This is one of the more well-known dives on Guam. It's a wreck from WW1 and a wreck from WW2 sitting on the bottom right next to each other. The SMS Cormoran was a German armed auxiliary cruiser that was hunting allied shipping in the Pacific in 1914 when it ran low on coal and stopped in Guam to refuel. The US was neutral at that time so it refused to provide coal to the Germans and instead interned the ship and crew. The US entered the war in 1917 and then tried to seize the Cormoran. The German crew scuttled the ship in Apra Harbour with explosives. Several of them were killed in the sinking and were buried in a cemetery on Guam.
The Tokai Maru was a Japanese Navy transport ship that was sheltering in Apra Harbour in 1943. An American submarine fired a pattern of torpedos into the harbour and damaged the ship. A few months later, another torpedo attack finally sank it. It sank to the bottom right next to the wreck of the Cormoran.
I dove here on a dive charter with Axe Murderer Tours (one of the more bizarre names for a dive business I've ever come across) on Feb. 27, 2019. We descended down the mooring line which was attached to the bridge of the Tokai Maru about 60' deep. I had a quick look at the winches on the sloping deck. Visibility was around 30-40'. The following images are mostly stills taken from the video I took.
We swam over the side of the Tokai hull towards the Cormoran.
We swam between the hulls of the 2 wrecks and saw the spot where the wrecks from 2 world wars touched each other. This was near the propeller hub of the Cormoran, which is missing its blades. The depth at this spot was about 80'.
Swimming along the side and superstructure of the Cormoran:
Our maximum depth (along the side of the Cormoran) was 100', but the bottom is around 120-130' deep. There wasn't much marine life on the wrecks, but they were still definitely worth diving for the historical interest.
