420 Dive Log Australasia OCTOBER 2026

Clark's anemonefish, Amphiprion clarkii, and diver with an Ikelite camera housing system , Yap

No performance arranged for tourists.

That is the problem with Yap.

This was rehearsal.

You begin planning the next trip before the current one is over.

We were the outsiders and were very aware of it.

People call it the Kingdom of Mantas, and it deserves the name.

We had been invited.

But after enough time here, the name begins to feel incomplete.

We were guests.

Yap is the manta that passes overhead when you have the wrong lens on your camera.

There is a difference.

It is the pipefish you cannot see until it moves.

The Return

Our flight left at 2:35 in the morning.

Shortly after midnight the resort staff came for our bags. Underwater photographers do not travel lightly. Cameras, housings, strobes, ports, lenses and dive equipment went back into cases that somehow seemed heavier than when we arrived. The same cheerful people who had greeted us in the middle of the night were there again.

We said goodbye.

The brightly colored mantle and rows of minuscule eyes make the coral-boring scallop, Pedum spondyloideum, easily recognized on the reef. This bivalve is a scallop and lives almost exclusively on massive coral colonies

Nobody made too much of it.

We knew we would be back.

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Dive Log Australasia #420 Oct’ 26

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