I am proud to say that I finally dived the Awajisan Maru wreck this morning. Four of us (all local divers) took a speedboat out from a river near Pengkalan Chepa, and only travelled about 15 minutes down river before we reached the open sea. From the river mouth, it was only another 10 minutes to reach the waypoint of the wreck that was saved in our GPS. It was a bit tricky, since there was no buoyline in sight, to find the exact point of the wreck. So we did a few trial runs on the boat with the anchor hanging down the side to see if it would hit anything hard. After about 15 minutes of wandering in circles, the guy holding the anchor line thought we hit something, so we decided to descend at that point and try our luck. Visibility was about 5-7m. While descending at around 15m we saw a school of giant barracudas (the biggest I've seen in these waters). I got excited, as it was a sign that we're nearby. When we got to the bottom (20m) there was nothing but sand (more accurately mud). We decided to do a square pattern of 40 kick cycles in each direction starting from the anchor, and spent the better part of 2 dives doing this, covering as much ground as we possilbly could. Nothing. When we surfaced after the second dive, we saw a fishing boat about 50m away, and asked the fishermen if they knew the location of the wreck, and they said that they were right on top of it. Our third attempt was successful, and my feeling when I saw a huge pillar-like structure while descening was one filled with awe and sentiment as I finally saw what I have been dying to see for the last 2 years. I am a history buff, and there is no wreck in Malaysia (or even Asia) that possesses as much history as this sunken ship. It was after all, the very first ocean vessel to sink during WW2. As I got down to the bottom, there were schools of red snappers, parrotfish and a A LOT of blue-ring Anglefish. The ship is broken into 3 parts, and we spent all of our dive on just one, because there was just so much area to cover, and plus you couldn't really see anything beyond 6 metres which made it really hard to get a whole picture of the ship. But the section we covered had amazing white, yellow and red sea fans, hard coral, soft coral, a great deal of nudis, and loads of barracudas. No wonder everytime a buoyline is tied, it is cut off within days, because the local fishermen don't want to share this site with anyone. There were a lot of fishing nets stuck all over the wreck and it needs some cleanup, but with some effort, it will make a great divesite, if not for the variety of marine life, then for the history of this wreck alone. All I care about is the latter. I am offering to take anyone who is interested to dive this wreck. You don't need your own equipment, you can hire my shop equipment. It's all brand new too. We will be running trips until the end of November. Prices will start at RM90 per dive including equipment rental. Email me at
antigravityds@gmail.com if you are interested.
