Transfer Anilao to PG - worth it?

[cetacean]

Mantas is Ecuador for sure. Easy to get to. Much more graceful animals.


That's in the same cluster as Fiji with the rainbow reef site. I have never been, but for soft corals the pictures are up there (if preservation efforts are upheld). It seems further east in PNG diving, reefs are said to be in better condition with less boat traffic and newbies kicking wreckage from resort pool sessions.

I cannot justify flying both long and pricey ($4000) for 1 week. Less allergic to air travel when significantly less time and dollars than actual diving/nice liveaboard especially long ones stopping over petri dish one after the next or worse sharing air in a cylinder . Not worth the money and risk to sit in the sun the whole time

First - the liveaboards in the Solomons are almost all 10 day trips, usually with a requirement to get in the day before, and many choose to stay in Honiara for a couple of days afterwards - so definitely not going to the Solomons for "1 week..."

The rest of your comment was somewhat unintelligible - something about petri dishes and sharing air...

My response: if you're going to limit where you dive by the distance you need to fly to get there then you are going to miss most of the world's best destinations. I've been to the Solomons several times before - in a world that is getting significant;ly harder to find pristine reefs, places like the Morovo Lagoon (the largest saltwater lagoon in the world) are absolutely worth the travel and the cost - it's unique, and on a good top one of the top 5 dive destinations in the world. It's one of the few places where you can snorkel with mantas daily (before breakfast) dive with 8 different varieties of sharks, experience prolific coral (soft and hard varieties) and still find massive schools of fish.

 

[Barrel SpongeBob]

First - the liveaboards in the Solomons are almost all 10 day trips, usually with a requirement to get in the day before, and many choose to stay in Honiara for a couple of days afterwards - so definitely not going to the Solomons for "1 week..."

The rest of your comment was somewhat unintelligible - something about petri dishes and sharing air...

My response: if you're going to limit where you dive by the distance you need to fly to get there then you are going to miss most of the world's best destinations. I've been to the Solomons several times before - in a world that is getting significant;ly harder to find pristine reefs, places like the Morovo Lagoon (the largest saltwater lagoon in the world) are absolutely worth the travel and the cost - it's unique, and on a good top one of the top 5 dive destinations in the world. It's one of the few places where you can snorkel with mantas daily (before breakfast) dive with 8 different varieties of sharks, experience prolific coral (soft and hard varieties) and still find massive schools of fish.

Airports are basically petri dishes. Many times gotten sick the second or third day. It is awful.

For 4 days in the air or hopping dock to dock along 10 days diving with perhaps 2-3 days exhaustion/decompression on land, that is half annual vacation gone to 1 liveaboard as oppose to doing 3 to 4 give or take. Got to limit geographically to Ecuador, Colombia, non-Carribean Central America.

 

[cetacean]

Airports are basically petri dishes. Many times gotten sick the second or third day. It is awful.

For 4 days in the air or hopping dock to dock along 10 days diving with perhaps 2-3 days exhaustion/decompression on land, that is half annual vacation gone to 1 liveaboard as oppose to doing 3 to 4 give or take. Got to limit geographically to Ecuador, Colombia, non-Carribean Central America.

The only on-par diving in that region is Cocos off the coast of Costa Rica, the Galapagos, Ecuador, and Malpelo, off the coast of Colombia. Everything else is average at best. Dive all 3 multiple times... can be excellent - but you're missing out on so much if you're limited to just those destinations.

If your immune system is that compromised that you can't travel for a couple of days without getting sick you might want to focus on that.

I can get to Honiara in less than 2 days of traveling from the west coast of the US. However, it's better to spend a full day in Sydney or Brisbane - then a full night in Honiara before boarding the boat. With this type of schedule exhaustion isn't really an issue...

Last- "hopping dock to dock..." - not sure what liveaboards you go on - in the Solomons there are no docks (they leave/return to the Honiara harbor - all remote diving in the interim).

Cocos and Malpelo are the only locations in Central America that come close in fish life to the Solomons. However the diversity of the Solomons is much greater than the entire Eastern Pacific. Mega-fauna is definitely more prevalent in Cocos, Galapagos, and Malpelo, however with the ocean warming patterns, the really large schools of hammerheads are now much more rarely seen, whereas in the Solomons you can still find large schools of smaller sharks outside some of the reef passes.