Trip Report : Iron Bottom Sound (Solomon Islands — Feb 2024)

Background

Diving the deeper wrecks in “Iron Bottom Sound” has been at the top of my list for a very long time.

The biggest barrier is that the resources nowadays for conducting deep technical dives in that area are very limited. Neil Yates is the local expert on the wrecks and he used to run Tulagi Dive but doesn’t anymore and the two liveaboards generally run recreational trips. Some of those trips visit a few wrecks and occasionally they will have a wreck-focused trip, but they don’t normally cater to technical divers.

When Aron @ Dirty Dozen Expeditions sent out an email saying they were going to run an inaugural trip to the Solomons, I replied instantly saying that I was in. The benefit of booking with the Dirty Dozen is that the equipment and supply logistics are taken care of in advance. We had sorb, rebreather cylinders, bailout cylinders, and banked Trimix ready to go. The other big benefit is that they book the entire boat so you have some freedom to construct your own itinerary based upon sites the divers on the boat want to visit (within reason). You are also likely to meet other divers with similar interests and capabilities when diving deep wrecks.

Finally, Aron had arranged for none other than Neil Yates to be on-board and dive with us for the trip!

With that out of the way, let’s get to the details of the trip. This will be very detailed with hopes that it can help others.

Travel Logistics

Inbound to Honiara

From most locations, there are essentially two ways to get to the Solomon Islands: (1) Connect through Brisbane (BNE), Australia or (2) Connect through Nadi (NAN), Fiji to get to Honiara Airport (HIR). I live in Southern California and United Airlines recently started flying from LAX-BNE 3-4 times a week so it made it a “no-brainer” to fly through Brisbane.

With any trip like this, it makes a lot of sense to show up a day or two early just in case flights change or bags get lost, etc. I flew LAX-BNE on the night Feb 14th and lost the entire day of Feb 15th. I arrived into Brisbane early the morning of the 16th about 4 hours before my flight to Honiara. Because I was changing airlines, I had to collect my bags and go through customs and wait until the Solomons Air counter opened to re-check my bags and check-in for the flight.

Two notes: (1) When I was there, the Solomons Air counter was not easy to find (it was early in the morning and no signs had been put up and they are in a temporary space) and (2) Solomons Air is VERY strict on weight limits.

On the first point, the airport sign said check-in was at Counter 12 which I couldn’t find. When I went to the end of the hall to Counter 10 and asked the agent where Counter 11 was, she literally said “What? There is no counter 11. We are at the end of the terminal at Counter 10.” I finally figured out Counter 11 was a temporary space behind the other counters.

On the second point, I finagled my way as a “media” person with all my camera equipment and was only charged for 2 kg of extra weight at AUD20 per kilo. I was actually over by about 20-25 kg.

Quite a few of us were on the flight from BNE to HIR and most had some sort of luggage issue. Also beware that one diver had brought a scooter with some power tool batteries that were apparently in excess of the allowed Watt Hours and were confiscated by security before he could fly.

After a couple hours of flying, we got into the approach for the infamous Henderson Field of the “Cactus Air Force” which is bordered on the south by the infamous “Alligator Creek.”

Honiara

We hit quite a bit of traffic on the way from the airport to Honiara and it took about 45 minutes (I think it is normally 25-30 minutes). I had one night and most of the next day in Honiara and decided to stay at Heritage Park which is apparently “the best hotel in the Solomon Islands.” They had a decent pool, it was quiet, the AC kinda worked and the food was passable Most other people stayed at the Coral Seas which is about a half-mile down the road.

After trying to get over some jet lag, I met up with another diver that was staying at my hotel and we made a two mile hike up to the Guadalcanal Memorial which was well worth the walk. It overlooks the town of Honiara with Henderson Field and Savo Island in the distance and has a number of monoliths and interesting information about the battles that took place there.

Outbound from Honiara

Everybody got their gear packed up and ready to go after our single dive on the 26th since we were debarking at 8am on the 27th. Of course, we had plenty of gear to offload. Probably about 1/3 is in the pictures below:

We were originally scheduled to fly out on the 27th from HIR-BNE. However, a few weeks before our trip, Solomons Air canceled our flight on the 27th which meant we all spent the night in Honiara again on the 27th before flying from BNE-HIR on the 28th.

