Diving at the German Channel (Travel report Palau)

The dive site German Channel is at least as famous as the Blue Corner. This is mainly due to the fact that the German Channel is considered THE Manta Hot Spot in Palau. And on the other hand, maybe a little because of his story, how it came about and how he got his name.

Table of contents

Where does the channel get its name from?

What many don’t know: Palau was once a German colony. To be precise, for at least 15 years. In 1899, the German Empire bought the colony of Palau from the Spanish at a spot price and made it part of the then imperial protected area German New Guinea. Later, at the beginning of the First World War, Palau was left almost without a fight to the Japanese. At that time – in 1909 – the Germans blew up a narrow, approximately 1 km long road into the coral reef inorder to shorten the transport route from the island of Angaur, which lies outside the reef and on which phosphate was mined, to the port in Koror. Today, the German Channel brings the many dive boats faster and easier to the southwestern outer reef, where, for example, the dive sites Blue Corner and the Blue Holes are located.

The location of the German Channel in Palau

The German Channel in Palau

No manta far and wide

On the German Channel we dived whole 3 times and unfortunately we have not seen a single manta far and wide. Really a pity, because – as already mentioned – this is THE manta spot par excellence in Palau, because there are some cleaning stations here. Maybe we were there at the wrong time? But no, from October to May is supposedly manta season… exactly our travel time. But apparently everyone hid from us 🙂

And so we spent most of our time in the German Channel waiting at the various cleaning stations.

The dive boat of Fish n Fins

Slow immersion

Waiting for the Mantas

The underwater world at the German Channel

The dive site itself extends over a sandy bottom, diving at a depth of about 15 to 25 meters. Even though we haven’t seen manta rays, there were other beautiful things we were happy about: such as several reef sharks, a large stingray lying calmly on the ground, turtles, giant pusherfish, Napoleon lipfish and majestic-looking firefish.

The highlight of our dives was on the one hand the large schools of fish and a sleeping leopard shark, which we have never seen before.

A butterfly fish

A leopard shark

Nemos in a purple anemone

A Lipfish

A whitetip reef shark

A starfish

Three butterfly fish

An anemone fish

An Eel Garden

A Napoleon lipfish

Diving on the German Channel

A large swarm of fish

Fish swarm on the German Channel

But stop: We saw a manta! In the morning while driving by speedboat to one of the dive spots just north of the German Channel! Only for about 10 seconds… but there are the mantas in Palau 😉

Our videos of diving in Palau

In total we did 17 dives with the diving school Fish ‘n Fins on Palau and here you can see some of our videos.

Alle Reiseberichte aus Palau

Die Inseln von Palau zählen mit der Blue Corner und dem German Channel zu den schönsten und interessantesten Tauchgebieten der Welt. Und die traumhaften Bilder des UNESCO-Weltnaturerbes Rock Islands haben sicherlich schon viele im Internet oder in Berichten im Fernsehen gesehen. Wir haben insgesamt 12 Tage auf Palau verbracht und das Inselparadies sowohl über als auch unter Wasser kennengelernt.