Get in there with them

There is nothing quite like a first hand tour of a place to help you get to know it. Reading about a place and imagining what it looks like is a great introduction and a wonderful way to start, but to really know and learn to love a place it is best to go there yourself.

I am going to take you on an armchair tour of some beautiful places right here on Saipan. We’ll go under the sea and see our amazing coral reefs. While I hope that you enjoy the tour and learn more about the places we’ll be virtually visiting, I invite you to learn to scuba dive so you can go there and check it out for yourself. If you already know how to dive then you may have already seen some of these sights. If not, it is an easy and fun process to learn how to live temporarily in that fascinating 3 dimensional underwater world of the coral reef. Scuba diving is not a daring or dangerous sport but it does require some specific training by a professional instructor. There are lots of instructor choices here on Saipan, Tinian and Rota so I urge you to get that training and get yourself into the water and see first hand why we need to do all we can to preserve and use our Marianas coral reefs wisely.

Today we will visit a place you can go to by boat from either inside or outside the barrier reef that borders the lagoon on our western shore. Called Fa Liket in the Carolinian tongue, you may know it as “those big rocks” out on the reef you can see from Tanapag.

The waters on both sides of the reef there are fairly shallow and even on the outside the depth drops off gradually. Some places have a steep drop off to several hundred feet but not here at the beautiful underwater world of the Big Rocks. You can snorkel here if you have not yet learned to scuba dive. You will see how the fishes that abound here use the passageways around the rocks to protect themselves and to come and go between the inside world of the shallow, sandy bottomed lagoon and the open water of the Philippine Sea outside the reef. The Big Rocks form a sort of broken passage between the inside and the outside. Most of the barrier reef is 50 feet across or so at the outer rim but here the rocks themselves form a gateway.

It is said that the first Carolinian residents to come here from Satawal in the Western Carolines in 1815 stayed in their voyaging canoes out by these very rocks to give thanks and to balance their new arrival with the existing forces of nature before they came ashore and began to repopulate Saipan after a long period of no people living here.

This place deserves some of your time. You will be amazed at the many species of fish and other sea creatures you see here. Corals and crabs, lobsters and lionfish, nemo and narwhals (okay, no narwhals) and nudibranches, too. There are so many living things here that it will take many trips back to see even a small portion of them.

Spending time there lying on the bottom, not moving but just watching the marine world unfold before you, is an education in itself. Spending time there watching and learning drives home the point that it is important for us humans to do what we can to try and protect this reef. Use it, enjoy it, coexist with the reef and do it as little harm as possible. You owe it to yourself to go see this area. You will come away with a renewed sense of awe about how the natural world fits together and works like an interconnected whole. You will see firsthand how the coral reef acts both as a nursery and a grocery store for the creatures that live in the sea. You’ll have fun in our crystal waters.