This was our second trip to the Solomon Islands. In 1999 we went on a 14 day trip which was hosted by Cathy Church, (famous underwater photographer and teacher). If you take your underwater photography seriously, try to go to the Solomons with Cathy. However, she chooses her boat mates carefully and she usually selects them from graduates of her week long photo course. However, she took me so how picky can she be.
This time we spent 12 days on the Bilikiki (the same boat we were on in 1999) and reconfirmed our belief that scuba diving in the Solomon Islands is as good as it gets if not the best in the world.
12 days may sound like a long time to spend on a dive boat, but with that many time zones to cross, and the expense of getting there, a one week trip just doesn’t seem to be economically justified. Sue calculated that total time on airplanes and changing planes at airports was 27 hours one way.
You can get to the Solomons either through Fiji or Australia. Either way the last leg of you trip will be on Air Vanuatu. Solomon Air Lines used to have their own jet but they were unable to keep up the lease payments when the turmoil damaged the tourist industry. The flight from Brisbane is technically an Air Solomons flight with their flight crew, and in-flight magazine, but the plane says Air Vanuatu on the side. No worries mate, it a modern well maintained jet. Be aware that you are limited to 20 kilos of checked baggage unless you ask for the extra allowance for scuba divers which brings you up to 38 kilos.
If you are an underwater photographer, the carry on limits on Qantas will be a bigger concern. You will probably have to fly Qantas from the U.S. either to Australia or Fiji. They have a 15# carry on limit per bag and allow one carry-on and one personal item, such as a small purse or brief case. We brought very cheap light camera bags and brief cases in order to maximize our limits. We went to Target to get them and carried them to the grocery department to weight them before we decided which ones to buy. As it was after packing the underwater still cameras, strobes and film, we barely had enough allowance left to take medicine and reading material. Rather than check it, I decided to leave my underwater video equipment at home. However, several people on the boat checked several thousand dollars in camera equipment in unlocked (required by the government) hard cases and the worst thing that happened to them was one guy had a 72mm circular polarizer broken.
By the way when Qantas says 15# they don’t mean 15 and a half, and 18” doesn’t mean 18 and a half.
We checked our Spare Airs in our luggage with the top un-screwed so that we could easily prove that they were empty. If you have them and you should, pack them so that they are easy to get at, as it is likely someone will want to look.
You will be quite far from the local drug store, and Malaria is definitely a risk. Take mosquito repellant and some form of prophylaxis (giggle). There are different forms of Malaria. All of them are something you really don’t want, and some of them will kill you. We chose to take Larium. You take a pill one week before you leave, one a week there and one a week for four weeks when you get home. Different people react differently to Larium. Study up on it before making a decision. Some people say that it caused them to commit suicide. In my case I would attribute to it, a slightly less positive attitude, some damn strange dreams and a slight run down feeling. I get bit more by mosquitoes in my own home than I did in the Solomons, but it only takes one bite to infect you for the rest of your life.
Beyond that, weight restrictions be damned, I took virtually everything in the drug store and medicine cabinet. (Sue wouldn’t let me take potassium iodine in case of a nuclear war. Hey, you never know.) Your fellow passengers won’t be very sympatric if you want them to lose a day’s worth of diving to go back to town for tooth ache medicine.
On the ’99 trip Sue developed a rash from something in the water, and on this trip a woman developed a large itchy patch on her leg. So take some skin creams. Also, it is highly recommended that you use some type of ear drop to prevent fungal infections after every dive. Cathy Church has a formula she recommends that is vinegar and alcohol that is cheap and seems to work. You will smell a little like salad dressing but no one seems to care.
In scuba school they tell you not to take decongestants and dive. The problem is that you may get down, have the decongestant wear off and not be able to clear your ears when coming up. Decide for yourself.
The long and short of it is, that on an extremely expensive 12 day dive trip ear care becomes a major concern. I estimate that at least 1/3 of the group were beginning to have ear problems toward the end of the trip.
I made the mistake of looking to the side at Sue just as I did a back roll into the water. My right ear was not amused at falling three feet and hitting the water first.. It went into a full state of rebellion the last day and it took over 3 weeks to get back to anything approaching normal after we returned.
