This is a three-tank day and how to add and-on an extra serving of Yap diving. Bill calls it a Super Size, which means lunch is served onboard with three dives and you’re back before happy hour. This is everything but the happy hour part.

Yap Corner

This is the M’il Channel outer reef wall on the north side, where you roll in just behind the breakers into clear Yap blue water.

Here you typically see the largest sharks, barracuda, tuna, schools of sharks with babies, eagle rays, manta rays, schools of snapper, grouper and everything that lives in the reef wall. Today we saw everything but the eagle rays and a school of sharks with babies.

Alex’s plan was to catch the very last of the incoming tide and drift into M’il Channel and ride the current back out to the reef wall.

As we rounded the corner into the channel we were passed by two dogtooth tuna, and had big grey reef sharks coming in and out of sight the whole dive.

Overhead was a school of chevron barracuda and father down the reef wall was a lone proper barracuda, I don’t know all of the four types found here on Yap, but a proper barracuda is over four feet long and has a broom size tail.

The outer reef diving in Yap gives it to you two ways – look close at the reef, or look out into the blue for big things. A guest pointed out the purple scorpion fish on that corral head.

Stammtisch

The next stop was a bouy all the way inside M’il Channel to the manta cleaning station. We came in with several animals that didn’t mind us one bit. Here’s today’s high-five pass in the first minute of our dive.

We had several mantas with us the entire dive passing between us within inches sometimes.

Lunch

We moved the boat from one lagoon to another and William broke out the Mnuw made box lunches.

I saw a couple of things getting opened up – sandwiches, salads, grilled fish, white rice, fries and baked beans.

This is served up in the shade with warm banana bread and bottomless hot tea or ice water.

This is noon in Yap with some macro diving to go.

Slow and Easy

After our post-lunch surface interval talking about how to solve the world’s problems, we decided to dive again.

This is the second-closest dive site to the resort, the first being the Manderine Fish mating site.

This is a macro wonderland and the place to see Yap’s critters. Today’s dive log has manta shrimp, pipe fish, scorpion leaf fish, nudibranches, a baby turtle, all the reef fish, cleaner shrimp, blind shrimp and white gobi’s, treveli, napolean wrasse and bumphead parrot fish.

Most of the things to see are in 30 feet of water, but this site also has some isolated coral heads down passed 90 feet that are full of life.

Alex took us across the entire site on a custom dive plan, per a guest’s request…  all you have to do is ask.

The request was to see ghost pipe fish, a manta shrimp and scorpion leaf fish.

First we went to the lair of a giant white manta shrimp that is well known and photographed at the outer most mooring, and ended the dive with three scorpion leaf fish deeper inside the channel.

This is also a great night dive. We’ve seen mantas transiting along the reef wall, white tip reef sharks hunting, lobster and reef critters that made us get out the book.

All of this happens 5 minutes from the hotel.

The perfect ending to a 3-tank dive day is a short boat ride home, someone else carrying your gear, the happy hour bell going off when you hit the dock and great pictures to share.

That was 210 minutes of blue water, manta and macro diving with lunch, Bill Acker’s “super size” dive day.