Kyokuzan Maru

The mast tops out at twelve metres, and the descent runs down the rigging to a deck at twenty-two. She sits upright and close to whole. The swim from bow to stern reads like a ship, not like wreckage, and nobody gets round her in one dive.

The forecastle at the bow opens straight into rooms with things left in them. Behind it are three holds on two levels: two hundred litre drums and unrecognisable freight on the 'tween decks, and the vehicles below. A Japanese Army jeep chassis sits at thirty-one metres in the second hold from the stern, largely intact. Staff cars and trucks are in the others, one of them now identifiable mainly by its whitewall tyres, which have outlasted everything around them.

The engine room is the part with options. A coal bunker in the third hold opens into it, and so do the bridge area, the skylights, and the large hole where the funnel used to stand. A fifth way in runs from outside the hull through the prop tunnel, and the diver who first wrote that route up called it not for the faint of heart. The engine itself was salvaged decades ago. The boilers are still there, and what divers describe is dropping a little deeper down their sides and flying from catwalk to catwalk.

Then the bridge, which is a dive of its own: cabins to work through, a large bath on the port side, kitchen fittings, and a floor of broken plates in what was a canteen, some of them still carrying the ship's crest. You can stand up in the wheelhouse. The funnel lies over to starboard almost horizontally, and it is an open swim through.

The batfish are what divers talk about afterwards. They are big, they are curious, and one group worked out that mimicking the grunts the fish make to each other pulls them in close enough to be studying you through your mask from a few inches away. Keep still and breathe gently and they stay.

She is the Coron wreck that is not in Coron. An hour of road and a boat ride separate her from the Tangat anchorage where the rest of the fleet went down, and that distance is the reason for everything else: clear water instead of the bay's green, a ship nobody has worked over, and quiet. Divers who have dived the Japanese wrecks of Chuuk reach for that comparison when they write about her, with the honest caveat that Chuuk has more artefacts.

What she has is objects. On the bay wrecks the interesting things are parts of a ship; here they are things people used: a bath, a canteen floor of crested crockery, cars in the holds with their tyres still on. A ship's crest on a broken plate only survives on a wreck nobody has been through.

How long she is, nobody can say, and this is not a rounding argument. Every diver who has swum the hull makes her between 160 and 180 metres, and the one precise specification in circulation is far shorter than any of them. No length appears anywhere on this page. How she came to be on the bottom is unresolved in the same way. She was bombed. Whether the bombs sank her, whether her crew opened her up afterwards, or whether a torpedo did it, has never been established.

She was an Imperial Japanese Army cargo ship, not a navy one, which is a distinction the dive trade routinely drops. In September 1944, after American carrier aircraft struck Manila Bay, the Japanese pushed their auxiliary shipping south and west into the Calamianes. This ship went furthest of any of them, round to the far side of Busuanga and into a small harbour on the north coast, where she anchored with two other cargo ships.

On the morning of 24 September a squadron of dive bombers flew three hundred and thirty two miles from the American carrier force to reach her. Twelve took off and ten arrived. They found the three ships almost line abreast in the little harbour and reported a bomb hit on the port side of the single-stack ship, three or more very near misses, and a fire burning topside near the middle of her. She is the only one of the three that is on the bottom today. The squadron had trouble releasing its external fuel tanks and dived while still carrying them, which is the reason there is one wreck on the north side of Busuanga instead of three.

Some of what a diver reads as war damage is not. Her engine was cut out of her after the war and the prop shaft was removed with explosives, and the resulting damage sits alongside whatever the bombs did in 1944.

The name is the last unsettled thing about her. The Lloyd's registers of the late 1930s and early 1940s carry no ship called Kyokuzan Maru, and no naval service record for her has surfaced. She is the Kyokuzan Maru because that is what everyone calls her, which is a different kind of fact from the ones the Coron Bay wrecks rest on.

Stay off the floor of the lower holds. A low white mist lies in the bottom of one of them, thick enough that a diver in the 1990s gave up trying to examine the hold, and later divers have called it asbestos dust. No sample has ever been analysed, so the identification is reported and not proven, and the instruction is the same either way: do not sink into the layer, do not fin through it, do not stir it.

Two lights, because the holds and the engine room are the dive here and not a detour from it. Then plan the depth honestly. The vehicles are at thirty to thirty-three metres, which is precisely where a hold full of recognisable objects will keep you longer than you meant to stay, and divers come off this site with lengthy decompression stops. Nitrox is prescribed here at thirty-two or twenty-eight percent, and the time to ask about it is at booking, not on the boat.

Take nothing, and this is the wreck where that matters most. She holds more loose material than anything else in the area: plates, kitchen fittings, vehicle parts. Everything on and in the hull is state-owned cultural property under Republic Act No. 10066, and disturbing an underwater archaeological site takes written authority and museum supervision1. The crested crockery is still on the canteen floor because eighty years of divers have left it there. Hover past the handrails instead of steadying on them, too, because a tasselled scorpionfish sits along them.

Then the part this site makes harder than any other in Coron. No working recompression chamber is confirmed anywhere on the island. The nearest chamber reported working is in Puerto Princesa, which is in the same province and still awkward, because no airline flies Busuanga to Puerto Princesa direct and the scheduled route goes through Manila. From this wreck that chain starts a boat ride and an hour of road further back than from anywhere else in the area. Your cover has to pay for the chamber and for the flight that reaches one, the boat needs oxygen aboard, and the operator should be able to say where the chamber question stands on the day you dive. Some of them require dive insurance for this trip specifically, so that conversation happens at booking anyway.