March 10-20, 2020 Manager's Blog

So we managed to get in one trip before everyone shut their borders! 5 adventurous divers joined us before things had got too bad and were rewarded with some excellent diving!! Although the weather was a bit rough to start with this passed and the sun came out and the sea was flat the rest of the way!!  

It was hard to pick the best dives of the trip but some of the highlights were Kicha where the underwater volcano of Kavachi was super loud and provided an amazing sound track to a spectacular dive that had grey reef sharks, huge school of jacks and rainbow runners and the most colourful, stunning coral garden. The sun shone for Mbulo Caves sending magical light rays down into the caves and swim throughs. At Lagoon Point we had turtles swimming by every 10 minutes, unbelievable visibility, giant gorgonian fans and too many fish to count all along the wall. The viz at Mary was stunning and we enjoyed swimming with schooling jacks and snappers and watching reef sharks on the point, plus there was the scary lobster cave!!! Everyone also really enjoyed Oli’s critter dive in Bilikiki Bay, checking out the weird little fishes that live there.  Rainbow Reef was also sensational with sharks, tunas, barracudas and the cutest school of batfish! My personal favourite was Karumolun, I have never seen the viz so good there, the sun was shining and there was fish and coral everywhere!! There were also some disco clams, nudis and a little spearing mantis shrimp!

Apart from our fabulous diving we also went ashore to check out some carvings and to see some great singing and dancing in the village of Karumolun. 

Thank you so much to everyone who made the trip in these uncertain times, it was wonderful to meet you all. Thanks also to the wonderful Bilikiki Cruises' managers, office team and crew who looked after us every step of the way. We arrived back into Honiara to find the world had changed while we were out diving, borders were closing and this terrible virus was spreading. Luckily there were still no cases in the Solomon Islands and we could all fly out to Australia as planned. 
We hope everyone stays safe and things return to normal soon!