It's a long way to Micronesia - we first flew from Phoenix to LA, then Honolulu, then Guam and finally Truk (note: the new official name is Chuuk instead of Truk but most divers still use the old name). Here are some of us upon arrival at the last airport, as you can tell the long trip has taken its toll.

We spent a week on the live-aboard dive ship S.S.Thorfinn, which is a converted whaler and quite spacious.

The boat runs on steam power and once we got going we were given a tour of the engine room.

The crew took care of loading all of our equipment onto the shuttle boats, refilling the air tanks after every dive, and they even handed us dry towels as soon as we finished our dive and climbed back onto the boat - great service. Here we are in the little boat, taking off for the next wreck:

During the week we had an opportunity to visit some of the little islands that comprise the Chuuk state; this also served as a good reminder that we were in the third world. The following pictures show the school and a few (fairly typical) island dwellings. During the week of diving we had a chance to see the following wrecks (see the literature or web sites about Truk for details):

Date	Wreck name	Type	Depth (feet)
3/28	Nippo	Cargo Ship	100-165
	Heian	Luxury Liner	40-120
	Fujikawa	Cargo Ship	30-110
	Betty Bomber	Plane	???
3/29	Hoki	Cargo Ship	110-175
	Kansho	Cargo Ship	60-130
	Fumitsuki	Cargo Ship	???
3/30	Fujikawa	Cargo Ship	30-110
	Yamagiri	Passenger Liner	30-110
	Hoyo	Tanker	10-125
	Kansho	Cargo Ship	60-130
3/31	Shinkoku	Cargo Ship	40-125
	Sankisan	Freighter	50-80
4/1	Amagisan	Cargo Ship	100-200
	Gosei	Cargo Ship	8-100
	Rio de Janeiro	Passenger Liner	40-115
	Sub chaser	Small Boat	???
	Sankisan	Freighter	50-80
4/2	San Francisco	Cargo Ship	150-210
	Dai-Na-Hino	One Gun Boat	3-70
	Shinkoku	Cargo Ship	40-125

Here are some pictures (courtesy of Perry);the first one shows Peter aiming the gun and the second one shows one of the many critters we'd encountered:

After a week of diving (we personally did about 20 dives each) we spent two days on a tiny island (about 100 by 800 yards) decompressing. It was time to relax, do some snorkelling and a few final dives from the beach. In the evenings we were treated to beatufiul sunsets (and - except for a few issues with cooling - the beer and booze were plentiful).

The trip back home was largely uneventful - we stopped for one night in Guam but unfortunately one of us had a mild case of food poisoning so we didn't get see much of it. The next morning we flew on Continental to Honolulu and then on to LAX where we switched to Southwest for the final flight to Phoenix. Unfortunately, the 3 bags we checked in didn't make it. When we asked Southwest they told us that they had no agreement with Continental as far as checked baggage and that maybe Continental put our bags on an America West flight. When we discovered that AmWest also didn't have an agreement with Continental we went home and started making phone calls. Unfortunately, Continental was absolutely no help - they told us that the agent in Guam surely must have told us that the bags couldn't be checked all the way through (even though she definitely did tell us exactly that) or that we should have picked up our bags in LA (even though it later transpired that they never were in LA), and finally that Southwest is the airline that needs to initiate the search for the bags (which SW refused to do, and rightly so - they never saw the bags and they have no baggage agreement with Continental so it was just a ridiculous attempt by Continental to evade responsibility). In the end one of the kind folks at SW took pity on us and went beyond the call of duty, eventually discovering that the idiots at Continental put our bags on a direct ATA flight from Honolulu to Phoenix, but ATA had no idea what to do with those bags and sent them back to Hawaii. So ,after a few days of frantic calls and worrying (the bags contained a bunch of brand new - and very expensive - diving equipment, and other expensive and/or hard to replace items) we were able to pick up our bags at the airport. The attitude of Continental was quite appalling and we learned another valuable travel lesson. Beware!