Diving on Yonaguni Island

In between typhoons, we did manage to have one great day of diving on Yonaguni Island! The rest of the days, the blustery wind made the surface conditions too rough to go diving. But the day after we arrived, it was a good day to dive. We were staying at Yonaguni Dive Service (YDS), which has a nice guest house attached to the dive shop. Makes it very convenient!

We were up at 7:30 a.m. for breakfast in the dining area. Besides Devlin, myself, and Joe, there were also four other visiting divers from other parts of Japan staying at the YDS. We were also accompanied by three other dive staff of YDS.

By 8:45 a.m., we were all dressed for Dive #1 in our wetsuits and our gear had been loaded onto the YDS boat in the main harbor. We clambered aboard, and everyone grabbed a tank and started prepping gear. Once all the gear was prepped and ready, off we went out of the harbor and to the first dive site. Our dive master, Ookii-san (oh-key-sahn), told us that it was too rough seas to dive at the Yonaguni "Ruins" site, so we were going to a calmer coral reef that had less currents.

And it was a pretty calm dive. At the start I had some trouble with my BCD (buoyancy control device) at first, after that got straightened out the dive was quite nice. Joe had some trouble with his BCD too, but we still saw a lot of fish and went through a neat cave passage-way between reefs. There were so many fish it was hard to focus on any one in particular - in all directions there were just so many.

Getting back in the boat was exciting - we would all surface together, and then at Ookii-san's signal, we would swim to the boat. It had a huge ladder, three-people wide, and we would scramble in as fast as we could with flippers on. Due to Yonaguni's fast currents, this is the best way to get on the dive boat - otherwise, the boat would drift away from the divers, and if we took our fins off before getting on, they could be easily lost by the fast water.

We returned to YDS for lunch. Dive #2 was at 1 p.m., and we were on the lookout for schools of barracuda. It was a drift dive in a faster current spot, so we didn't have to do much swimming - the current smoothly pulled us along. At Ookii-san's signal, we would all sink to the ground and hold on to rocks to watch for barracuda. We didn't see any that dive, but Devlin saw a big eel, and we saw oodles of fish. 

It was really cool to look around and see all the other divers, with their streams of bubbles floating up. It's an incredibly different world to be in. Our underwater world was comprised of the hills and valleys of the coral reefs, and hanging above them, seemingly weightless, were the countless schools of tropical fish.

At 3:30 p.m., it was time for Dive #3. We went back to the same spot as Dive #2 in attempt to see barracuda again. We didn't have any luck there, but we did see some other great things: a big purple & orange parrotfish that was industriously moving sand & coral around (maybe to lay eggs?); the ghostly image of some really really large fish far away... Ookii-san said they were unicorn fish. Devlin could see the horns but I couldn't see quite that far. And we were visited by one larger and very curious silver fish, that moseyed through our group of divers and then leisurely swam away.

After three dives, we were all absolutely exhausted. We were all falling asleep at dinner at 6pm!

Joe plans to return to Yonaguni another year, when it isn't typhoon season. To see the Yonaguni ruins, the water needs to be quite calm. And, we are told that schools of hammerhead sharks come through between January to March to mate, so that is also a very good time to visit the island!