Tawali, Papua New Guinea

I go there soon, anyone dove Papua New Guinea?

thanx, shawn abbott

shawn wrote:
> I go there soon, anyone dove Papua New Guinea?
>
> thanx, shawn abbott
>

Went to Tufi earlier this year, absolutely brilliant. The visability
was very good. Boat dives tended to be around pinnacles with plenty to
see, mostly of the larger variety (great barracuda, grey, whitetip,
blacktip, silvertip and hammerhead sharks among other things). Off the
jetty there were all sorts of rarer things such as blue ring octopus,
mandarin fish. Where we were there were several wrecks as well, PT
boats just off Tufi jetty and some excellent wrecks within about an hour
(we dove the Jacob, Blackjack is also mean't to be very good). These
are going to be deco dives though. In fact in general most dives were
relatively deep for standard rec limits (between 30-40 metres, wrecks to
50m with tanks hung from boat for deco).

Even though all the boat dives were out around submerged pinnacles or on
wrecks there was very little current, in retrospect I think we came up
the ladder with no surface swim on every dive.

"shawn" <shawnabbtt@> wrote in message
news:1122900673.120236.30310@g44g2000cwa. ...
>I go there soon, anyone dove Papua New Guinea?

I have not stayed at Tawali resort, but I have dived PNG a number of times
now and Milne Bay (where Tawali is located) 3 times, though I did Milne Bay
from liveaboards. Which brings to mind that I think Chertan is based from
Tawali.

Milne Bay is extraordinary diving. It is heavy on the critter stuff as well
as what they call "muck diving" (basically critter diving in muck and poor
viz). Obviously I don't know where the Tawali boats go on a regular basis,
but if they even give it half a try to reach the better locations you should
have a great dive trip.

A point to consider: it used to be that *in most cases* one had to overnight
in Port Moresby before boarding a plane to their final PNG destination the
next day, but that requirement has been relaxed some and Air Nugini now has
schedules that allow a lot more travelers to just stop at Moresby before
heading out to their final stop...all in the same day. Keep that in mind
when booking flights. A stay in Port Moresby is the biggest waste of time I
can imagine when one could instead spend that extra day in Alotau.

I'm heading back to do the Star Dancer on the Solomon Sea itinerary, this
coming January. PNG has never disappointed me in regard to diving and photo
ops. I have an immense appreciation for the scuba there. Between PNG and
West Papua above, I think the diving is as good as it gets anywhere in the
world (at least anywhere in the world I have visited).