Morazan

Descent is usually at the stern, over the rudder and the gap where the propeller shaft ran, then a short swim across the plating to a doorway. Behind it is the rear hold, and from there the ship stops being a set of separate stops and becomes one route. The 'tween decks run forward the whole length of her: down and up through the holds, past the engine room and the funnel, two more holds, and a door near the bow that puts you back outside. Ninety metres of ship, in a line.

What keeps that comfortable is a hole somebody else cut. Salvors took the steam engine out through the port hull, and because she is lying on her starboard side that hole now faces the surface. Between about ten in the morning and two in the afternoon on a clear day the light drops straight down into her and divers surface talking about a cathedral. Two boilers were left where they were. Three bomb holes near the bow are the other way in, torn open by the bombing.

Most dives finish outside on the upturned port hull, which is mostly shallower than fifteen metres and carpeted in hard coral. The bridge, the holds and the kingposts are all up there, and the funnel lies off on the sand at twenty-five, below where it stood. Razorfish gather over her in a large school, hanging nose-down and moving forward in that position, and they are the animal divers describe afterwards once they have finished describing the ship. Scorpionfish sit on the plating everywhere.

She was a banana boat. Before the capture, before the bombs, this hull carried fruit and passengers out of Spanish Honduras for a La Ceiba shipping family, and her maiden voyage in 1908 took her two thousand miles up the Amazon to Iquitos. She had already been through one war by then. The Royal Navy requisitioned her in December 1914 as a squadron supply ship, and from January 1915 she lay at Stornoway in the Hebrides as an auxiliary patrol depot ship1. Two navies on opposite sides of two wars is not something the rest of this fleet can claim.

The diving reason is the route. The other lit wrecks in the bay give you holds to drop into and come back out of; this one gives a passage with the ship closing over you and opening again, at a depth that leaves time to swim the whole of it. One diver who knows both put the feeling next to the President Coolidge in Vanuatu, on a ship a fraction of the size.

She was launched at Scotts of Greenock on 27 November 1907 as the Manco, yard number 422, and completed the following year for a Liverpool owner: a steel screw steamer of 2,979 gross tons and 91.53 metres, two masts, triple-expansion engines good for twelve knots, refrigerated holds and cabins for passengers1. Divers who measured the wreck in 2006 made her 93 metres.

The name she is dived under is one she never carried. She was the Manco until 1921, the Morazan under her La Ceiba owners after that, and the Ekkai Maru from 1942, Japanese ownership having followed her capture at Shanghai in December 19411. Morazan Maru belongs to neither ship.

Her Panamanian registration in her last years is what ties the record together. The Japanese and American naval compilation of the Coron raid lists among the ships lost that day the Ekkai, ex-Panamanian Morazan2, and her builder's register closes on the same event from the other end: bombed on 24 September 1944, sunk by American aircraft in Coron Bay at 11 degrees 59 minutes north, 120 degrees 02 minutes east1. A Clyde shipyard and a naval loss list, with nothing in common, agree on an obscure change of flag three years before she went down.

For a while she was somebody else. In 2005 a researcher argued that the ship lying on her starboard side here was a captured freighter called the Taiei Maru, and the physical evidence he leaned on was encrusted lettering across her stern reading CEI, a gap, then SH. He read it as part of a ship's name. A British-registered merchant ship carries her name above her home port on the stern, and her home port from 1921 was La Ceiba, Spanish Honduras1. The letters are not another ship's name. They are her own address, and they identify her.

Divers settled the rest with photographs. Working from 1930s pictures of the Morazan, they checked the wreck against the things a camera can decide: how many portholes there are and how they are spaced, the air vents, the railings, the doorways, the davits, the mast fittings, and a pattern of bolt holes on the funnel where a letter V had been fixed, the mark of the line that bought her in 1921.

Book the middle of the day. This is one of the few dives anywhere you book by the clock: from roughly ten to two on a sunny day the light comes down through the salvage hole and fills the holds, and the same dive at eight in the morning is a darker and smaller thing. Carry a torch anyway, and a second one if you are going the full length, because the lit part of the interior is the part under the hole.

Wear a full-length suit, and the reason is the ship and not the water temperature. The engine was cut out with torches, the bomb holes are torn plate, and the passenger corridor on the through-route is down to its steel framework. A diver on that route in 2025 came out of it with a cut palm from one brush against the steel. Hover through the openings, and keep hoses and gauges tucked close.

Decide how far in you are going before you get in the water, and be honest about the training you hold for it. The shops here differ in what they will let a customer do inside a wreck, and this is the hull where that difference bites, because the daylight makes the interior feel like a swim through open water. Light through a hole is not an exit.

Take nothing. She passed the fifty-year mark in 1994, so everything on and in her is state-owned cultural property under Republic Act No. 10066, and disturbing the site at all takes written authority and museum supervision3. Her engine has already gone. The bottles and fittings in the holds are what is left.

Then settle the evacuation question before you book. No working recompression chamber is confirmed anywhere in Coron. The nearest chamber reported working is at Puerto Princesa, in the same province, and no airline flies Busuanga to Puerto Princesa direct, so the scheduled route runs through Manila. Hold insurance that pays for hyperbaric treatment and for the flight, and check the boat carries oxygen.