The third day we ran into some strong winds that curtailed us from going outside the channel, so we dove Ngemilis Wall. A deep wall, with cut ins and lots of growth including soft coral and friendly blue finned trevally would come up to play. Also saw turtles, several white-tip sharks and a clown trigger at the end of the dive in 12'. In Fiji we rarely saw them, and then it was down much deeper. The second dive was going to be New Drop Off, but the surf was much too high as we got outside, so Matt aborted and went back around the corner so that we could do Big Drop Off again. After we got down, he turned the dive to go the other direction to go with the slight current. But being busy shooting some clownfish, I didn't get the signal and continued wall left. After kicking a bit against the current, I got in a slack and then had the current with me. It turned out to be the best dive I had, with really big gorgonians, cup coral and soft coral all open. I also saw a glowing red fire anemone, as well as the usual white-tips and so forth. When I went to surface, the sea was covered with Japanese snorkelers, and I had to wave them aside to come up.

After a wet and bumpy ride home, we changed tanks and went over to Chanedlier Cave, a unique cave that has an entrance underwater and then 4 caverns in a straight line. It's huge, shallow, and you can't get lost. We enjoyed surfacing in each cavern and shining our lights to check out the formations. Afterwards, we dove around the outside of the entrance on the aptly named "Garbage Reef" which was pretty dead, but had some interesting tunicates, and Steve Dauzenroth searched and found a couple of Chinese Mandarinfish. None came out for my camera, however.

On our last day we couldn't dive, so we rented cars and drove about 30 miles on the 10 miles of paved roads. Phil Kush knew his way around and we visited a few old war gun emplacements. Everything was closed in Koror on a Saturday no less, but we did find a department store in Koror that was open and had some souvenirs. But we all agreed that there really wasn't much to see and would skip the cars the next time. That night we dined at a great Japanese restaurant called Dragon Teh to end our Palau portion of the trip. We only had time for an overview, but enjoyed it and will come back!