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Palau's Position
Palau is a nation of 340 islands in Micronesia, 800 km east of the Philippines. The main diving concentration is on the western edge of Babeldaob Island, where the reef drops into the Philippine Sea plate at vertical walls that descend hundreds of metres. The dive fleet operates almost entirely from Koror, the main city.
Palau's reputation rests on a specific combination: extraordinary shark and pelagic diversity, iconic topography, and a tightly regulated marine protected area (the Palau National Marine Sanctuary covers 80% of Palau's exclusive economic zone).
Blue Corner
Blue Corner (Ngemelis Wall corner) is diving's most famous single dive site. A current-swept promontory jutting out from the western reef edge, where the prevailing current hits the corner and concentrates everything — sharks, barracuda, jacks, eagle rays — in a naturally-occurring convergence zone.
Divers descend to the reef top at 15-20 metres and deploy reef hooks — a short line with a clip that attaches to dead rock — to hold position in the current. The current holds divers horizontal, streamlined, watching. What passes at Blue Corner on a good day: grey reef sharks stacked 30-deep in the blue water above the corner; a wall of several hundred barracuda; Napoleon wrasse the size of coffee tables; trevally in boiling formation.
Ulong Channel and German Channel
Ulong Channel is a drift dive through a natural canyon flanked by orange and yellow soft corals — one of the most scenic channel dives in Micronesia. The manta cleaning station at German Channel (a man-made channel blasted through the reef in the German colonial era) is one of the most reliable in Palau.
Peleliu Corner and Peleliu Wall at the southern tip of the lagoon are for experienced divers only: exposed, current-swept, with unpredictable down-currents and blue-water encounters with silvertip sharks.
Jellyfish Lake
Ongeim'l Tketau — universally known as Jellyfish Lake — is a marine lake on Eil Malk Island. The jellyfish that evolved here, cut off from predators for thousands of years, have lost their effective stinging cells.
You snorkel (scuba not permitted — the decomposed organic layer below 15m contains toxic hydrogen sulfide) in the middle of 5-30 million golden jellyfish (Mastigias papua etpisoni). They pulse around you, migrate horizontally across the lake following the sun, and touch your skin with harmless contact.
Jellyfish populations fluctuate with the El Nino cycle — the 1998 El Nino event killed almost all the jellyfish, which recovered by 2012, then collapsed again in 2016. Current populations are rebuilding.