Dramine is a must. I take it two hours before boarding the boat, the first morning and then when ever told to. There are only about two passages where the crew will tell you to take a pill and go to bed (the boat makes long passages at night). The rest of the time is usually spent hiding in the lee of islands and the water is quite calm. After 12 days, I usually find I have to take one more when I get off to avoid “land sickness”.
From a timing standpoint from the U.S. LA-New Zealand-Brisbane-Honiara seems to make the most sense. However, if you have e the time and money, Fiji, Vanuatu, Honiara is well worth it.
In Fiji stay at the Sheraton Denesaru Island Resort
which used to be part of the Regent chain, and in Vanuatu, stay at the Iririki Island Resort which is like stepping into the movie South Pacific.
The best (really—the best.) accessible wreck dive in the world is the U.S.S. Coolidge which is in Santo. To get to it from Port Vila, you have to fly about an hour in what is euphemism called an airplane by Air Vanuatu.
(It was a De Havilland Twin Otter which when new would be one of the finest planes in the world. Suffice it to say this one wasn’t new. If I am going to fly in something, rode hard and put up wet, I want a DC-3 thank you very much.)
Several years ago when we where there they had to use duct tape to keep the baggage door closed. You will then have to overnight in Santo to meet the 24 hours before flying rule. Be prepared to go to 150’ on the Coolidge to “see the lady” a statue in the men’s smoking lounge. However, when we were there the dive was so well planed and structured, that it isn’t a problem. They had multiple tanks of air at a ‘coral garden” at 20’ where you could hang out, decompress and play with the pet moray eel.
We over nighted in Brisbane both ways although it is technically possible to connect directly to the Honiara flight. In our case we were late arriving in Brisbane the day before and presumably would have missed the flight to Honiara had we not built an extra day into the agenda. Further, I always like to have a day for my bags to catch up. If you miss the flight to Honiara, the next one is three days later, by which time the Bilikiki may be several hours sail away from Honiara.
We stayed at the Sheraton which is a bit pricy and ate at their “Sidewalk Café” which is more than a bit, pricey. However, the buffet is wonderful and after that long on an airplane you may like my feel you owe it to yourself.
Only about 300 people a year dive the Solomons and they cover about 1 million square miles of the Pacific ocean, so crowded dive sites are not a problem. The only damage to the reef is from fishing and some subsistence free diving done by the local population. The Bilikiki asks that you don’t buy shells in the villages where the creature was killed for the shell trade. This means that about the only politically correct shell that you can bring home is the Nautilus shell. This is because these primitive creatures live at over 800’ and the shell floats to the surface after the animal dies naturally. They are then found and sold.
The restriction isn’t a problem however, because several of the villages that we visited are peopled by world class wood carvers and there are opportunities to buy everything from mother of pearl inlayed salad spoons to intricately carved “spirit houses”. Unless you are what car salesmen call a flop (you flop your check book out and pay full sticker price), don’t pay “first price” for carvings. Sue brought so much we had to have the packed and shipped back DHL when the boat docked in Honiara.
Honiara is not where you will want to spend a lot of time although things are getting better. Sense the British made a mess of things and then left, there have been some serious “ethnic” problems between the Melanesian and Polynesian which used to live on different islands. The British decided that as some islands were heavily populated and some were sparsely populated, why not just take some of the people from the crowded islands and move them to islands where there was more room? That way each island would have plenty of people to work the Leaver and Burns Phillips coconut plantations.
After we were there in 1999, one group got control of a 50 cal machine gun mounted on a patrol boat, that was a gift from Australia, and turned it on a crowd about 2 blocks from the hotel where we had stayed overnight before boarding the boat. Several people were killed. By the time we arrived this time, things had gotten so bad, that a week before we got there, Australia had deployed a 2000 soldier peace keeping force, and several hundred policemen. I stood in front of DHL on the main street and timed Australian police cars which came by about once a minute. Henderson field ( named after a hero of the battle of midway) looked like all the ghosts of WWII had risen from the grave and re-peopled it. Instead of being U.S. Marines they were from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and even New Guinea. Beyond that, something the Marines could only dream of, many of the soldiers were women.
The islanders will tell you that they are not mad at tourists, They want us there, and sense most of the population has now been disarmed, you don’t have to worry much about getting caught in a cross fire. Most everyone welcomed the peace keeping force, and when three Australian soldiers crossing a river got swept into the ocean in full battle gear almost drowning, the islanders launched their dug-outs, fished them out and dried them off.
