Heaven and Hell

I'm still in serious culture shock (and temperature shock) after spending 5 weeks diving in the South Pacific. I spent two weeks on the FeBrina in Papua New Guinea and 10 days on the Bilikiki in the Solomon Islands, with the rest of the time diving and touring on land in the Solomons and PNG (and even a day in Cairns and Nadi).

The diving made anything else I have ever dived pale in comparison. I've been diving in a reasonable number of places over the last 8 years, but the diving in the Pacific just floored me. We saw hard and soft corals the size and variety of which boggled the mind. We saw sharks on just about every dive. I saw my first manta rays, sea snakes, Spanish dancer, crocodile fish. And then, there were the nudibranchs: fat ones, skinny ones, huge ones, tiny ones, ones that I could not find in any book, ones that I found were 3 or 4 times larger than the "maximum size" in the reference books, and ones that were out of the known geographic range. We saw turtles, enormous schools of barracuda, jacks, wrasses, trigger fish, surgeon fish, butterfly fish, and giant cod (and I mean giant -- like almost the size of a diver). We saw blue spotted rays, huge eagle rays that looked like the most graceful of birds swimming through the water, giant tuna, mackerel and wahoo, and lion fish and scorpion fish of all different types. One dive, I thought that my regulator was making a funny whistling sound. I ignored it for a while, but then noticed it happened at irregular intervals both when I inhaled and exhaled. I had been surrounded by a school of dolphins, keeping their distance because of my bubbles, but still hanging out with me for over an hour. We saw pristine, untouched reefs, beautiful village children who looked like they could swim and paddle a canoe before they could walk, uninhabited islands surrounded by gorgeous reefs, underwater caves and caverns which when we timed the dives right had the sunlight casting the most incredible shadow through the trees, open ocean bommies (sea mounds made out of coral, rising up from the depth of hundreds of feet sometimes almost to the surface) which had all the beauty of the reefs, plus the large pelagics found in the open ocean, and sheer walls that descended as far as the eye could see absolutely covered in life. Absolutely astounding.

It made you think there must be a god in this world....

And, at the other end of the spectrum, we saw both above and below the water, the scars of World War II --- Japanese and American plane wreckage throughout Raboul, the tunnel and cave system used by the Japanese during their occupation to escape from enemy bombing (except the locals were not so fortunate), craters from the American bombing, still 30 feet in diameter 50 years after the war. In the Russell Islands (a small group of islands in the Solomon Islands), we saw where the Americans had dumped war surplus -- jeeps some of which had the tires still full of air in 150 feet of water, hand grenades, ammunition, helmets, canteens, coke bottles, water tanks, all dumped in the ocean at the end of the war. The water still had a rusty haze to it. I dived a Japanese supply ship which was run aground on Guadalcanal as a last ditch effort to resupply the Japanese -- the bow was in 15 feet of water and the stern was nearly 200 feet deep, completely encrusted over with soft corals, and now home to an enormous assortment of fish. We saw areas of Guadalcanal that are off limits because there are still live bombs and mines.

It made you think there couldn't possibly be a god in this world....