Akitsushima

The crane comes out of the gloom first, lying out across the sand at thirty-six metres, and most dives start there because it is the deepest thing on the site. It was built to lift a flying boat with a wingspan of nearly forty metres, and the scale of it still reads underwater. An anti-aircraft gun sits in the sand nearby. Somewhere on the same stretch there is a flight helmet.

She is on her port side, a full quarter turn, and that changes everything about how the hull behaves1. Vertical is sideways. Doorways are in the floor and in the ceiling. Divers who have spent a week on the upright Coron hulls arrive here with the wrong instincts and lose their bearings faster than they expect.

The way in is the damage at the stern, where the ship was very nearly torn in two2. Inside is the winch that drove the crane and then the engine room, which still holds all four engines and a wall of gauges. The passages are small, some of the interior silts, and the entry rule here is stricter than anywhere else in the bay.

The way out runs shallower along the outside of the hull, past an intact radio tower and over plating grown over with coral, to about twenty-two metres at the top of the structure. It is a short dive for how much ship there is. Divers say so, and one of them puts it plainly: the bottom time ended sooner than he wanted.

You are on a ship of war, and there is no mistaking it for anything else. Every other hull dived at Coron carried food, fuel, cement or construction material. This one carried anti-aircraft guns and a crane built for flying boats, and its armament is still lying in the open where the ship came apart.

The crane is the object people photograph and the object they remember, and it comes with a fact that no dive description carries. She was at Truk in February 1944 during the American raid that sank most of the wrecks divers visit there today. Two bombs hit her, one forward of the bridge and one on the end of the fantail that damaged the plane crane, and a third the following day. She got away to Palau anyway2. Seven months later a nearly identical attack caught her at Coron. The crane you swim out along here had already been bombed once, on the other side of the Pacific.

Marine life is not the reason to come. There is coral on the plating and fish over it, but the subject of this dive is the machinery, and it is worth saying so, because dressing the site up as something else would be worse.

She was completed at Kobe on 29 April 1942 and assigned to the 11th Air Fleet, a purpose-built seaplane tender and not a combatant of the line. Her job was servicing and rearming flying boats, which is why she carried a crane heavy enough for the Kawanishi H8K, the largest Japan operated. She is not a maru and she was not a battleship, whatever the shop boards say: about 118 metres of support ship, armed to defend herself.

Truk came first. In the raid of February 1944 two bombs struck her on the 17th, one forward of the bridge and one on the very end of the fantail that damaged the plane crane, and a third hit her the next day and started a large fire. She left under her own power and reached Palau at the end of the month2.

She arrived at Coron Bay from Manila on 23 September 1944 and anchored in the narrow passage between Lajo and Manglet islands. The attack came the next morning between about a quarter to nine and half past. More than thirty aircraft came at her; two bombs hit amidships and she took a heavy list to starboard. Then a bomb landed on the stern catapult track and set off an explosion fuelled by aviation gasoline, which blew the shell clean off her port quarter and left the stern held on by the keel and the plating on the far side2. She capsized to port and went down on her side in the passage.

A US Navy salvage team found her the following August, on the bottom at a 90-degree port list, gutted amidships, with wreckage blown fifty feet astern of the hull2. That survey is the oldest measurement of any Coron wreck. Eighty years on, she is one of six wrecks here whose photogrammetric scale models were handed to the National Museum of the Philippines in February 20263.

Touch nothing on this wreck. There is live ammunition still on and inside her, so the risk is physical, and everything on and in the hull is state-owned cultural property under Republic Act No. 10066, so taking a souvenir is an offence rather than bad manners4. The loose objects on the sand are exactly the ones that tempt people. Photograph the helmet and leave it where it is.

Plan the dive deepest first. The crane is at thirty-six metres and it is what you came for, so the sensible profile takes it at the start and works shallower along the hull. Nitrox 32 is what the operators here recommend, and the reason they give is bottom time, not safety margin.

Do not negotiate the interior on the boat. The rule for this wreck is that no swim-through happens without a wreck certification, which is stricter than anything else at Coron, and the ship earns it: small passages, a quarter-turn list that puts doorways underfoot, silt, and torn metal through the stern. If you want the engine room, do the course.

And plan for the distance. She lies out in the passage between Culion and Busuanga, outside the bay, so this is a full-day boat trip, and no working recompression chamber is confirmed anywhere in Coron. Carry insurance that pays for hyperbaric treatment and an evacuation flight, and check the boat has oxygen before it leaves.