For Americans, they keep a special place in their hearts. Before WWII the only white men that they were exposed to were British politicians, plantation owners and overseers. The British treated them as sub human. When the War came, and they worked for Americans the Americans ate with them, shared fox holes and even gave them cloths and weapons. In short they treated them like equals. The feel such a strong bond with Americans that when the government recently changed the name of Henderson Field to Honiara International Airport (to placate the Japanese) the people of Guadalcanal threatened to file a law suit.
If you have to overnight in Honiara or decide to take some of the battlefield tours, you will want to stay at either the King Solomon or the Mandana Hotel. We stayed at the Mandana and it is said to be the better of the two. When checking in, the open air lobby will give you the impression that you are checking into a 3 or 4 star hotel. You will soon be disabused of this notion. You’re not in Kansas anymore Toto and the definition of a luxury hotel changes quite a bit between Brisbane and Honiara. The Mandana probably would have never met Holiday Inn franchise standards and the civil war hasn’t been good to the tourist industries or the infrastructures that it supports. What you will get is an adequate air conditioned room and friendly service. You may see a little mildew, and you probably won’t be bothered by bugs as the geckos in your room will eat them first. The open air restaurant is probably as good as the Holiday Inn and when we ate in the formal restaurant the food was excellent. Check the menu for Vanuatu beef. If it is there don’t pass it up. (Vanuatu is the next chain of islands to the east, and the French plantation owners decided to import cattle to keep the ground under the coconut palms trimmed down. When the found out what it was going to cost to ship cattle, they decided that they might as well ship the best. 100 years later, the steaks are wonderful.)
The Bilikiki is a 130 foot converted fishing boat with an exaggerated high bow of a style that seems to be unique to this part of the world. She is steel and although old, but has been completely rebuilt and her appointments and cabins seem new. If you are experienced with the Aggressor Fleet or Peter Hughes, the boat should be well up to your expectations.
She is configured with 10 cabins below deck, and the cabins are kept quite cool to keep the guests from smelling like the dead fish that originally occupied this area of the boat when she was a fishing vessel. The cabins are spacious by live aboard standards and have ensuite bathrooms. There are no port holes so daytime naps are not a problem.
The aft dive deck has a large camera table and each diver has two tanks and a basket below a bench to keep dive gear in between dives. In typical live aboard fashion you never take your gear off your tank and the crew recharges you tank between dives. Nitrox is available. There are showers and separate camera and gear rinse tanks on the dive deck.
Although you keep you cameras on the dive deck table between dives you are encouraged to do your camera maintenance in the large salon on a large table reserved ( no food or drinks around that table) for the purpose. There is E6 processing and light tables to view slides. There is also a TV to view videos and movies. Forward of the salon is the alfresco dining area where three or four tables are set up for meals and you get to know your boat mates usually rotating from one table to another. However, on our trip their was an Italian family that didn’t speak much English and usually kept a table to themselves at meals.
The top deck has chairs for sun bathing and is where “nibblies” are served every evening before dinner. This usually consists of sausage, crackers, olives, nuts etc. However, on our trip one young man liked to night fish with a hand line and twice we were treated to yellow fin tuna sushi and wasabi. I spoiled my dinner. Beyond that the food on the Bilikiki is pretty much hotel food. Nothing to complain about but if it were a restaurant you might each lunch there regularly but you wouldn’t rave about it to your friends. It is about one step below Aggressor Fleet food and two below Peter Hughes. However, there is no dress code for dinner and expect to spend the whole trip barefooted in swim suits and wraps. (Note to women: be sure to have something very conservative to wear into the villages. Most villagers are seventh day Adventists and don’t appreciate it if you flaunt a lot of flesh in front of their children.)
As with most live aboard diving, you are own your own when diving off the Bilikiki. You are expected to dive safely but beyond requiring a certification and air evacuation insurance and being strongly discouraged from going beyond 130’, There are no dive masters to either help or hassle you. As I tend to subscribe to the theory that “dive masters” are the most dangerous creature in the ocean, this doesn’t hurt my feelings even a little bit. However, I would not recommend the Bilikiki or the Coral Sea as a good choice for anyone that doesn’t have at least 100 dives in their log book. Don’t get me wrong, you could dive the Bilikiki from a wheelchair, but you need to know what you are doing.
