Which explains why the island’s best-named hotel remains the Truk Stop

Which explains why the island’s best-named hotel remains the Truk Stop. Better known is the fact that the Chuuk Lagoon is the last resting-place of the 60-odd Japanese ships that were sunk during two devastating days of US carrier strikes in February 1944. Today, three “live-aboard” dive boats work what has accurately been described as a wreck-diver’s heaven, and I’d joined the Thorfinn, a converted steam-powered whaling ship for a solid week of diving.Lance Higgs, our sturdy Canadian captain, bought the Thorfinn in 1974 and, two years later, shifted her from the east Canadian coast to the west, via the Panama Canal. Somewhere in those southern waters he decided that life in the Tropics had a lot more appeal than working the frigid Canadian waters. He had the Thorfinn refitted in Vancouver as a charter cruising ship, a makeover which included such non-Arctic features as air-conditioning and a hot tub on the rear deck.

Twenty-five years later, Lance is comfortably at home in Micronesia, running his ship with what is essentially his Chuukese wife’s family as crew.Diving Chuuk turned out to be much easier than expected. Many of the coral-encrusted wrecks were at easily reached depths, but some of the finest were deep, well below the 120 to 130ft commonly thought of as the sport-diving limit. There would be plenty of opportunity for “penetrations” (divers’ jargon for going inside the wrecks) and, with up to five outings a day, enough dives to guarantee a nicely nitrogen-saturated bloodstream.The water was clear, warm (never dropping below 80F), virtually current-free and blissfully calm. As a result, there was no need for thick wetsuits or the heavy weights that go with them, so the diving was relaxed, stress-free and, well, deep.Three times during the week, I found myself below 160ft, comfortably deeper than I’d ever been before, but not the least bit concerned about my safety. Part of that confidence was certainly due to the unusually long “safety stops” we were instructed to take on the way up (the deeper you go and the longer you stay, the slower and more protracted your return to the surface should be).Our group started out with 14 divers but 11 of them were victims of short American holidays and that left just three of us to enjoy the whole seven days.

Pierre was a charming Frenchman, working for his bank’s Hong Kong office, and Rhoda was an adventurous Englishwoman who’d left her husband behind in Tokyo to look after her two young daughters while she explored Second World War ships’ engine rooms, 120ft below the water’s surface, at night.To get all that diving in, we set out after dark, torches in hand, to swim through the ships in the blackness. Straightforward though the diving turned out to be, none of us were beginners and all were well-equipped. Which explains why I headed down with that wonderful modern invention, the dive computer, strapped to my wrist. A large part of every diving course is spent studying “the tables”, the columns of figures that tell you how long you can safely stay at any given depth – all of which is related to how recently you’ve been diving, and how deep and long that last dive was.