Lauren Rebbeck
Just thinking of the adrenaline rush I get being whisked away by speedboat—engines roaring and bound for a world-class dive site I’ve only read about—sends my heart skipping. Get me there and underwater already, urges the voice in my head.
But when I first arrived in Palau a few years ago, it was for a slower kind of dive adventure with marine biologist Ron Leidich. One that would take us by kayak and our own paddling power to some of Palau’s less-visited dive sites, where I learned there was much to be gained by shifting into low gear.
Palau is best known for its outer reefs and drift-dive sites like Blue Corner, German Channel and Peleliu Express, which act as pelagic magnets, drawing herds of bumphead parrotfish, tornadoes of bigeye trevally, gray reef sharks, barracuda, mantas and the like. But Leidich’s tour aimed to show me and my dive buddy the ancient marine lakes and hidden coral colonies inside the protected Rock Islands instead—nurseries for all kinds of juvenile fish and where Palau’s showstopping marine life begins.
We paddled our kayaks through the still lagoons of the Rock Islands with a support boat to carry our gear, taking our time, slow and low to the surface, in this wonderland of steep limestone formations carpeted in green. The goal was to peel back some of Palau’s layers.
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Disney Lake, a marine lake inside one of the Rock Islands that’s fully encircled by plunging karst walls, is hard to reach without a kayak—and harder to enjoy without diving gear. We used the latter to dive through a tunnel and into the calm lake, where Leidich explained that baby fish arrive via currents and stay for the promise of protection. We lingered with juvenile cardinalfish, baby titan triggerfish and an immature Picasso triggerfish whose prominent lips seemed comically large.
Sheltered from the wind and waves beyond its womb-like walls, the lake was home to delicate basket corals that Leidich guessed were 400 or 500 years old.
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In other well-protected marine lakes, Leidich warned that we were the bulls in the proverbial china shop—the delicate coral around us had managed to grow robustly with almost no interference. They were so healthy, they stretched their unbroken fingers nearly to the water’s surface. In Mandarin Fish Lake, we watched colorful fish emerge from the shadows, and spotted baby bumphead parrotfish and juvenile bigeye trevally frolicking too.
At the end of the trip, of course, we ditched our paddles and hopped on a speedboat to the outer reefs for a grand finale. After all, there’s no Palau dive pilgrimage like the one to Blue Corner. When I was finally attached with a reef hook onto a piece of rock in its ripping current and watching one of the ocean’s finest pelagic shows, admiring all those fish in their grown and flown forms, I realized I was changed.
How lucky I was to have slowed down enough to see where all those beautiful babies had come of age.