In order to protect the reefs, much of the diving on the Bilikiki is done from a “live boat”. That means that when you get to a dive site, the captain will leave the boat running and circle very slowly about 50 yards from the site. You then board “tinnies” which take you to the site and on the count of three about 8 divers at a time will roll backwards into the water.
Most people will never experience the level of service that we experienced on the Bilikiki. The crew is perfect. They know what to do and when and are virtually invisible. You will never lift a tank, or swim more than a few feet. I joked that my underwater navigation skills had never been so good, I always came up right next to the tinny. You take your gear off in the water, they lift it into the boat and whisk you back to the Bilikiki where there are usually cookies or popcorn. DO NOT WEAR INTEGRAL WEIGHTS. These guys work hard and lifting gear out of the water 30 or 40 times a day is hard enough, don’t make it 10 pounds harder.
If you are an underwater photographer, after the first day, they will even get to know which camera is yours. They will load this for you and take it from you when you come out of the water. They will even rinse it for you when you get back to the boat. Trust me you are more likely to drop it or scratch the lens than they are. They really know their jobs and I don’t think that they make mistakes.
You will be issued a “safety sausage” with the boat name on it to keep as a souvenir. Should a squall come up when you are down, you may actually need it, we never did. I don’t think you could hide from the crew if you tried. However, in scuba diving in much of the S. Pacific a safety sausage, and emergency strobe are a lot like what the old cowboy said about his gun: he didn’t figure he would need it, but knew if he ever did, he would need it like HELL. In most of the S. Seas, there isn’t a 2 million dollar air sea rescue helicopter gassed up and crewed waiting for you to need it. On one trip that we made in Fiji, one woman lost her safety sausage and it took the crew over an hour to find her. The host on the Bilikiki said that when he worked out of Australia he was lost for over 4 hours and that it isn’t a good feeling.
Beyond that, this is not a good place for equipment failures, or pushing the dive tables. The Bilikiki has some rental equipment, but someone else may get it first, so get your equipment serviced by someone you trust before you leave. Unfortunately I don’t trust anyone. I have had more failures with just serviced equipment than not. However, this trip we had everything serviced and all the dive gear worked prefect.
At the farthest point of the cruise the boat will be 8 hours sail from the airport at Honiara, and 5 hours more by air ambulance to get you to the nearest chamber. Sue and I dive conservatively and spend 5 minutes at 15’ at the end of even the shallowest dive. In some cases we will spend the last 20 minutes of a dive on the top of the reef at 20’ but we still do the 5 minute safety stop. Beyond that we ascend very slowly from 15 feet to the surface. Everything that everyone knows about decompression sickness doesn’t apply when you are doing 4 or 5 dives a day for 7 to 12 days in a row. One couple we were on a boat with in New Guinea would take a day off from diving during a 12 day trip.
On any live aboard dive boat, you are going to be with your boat mates for a long time. There may be significant cultural differences as many foreign countries may be represented. On our ’99 trip there were even people from NEW YORK CITY!!
There is no where to hide. If you have never spent a week on a boat, you will be surprised how small 130” can be. Religion, politics, and things that you wouldn’t consider even mildly controversial on land, should be left on land.
Whad ya see, what kind of film do you using. Isn’t that a pretty moon are all good topics for live aboard dive boats. However, with today’s digital/film wars (You’ll pry my film out of my cold dead fingers) even what kind of film do you use may be too controversial for conversation on a live aboard.
The Villages
The people of the Solomon islands are friendly, talented and have a unique and interesting history. You will visit several villages during the trip and villagers will come to the boat in their dug outs to sell shells, fish and vegetables.
Study up on the history and culture before you go and you trip will be more enjoyable. The Polynesians were navigating huge areas of the Pacific ocean when Europeans were terrified to get out of sight of land. The people of Guadalcanal were our allies during the war and in one case withstood torture by the Japanese to protect American allies.
Take plenty of film into the villages. The children are some of the most photogenic in the world.
