More about Mr.Scuba's Solomon Islands Trip

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We then moved on to Guadalcanal and Tambea Holiday Resort for three more days diving and touring WWII battle sites. Tambea is where the Japanese left the island when they gave up the campaign. (Also known as Cape Esperance) I also witnessed a moving Shinto memorial ceremony for the 30,0000 Japanese soldiers who died in the battles there. There I dove a sunken Japanese I class sub ranging from 30 to 90 feet in depth, (carried 200 men). A B-17 bomber sunk in 50 foot of water, Betty the Jap-smasher. This was mostly intact from the waist forward, including both wings with four engines and propellers still attached. You could also see the top turret and twin 50 Cal. machine guns. all covered with coral. We also did a reef dive.

Then flew on to Gizo for three days. We dove with Adventure Sports run by Danny & Kerrie Kennedy. There I twice dove the Toa Maru (a 300 foot troop transport sunk by bombs). I saw a Tank, a motorcycle and a Petrol Bowser, as well as morphine vials and a gas mask. We did a surface interval on Kennedy Island (where JFK and his injured crewmen were ship wrecked) then onto Munda for a week. While on Munda I stayed at Agnes Lodge and dove with Solomon Sea Divers run by David and Mariana Cooke except for one night on (were JFK's PT Boat was based), toured a museum there and dove a wrecked LS-T (salvaged a 1943 Coke bottle and some 7.6 and 50 Cal. rounds) and a Douglas-Dauntless SBD wreck - the planes pilot Col. Jefferson De Blank was credited with sinking the Toa Maru I dove in Gizo, and won the Medal of Honor for his exploits!

There are also a lot of pelagic fish in the Solomons. We started all our reef/wall dives at 90 or 100 feet and always saw sharks. I saw white tipped, silver tipped, black tipped, gray whalers and a hammerhead as well as two pygmy mantas and an eagle ray. We also saw about three or four turtles (hawksbills or greens). Once we approached a leatherback turtle on the surface, but before the boat captain understood we wanted to snorkel with it he had gotten too close and it sounded.

At Kolombangara Island (near Munda) during a surface interval I toured Japanese bunkers discovered only three years ago. They still had live ammunitions in them and one of our group almost stepped on a hand grenade! I told her that if she set that off while I was standing there I'd never speak to her again ;-} We also had a chance to visit Skull Island a Tambu site near Munda. This island hosts the skulls of local chiefs moved their before WWII. The native Solomon Islanders practiced ancestor worship before the Weslian missionaries converted them to Christianity at the turn of the century. The missionaries forbade continuation of ancestor worship and wanted all the relics to be destroyed. Some of the older Islanders sort of "hedged their bets" and removed all the ancestral bones, placing them on a "secret island". The curious thing is had they not done so, these relics most certainly would have been destroyed in the carnage of WWII. The remote and unpopulated island was never attacked, while Munda and Kolombangora were so heavily bombed that not a tree remained standing at the end of the war.

I met some wonderful people and would love to go back in a couple of years and do it all again. I took a lot of photographs but had trouble with my under water camera's strobe. I fixed it (I hoped) with duct tape. When the slides come back I found out I did well making"in the field" repairs. As soon as I get some images scanned I'll post them.

It was a trip providing many once in a life time experiences such as observing American and Japanese memorial services on Guadalcanal. A visit aboard the Rainbow Warrior in Gizo. A unique Cave dive near Munda. We began in a pool in the middle of an Atoll then descended 110 feet through a lava tube and ending in the Ocean @ 60 feet. While there I also had the unique privilege to dive on never explored reefs (and one cave).

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Last updated on October 12, 1997

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