Blog: Angelfish

Diving in The Solomon Islands

We left London on Friday 28th March, travelled via Los Angeles and Fiji and finally arrived in Honiara (aspirated H) four days later.  We had lost Saturday 29th March flying over the international dateline.  This was strangely disorienting as we felt lost for the rest of the following week, not knowing which day it was.

Luckily for us, we found the 29th March again when we left Fiji for Hawaii, flying back over the international date line.   However, this wasn't until 11th April, which we had twice.

We are now in Hawaii, doing nothing much at all but clean our dive gear, write up our log books and look at the Pacific rolling in on the beach.  

The water here is cold - at least by my standards.  Luckily for us, the water in The Solomon Islands was on average 29degrees centigrade. The surface conditions were variable and the rainy season seemed to have extended itself to include our dive trip.  After several mornings of cold, grey, damp beginnings I began to wonder if we had inadvertantly transported ourselves back to blighty.   The only difference being that the air temperature was an average of 27degrees, just warm enough not to need the woolly socks I had travelled in, but cool enough to roll-back into the first dive of the day with relief.  it was warmer underwater than it was on the surface.

We were staying on the Bilikiki, a well known live-aboard dive boat, which has been operating for over ten years in The Solomon Islands.  The rough conditions meant that we did not visit all the islands or sites that we would usually see but those that we did visit were spectacular.

The underwater topology is largely hard corals, although some soft corals survive.  The coral gardens are magnificent.  There were times that we felt we had strayed into an underwater version of Hampton Court, the corals were pristine, well manicured (presumably this is thanks to the gigantic Bump Head Parrot Fish) and extensive - they just went on forever; the walls were sheer drop-offs to hundreds of feet in the blue below.

We enjoyed a variety of under water conditions with currents sometimes flying us past the gardens at break-neck speed and then reversing and sending us back again.

Hope you enjoy the photos.  Will be back with some more about some of the WWII wrecks and sites we dived on. 

by angelfish on 22:19 on 14th April 2008