During our 1999 trip, we visited an off shore village where they put dance programs on for us. Neal wondered off from the group and found an old woman with a group of baby eclectus parrots which were pecking around in her yard like chickens. They were about as cute as it gets. As Neal videoed them, the old woman scowled. Normally the villagers are very friendly. On the way back, during the layover in Brisbane, the subject came up and Sue explained to Neal that raising baby parrots for export is illegal. The chief had probably told her to hide here babies until the visitors left. This explained some empty cages that were scattered around the village. Neal's videoing her and the babies, probably go her a good talking to by the Chief after we left.
There is somewhat of a conflict in the remote parts of the world between the rich westerner's desire to save what is left from commercialization, and the local people's desire to harvest their resources and become rich like the westerners. Hardwood is one area where there is friction. They feel like we harvested our resources and became rich and now we are telling them to leave theirs as is and stay poor. When you don't have enough money to buy insecticide to keep your children from getting malaria your perspectives about cutting down a tree are a little different. Off the beaten path is not a good place to wear your "World Wildlife Fund" T shirt.
Typically you will be offered 5 opportunities a day to dive. After breakfast, before lunch, after lunch, before dinner and a night dive. I took 20 lumen sticks on this trip and didn’t use any of them After three to four dives, bed beckoned more than adventure. Sue and I have made quite a few night dives in our lives and while they are great fun, they don’t seem to produce the number of photo opportunities that diving during the daytime does.
While 5 days a day would be impossible or dangerous for shore based diving, Live aboard diving allows you to start early enough and go late enough that even with 5 dives you can have plenty of surface interval between dives.
The crew will give you very good briefings before you go in the water. They will tell you what to look for and sometimes even point it out to you. However, the more you study the marine life in advance of the trip the more you will see.
To that end, I strongly suggest that you purchase Bob Halstead’s book on the marine life in the coral sea. The Coral Sea Reef Guide.
It is not unusual at the start of a trip, for a group of people to go in the water at the same time and the same place and some will be astounded at the diversity of life that the see and photograph, and others will say: “there’s nothing down there”.
Much of what you can see is very hard to see or easily scared off. This is not the Caymans. The fish here aren’t looking for a Cheese Whiz hand out. The marine life is not used to scuba divers and will treat you like a potential predator. Octopuses will change to the exact color, shape and pattern of the reef. Cuttle fish will mimic a sea cucumber exactly, (I have video from New Guinea to prove it) or whiz away like the Enterprise going to warp speed. Lion fish will turn their backs to you to point their poisonous spines in the direction of the threat, and worst of all Stone and Scorpion fish will be absolutely still, which makes them almost impossible to see.
While on this subject: do not settle down on the reef or a patch of sand, to take a photograph or adjust equipment until you are absolutely sure that there is nothing below you. I have been told by a degreed marine biologist that if a stone fish stings you, you will be dead before you can get back to the boat. This kind of makes it a moot point that you will usually be greater than 12 hours away from anything most of us would call health care.
Having said all that, if you study so that you know what to look for, swim slowly, and pay attention, you will see more on one dive off the Bilikiki that you would in three or four dives in other world class destinations.
Neal’s rule, is that the best stuff is usually right under the boat. On one of the few dives where we stern tied to an island, there were two fairly large octopuses mating in about 20 feet of water directly under the stern platform. You couldn’t run them off and one of the crew even petted one on the head. They stayed in one small area while diver after diver shot stills and video.
The Photography
There was just about every type of underwater camera rig represented on this trip. Nikonos Vs, housed film SLRs, housed digital SLRs, in our case a Nikonos RS (purpose built underwater SLR). We had a Nikonos V as a back up but didn’t need it.
The boat crew was very non-committal about current and whether to take wide angle or macro during the dive briefings. “ There may or may not be current and it may or may not be going in or out and it may change during the dive. There are some really good macro shots, and some really good wide angle shots on this dive.”
There are sea fans as big as a diver, and some excellent shots can be taken by following the old rule: get low and shoot up.
During our trip some of the dives were “merked up” by Coral Sea standards (most places they would have been described as “gin clear”.) Sue was shooting wide angle with a 13mm fish eye lens with a 180 degree field of view, and another diver was using a housed Canon with a 15mm fish eye.
