. As things progress and new management assumes day-to-day responsibilities of running the business, Bill has more time to take guests diving, mingle in the pool and talk it up at the Crow’s Nest bar. These days you’ll see more of ‘the Manta Man’ with his mantas, rather than his keyboard.