Papua New Guinea by Ken

Papua New Guinea Report, 1999
Author: Ken Kurtis

I’ve gotten to go a lot of places all over the world in pursuit of good dives but never had I had the pleasure of doing a five-minute drifting safety stop and being accompanied by five dugout canoes. Welcome to Papua New Guinea.

It’s been called one of the most remote places in the world. (A recent article in Variety pointed out that PNG was last country in the world to cut a syndication deal with Baywatch.) And getting there is no picnic. We flew LAX to Sydney (14 hours), 2-hour layover, Sydney to Port Moresby, PNG (6 hours), overnight in Port Moresby, Port Moresby to Kavieng (3 hours, with two stops), get dropped at a local resort for lunch and relaxing while we wait for the boat to be prepped (the previous group left on the plane we came in on), and FINALLY set foot on the Paradise Sport.

The boat was, in a word, fabulous. It’s a 104’ catamaran with about a 30’ beam, so there’s plenty of room. The main deck serves as living quarters (11 staterooms of varying sizes) and dive deck. The second deck houses the galley, salon, and both a forward and aft outdoor area. The upper deck has a sundeck and the wheelhouse. The food was wonderful; the crew very attentive and responsive, and the DM (they call him Trip Director) did an excellent job.

On this trip, we had 21 divers, 7 from Reef Seekers (Bruce & Christy Bonnett, Vick Thomas & Elisabeth Sykes, Kevin Brooks, and Fred Vanacore, in addition to Ken), 7 from a shop in suburban Washington, D.C., and 7 others from various parts of the world. It was a very interesting, eclectic group.

The short version is that PNG was very good but not as spectacular as I’d hoped, mainly due to the vis, or relative lack thereof. We generally had 60-80’ vis, and there were a number of dives where there was a fair amount of particulate in the water. I had hoped to enjoy that fabulous clear, blue water that we always dream about and, while we had a couple of dives that met those conditions, that was not to be consistently so. But that’s NOT to say that we didn’t have a good time or that the trip wasn’t worth the effort. And the wonderfully-comfortable 86º water helped mitigate the lower vis.

PNG has been called the center of biodiversity in the ocean. If you do a species count, the closer you get to that area of the world, the higher the number of different fish species. Off the top of my head (and don’t hold me to these numbers) we’ve got rough 300 species off our Pacific Coast, Hawaii has 450, Micronesia has 1000, and the PNG area may have over 2000. There’s a school of thought that says this is where life in the ocean started and spread, which explains why the species count drops as you get further and further from PNG.

Well, we saw LOTS of fish. To put it in perspective, if you made 40 dives, shot an entire roll of film (36 pix) on each dive, saw every species that existed, took only one picture of a given species, at the end of your trip, you’d still be missing 600 species of fish. So there’s a lot to see. And you definitely won’t see everything. But we saw a lot.

Although Kavieng is billed as “The Pelagic Capital of PNG,” our group may have considered that a bit of an over-statement as we didn’t see any whale sharks, manta rays, whales, or orcas. And while it’s fun to go hunt for Mr. Big, you’re much more likely to run into Mr. Small.

To me, it wasn’t the sharks (silvertips, blacktips, whitetips, and gray reef), chevron barracuda, eagle ray (only one), jacks (thousands), or Spanish mackerel that made the trip special. For me, the special moments were seeing my first crocodilefish (a lot smaller than I’d thought), diving a wall and looking at literally a hundred thousand red anthias darting in and out of the protective coral, watching a cuttlefish change colors, seeing squid avoid the edges of our dive lights at night, watching the various dartfish (fire, elegant, and two-tone) hovering above their holes, seeing the blind shrimp and the gobies work together, and (my personal favorite because I found it) watching a bright yellow leaf scorpionfish wait for his next meal to come along.

And every day, we would be visited by natives from the .local villages. Although a few had boats with outboards, most of them (including the kids) paddled over in the dugout canoes that were hollowed out from a tree trunk. Even though most had a single outrigger attached, we still marveled that they were able to keep them from tipping over. Some people came to barter food with the boat (trading locally-grown vegetables for rice, sugar, and other staples) and some just came to gawk and hang out. But you really got a feel for the cultural gap, no more so than when one of the DC divers, who was on a rebreather, was kicking back to the boat on the surface and threading his way through the locals. Talk about technology meeting the Stone Age . . .

Because we were diving for nine days, we also had a chance to do some exploratory diving. We headed for a small island 20 miles SW of New Hanover Island, pulled in and asked the villagers for permission to dive. They said it would be fine and told us of their beautiful reef, but also warned us to watch out for the dragon that lived at the bottom of the reef and swallowed divers. Since they said it with a straight face, we assumed they really believed it to be true, and named the first spot we dove Dragon Point.

This was simply spectacular. First of all, the vis was in excess of 150 feet. But the reef structure was what was truly amazing. Look at the nearest wall in the room you’re sitting in right now. Picture that absolutely 90º vertical wall covered with corals, especially HUGE sea fans and barrel sponges, some over six feet. Let the wall stretch for as far as the eye can see in all directions, and now add a hundred thousand colorful fish. THAT was what the dive at dragon Point was like. I cruised a lot of it at 100’, and I could look straight down and could just barely at the edge of visibility see the reef start to slope out.

I’ve never dove Bloody Bay Wall in Little Cayman but a couple of people on the boat had and said this was an even better dive. I think the sheer verticalness just added to the overall impression.

Probably our best dive overall was at Chapman’s Reef, specifically Chapman’s II. It was just covered with fish and invertebrates and there was a whole lot going on. We also had great dives at Planet Channel, Peter’s Patch, Chamis Channel, Big Fish, and Judy’s Reef.

And we did the requisite nautilus dive (another personal first for me). Chambered nautiluses (nautili??) live in very deep water and migrate upward to feed at night. So the boat set a trap (a big baited cage) and goes out the next morning to see the results. We got nine. You go to a shallow part of the reef, take a nautilus out of the trap, look at it, take some pictures, watch it roam around (they’re really interesting-looking), then put it back in the trap so it can later be released into deeper waters.

Then I got the bright idea that, since everyone had put the nautili back into the trap, I could go back to the boat, put in a new roll of film, put on a wide-angle lens, take two Nautilus wranglers with me (thank you Fred and Christy), and shoot all nine of the nautili on the reef.

You know how some ideas seem better on paper than in practice? Just getting the nine nautili all together on the sandy bottom (without kicking it up, of course, lest we ruin the vis for the pix) was a feat, but when all nine nautili saw this as their chance for freedom and took off in nine different directions, stirring up the bottom as they siphoned and jetted their way along, you can see why we started referring to this as the Nautilus CF dive. But, hey, it SEEMED like a good idea at first.

All in all, it was a wonderful trip. Perhaps not everything we’d hoped for but an amazing experience nonetheless. And definitely worth doing again. And we’d certainly recommend Mike Ball Dive Expeditions to anyone. Great operation from the pre-planning to trip operations to the send-off (except for one little problem I’ll save for later).

For those interested in seeing what this was all about and enjoying it vicariously, we will have a public showing of the slides sometime in November, after we’ve returned from the Sea of Cortez. E-mail me privately for the specifics if you might be in the LA area at that time.

Ken Kurtis
NAUI Instructor #5936
Co-owner Reef Seekers Dive Co.
Beverly Hills, Ca.