The advantage of a fish eye is that you are so close to your subject that there is very little water between it and the lens. The less water the less merk. Others who were using what would ordinarily be considered very wide angle lenses such as the Nikonos 15mm, (90 degree angle of view) were getting noticeably more tiny white spots in their photographs.
Virtually everyone was using dual strobes on arms that allowed them to position them about 2’ from the lens to each side. The host has a theory about putting strobes right next to the lens for wide angle, but I think every one put on their best boat manners, agreed and then put them where Cathy Church says, as described above.
One tip from Cathy’s course, don’t even try to light vertical shots with a fish eye lens. Your not good enough.
Another tip from Cathy’s course is always inspect all ‘O” ring seals with a lighted magnifier before closing up you camera. Unless you go with Cathy, you are a very long way from camera repair when you are in the Solomons.
Our strobes don’t have built in modeling lights so we mount separate flashlights on top of each strobe to be sure that they are aimed properly. They also help predict what color the reef will be when the strobes hit it. You’d be surprised sometimes even in shallow water.
That brings up the fact that even on a daytime dive we are using 16 AA batteries every time we go in the water. The new pulse charging battery chargers from Radio Shack have really lightened the number of chargers and batteries that I have to take on a trip. On night dives we need at least one additional light on the top of the camera as a focus light, and normally have one more flash light each. Our BCs also have emergency strobes on them so on a night dive we use as many as 32 AA batteries, and three lumen sticks. I tie one to the camera and one to each of our consoles.
I have never made a dive trip that I didn’t flood at least one flash light. However
This is the only trip we have ever been on where no one flooded a camera. There is a saying that there are only two kinds of underwater photographers, those who have flooded a camera and those who will. However, using a lighted magnifier helps your odds immensely. On the ’99 trip about a third of the divers flooded a camera on the first dive, but fortunately Cathy Church was there and literally wrote the book “The Nikonos Manual” on how to restore a flooded camera to operation.
They had however, violated one rule that Sue and I never do and that is: don’t take a camera down on the first dive of the trip. Somehow the rush, hurry and newness of it all, offends the underwater photography god, and he is vengeful.
Even without flooding problems, there were camera problems aplenty. We had some defective recharable batteries that would show a full charge and go dead after about three shots. After we identified those the stop down lever on the camera quit engaging the lever on the lens. After the first shot, the viewfinder would go dark and stay there. We fixed that by gingerly bending it back to its proper angle, but I still don’t know how it got bent.
One very expensive top of the line digital video housing worked about half the time. It would work perfectly on the boat and go belly up about 10 feet under. A housed SLR had a bad connection between the strobe cord and the housing so the strobes would start to fire and then shut off immediately.
One lens that had to be converted by Nikon to fit in the underwater housing (removing the tripod mount) jammed and wouldn’t focus. They were mostly little things and most people found work arounds, however what little extra camera equipment the Bilikiki keeps was quickly rented.
On the second to the last day, the digital camera users were plagued with condensation inside their cameras. This seemed to evidence itself in the camera might or might not take a picture and it might or might not be sharp.
On the plane back I met a professional photographer who worked for the Australian Federal Police force. He had been deployed with the troops for 30 days and shot 8000 pictures. He had two Nikon Dx cameras (state of the art $4000 street price plus lenses) About half way into the trip one went belly up and never worked again. I have sense heard that digital cameras are only rated to operate at slightly over a hundred degrees and not more than 85% humidity. If that is true, this wasn’t the trip for them.
The neat thing about macro is that there is always something cool to take a picture of. I think it harkens back to when we were 2’ tall and or view of the world was quite a bit closer than now. Bugs, ants and leaves are all pretty big when you’re that close.
I can’t imagine any dive in the Solomons where you couldn’t shoot 36 exposures of different macro subjects. You have to move slow and look close. I noticed several of the divers on the trip took hand magnifiers down with them to search the sea fans for pigmy sea horses.
There is a saying in sales management that the average salesman drives past more business than he gets, and I am sure that the average scuba diver swims past way more than he sees.
Lots of soft coral, large schools of jacks, octopuses, scorpion fish, stone fish, lion fish, crocodile fish. We saw lots of dolphin but not underwater and some bump head parrot fish the size of Volkswagens. Some rays, flounders, clown fish, anemones, etc
This trip was short on the big stuff. What few sharks we saw didn’t want to be photographed.