USS Apogon Submarine

Hagatna · Apra Harbor · Guam

Apra Harbor on Guam's western coast has served as a strategic anchorage for centuries, and the seafloor here reads like a timeline of Pacific military history. The USS Apogon, a Balao-class submarine that served in the Pacific theatre during World War II, sits upright on the sandy bottom at thirty metres, deliberately sunk as a target vessel during atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946 and later towed to Guam. Just fifty metres from its stern lies the bow section of the Tokai Maru, a Japanese freighter torpedoed during the 1944 liberation of Guam. Together they form one of the most remarkable wreck dives in the Pacific. The mooring line dropped us directly onto the conning tower at eighteen metres. The submarine is startlingly intact. The periscope housings, bridge railing, and deck gun mount are all recognisable, covered in a carpet of encrusting sponges and soft coral that gives the steel structure the appearance of a coral reef sculpted in the shape of a warship. I ran my hand along the fairwater plane, still extended at its operating angle, and peered through an open hatch into the darkness of the control room below. Swimming forward along the deck, the torpedo loading hatch gaped open and a green moray eel had claimed the interior as its territory, its head protruding from the opening with an expression of theatrical menace. The bow planes extended symmetrically on either side, their hydrofoil shapes now encrusted with barnacles and juvenile corals. At the bow, a large green sea turtle rested on the forward torpedo tube doors, apparently a regular occupant based on the algae worn clean from its favourite perch. I descended to the sand at thirty metres and looked back at the submarine in profile. It is a profound sight. The hull curves upward from keel to deck in a perfect arc, every frame and rivet visible beneath the marine growth, a machine designed for stealth now permanently exposed. The twin propellers at the stern are intact, their bronze blades green with patina, each one taller than a diver. The crossing to the Tokai Maru took two minutes of finning over open sand. The Japanese freighter's bow section rises from the bottom like a rusted cathedral, its anchor chain still running through the hawsehole. Inside the forward hold, lionfish hung motionless in the filtered light while a school of barracuda circled the mast stump. The juxtaposition of American submarine and Japanese freighter, enemies in life and neighbours in death, gives this dive site a resonance that pure coral diving cannot replicate.