8 Pacific dive legends

THE SOLOMON ISLANDS

I can’t help but wonder what my father would say if he knew I was going to Guadalcanal.

To him — a 25-year-old Navy corpsman attached to a Marine air wing — Guadalcanal was hell in a very small place, the setting of a six-month pitched battle in World War II, a scene of constant anguish, brought to closure at the cost of thousands and thousands of lives. Guadalcanal was the place where he earned a Bronze Star for valor — but what he did to get it remains unclear to this day. He never, ever talked about it.

To me, this place is a chance to pay homage to the sacrifices made by my father, his colleagues and, yes, the Japanese occupying force that resisted them for so long. More importantly, it’s a way to savor the present-day peace and tranquility that was purchased more than half a century ago with all that brave young blood.

Guadalcanal is home to Honiara, capital of the Solomon Islands, the second-largest insular nation in the South Pacific. It’s a nation wide-flung enough to include Melanesians, Micronesians, Papuans and even Polynesians — all the principal peoples of the Pacific. Islands here range from atolls to volcanoes (one tiny island, Kavachi, is a volcano that did not even breach the surface until May of 2000), some of the greatest geographic variety to be found in the South Pacific.

The echo of the Pacific war is a principal reason that divers travel to the Solomons today. Iron Bottom Sound, the body of water between the islands of Guadalcanal, Tulaghi and tiny Savo, is the resting place of dozens of warships and scores of aircraft. Many, such as the American carrier Quincy, the Australian heavy cruiser Canberra and the Japanese battleship Kirishima, lie far beyond the reach of recreational scuba divers. Others, such as the USS Aaron Ward and the USS John Penn, can be visited by properly trained technical divers. Some, such as the Japanese cruiser submarine I-1, are easily accessible by recreational divers. And a few, such as the Hirokawa Maru and the Kinugawa Maru, can actually be done as shore dives. Warship wrecks — described by one divemaster as “metal dinosaurs slumbering on the ocean bottom” — are typically littered with bomb or torpedo damage, jeeps, machine parts, sake bottles and live ammunition, all of it gradually succumbing to encrustation by soft and hard corals, the bottoms nearby often home to garden eels and anemones.

Yet even if the Solomons had somehow managed to remain untouched throughout the entirety of World War II, divers would certainly have discovered them by now. Surrounded by the aptly named Coral Sea, these islands are home to some of the most lush coral reefs in the Pacific, some still awaiting their first visits by scuba divers. Both hard and soft coral are here in abundance, and reef inhabitants and visitors range from scalloped hammerheads and rays of all varieties to bumphead wrasse, clownfish and virtually any Pacific tropical you might care to search for.

Because of depth, occasional strong currents and the fact that live-aboards are the preferred means of visiting many dive sites, the Solomon Islands appeal most strongly to advanced divers, and all-technical charters are not a rarity. But this is a destination worth planning for, a strong and diverse underwater environment that is the setting for some truly sobering reminders of sea battles and war.

You know that thing they always yell on Wheel of Fortune? That “Big money! Big money!” rant? Well, obviously, these people have never been to Yap.

Yap, westernmost of the principal island groups in the Federated States of Micronesia, is the home of the prototypical big money. We’re talking disc-shaped stone money the size of tractor tires, carved from limestone quarried 300 miles away in the islands of Palau and valued, not according to size, but according to how many people got crushed, drowned, eaten by sharks or otherwise became hors de combat in bringing this Jolly-Green-Giant-size loose change home.

Not to worry; you won’t need pockets the size of parachutes when you get here. Stone money is still used for things like land transfers, but for most other things dollars will suffice. Still, combine the stone money (left outdoors and rarely moved) with the fact that grass skirts and thu’us (loincloths) are still worn here, that history is recorded not in books but in dance, and that just about anyone you meet is apt to be chewing betel nuts (giving their teeth a decidedly vampiric crimson cast) and you may get the impression that you have ventured just a wee bit off the beaten path. And that’s before you’ve even gotten wet.

Underwater, you may get the impression that FSM stands for “Fabulous Scuba with Mantas.” As one divemaster told me, “On Yap, ‘manta dive’ does not mean a dive where you hope to see mantas — it means diving with the mantas.” Mil Channel (to the north of Yap proper) contains three sites that virtually guarantee encounters with the winged giants of the Pacific, and Goofnuw Channel, just off Gagil-Tomil, likewise holds mantas from June through October.

Summer is also a good time to spot gray reef sharks at aptly named Shark City (near Mil Channel), and eagle rays, whitetip reef sharks, bumphead parrotfish, Pacific gray sharks, and a variety of wrasses are just some of the headliners playing in venues around the island group. And if you like your underwater sights within arm’s reach, Yap is known as a place to see ghost pipefish, pygmy seahorses, mandarinfish, several varieties of clownfish and a wide variety of nudibranchs.

Windward (east-side) dives on Yap are generally on sloping terraces decorated with one of the widest selections of hard corals in this part of the Pacific. Leeward (west-side) dives are generally on walls, some of which begin as shallow as 15 feet and drop off to visual forever. A hundred feet of visibility is common, with half that again from time to time, and the southern end of Yap proper includes caverns and swim-throughs spacious enough for even the more timid of recently certified divers.

“Something for everyone” is usually hyperbole, but on Yap, that phrase rings as naturally true as the lithic click of stone money.

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