The flight into Brisbane landed after the daily from HIR to California so I had to stay the night. To make things easier, I stayed at the Pullman Hotel at the Brisbane Airport. It still meant hauling my luggage to the hotel and back the next day.

I flew on Feb 29th (once every four years!) from BNE-SFO and then SFO-SNA. Dealing with luggage logistics on all of the layovers and hotels can be quite a pain. Essentially, every step of the way you need to collect your luggage, store it, recollect it and the move it again. This happened from (1) Boat to the Honiara hotel, (2) Honiara Hotel to the HIR Airport, (3) Brisbane Airport to the hotel, (4) Brisbane hotel back to the airport, (5) Customs at SFO, (6) Destination at SNA.

I was diving “wet” and had a 5mm wetsuit so at least I didn’t need to take all my drysuit equipment. However, I still had close to 170 pounds of gear with me.

Boat

We boarded the Solomons Master around 5pm the day after we arrived. We quickly took over the boat with a ton of dive and camera gear with about 13 technical divers. The dive deck on the boat is well laid out but it is still cramped with that many technical divers with rebreathers, bailout tanks, etc.

One caveat I would give people is that the boat itself is definitely in need of some TLC. I dove on the same vessel in Bikini Atoll in June 2023 and it was starting to literally fall apart. The boat was going into dry dock at the end of the season and I was hoping that they would perform some major rework on the interior but that didn’t happen. Some of the obviously wrong things were fixed but it still definitely dated and needs some love.

In spite of the physical condition of the vessel, the crew is excellent and the overall environment is great. Given how remote we were, the food was very good. There was plenty of food and meals usually consisted of multiple protein choices along with veggies and options for vegetarians and vegans. Deserts were also good.

We also have some fantastic views while on-board the boat and were often treated to nice sunrises and sunsets.

Diving Operations

Unlike the wrecks in Chuuk and Bikini, most of these wrecks do not have permanent mooring lines on them and the currents can be strong based upon the environmental factors (tides, moon, weather, wind, etc.). The general flow of operations is that the crew would put a downline on the wreck (or use an existing one) and ensure that we were on the wreck. They would then attach a portable decompression station to the downline and stage extra tanks including Nitrox 50 and O2. We would then shuttle groups of divers out to the wreck in RIBs.

We were fortunate to have Neil Yates on board. He would give us a pre-dive brief about both the history of the wreck and key points of interest. We took full advantage of his experience and expertise (photos below courtesy of Antti Apunen and John Hache).

Safety operations were paramount for an operation like this. We would meet as a group and each team would provide their dive plan including where they would be and their max depth and runtime which would be noted on the master log. In order to give some room to people getting ready on the dive deck, we would separate into the smaller teams with generally no more than two teams gearing up at the same time and the first team in the water would rotate each day. Every diver would be given a pre-splash check from a checklist and then upon returning provide the pressures in all of their tanks along with actual dive depth and runtime.

One of the RIBs would stay tied into the downline with safety gear and additional tanks. The other RIB would shuttle divers back-and-forth to the Solomons Master. When you finished your dive, you would hand your bailout tanks up to the RIB attached to the downline and then take off your rebreather and hand it to the roving RIB which would gather up a team of divers and shuttle them back to the boat.

It took us a couple dives to get into a rhythm but then it started to run very smoothly.

The Wrecks

Obviously, the main reason we were there was to dive wrecks!

There were numerous battles that took place in Guadalcanal during Operation Hightower between 7 Aug 1942 and 9 Feb 1943. The primary objective of the US and Allied combined forces was to take over the island and control of Henderson Field. There were many bloody battles fought on land during those months. It was yet another island based airport that gave us another place to base our forces on the march west towards Japan. For readers of history, the best book I have read so far on the Naval history of the battle is Neptunes Inferno by James Hornfischer.

Most of the wrecks are deep in the what got nicknamed “Iron Bottom Sound” after all the ships that sank there. It is a series of sounds and straits which are in between the main island of Guadalcanal and the outlying islands to the east.

Both Paul Allen on R/V Petrel and Robert Ballard have discovered and documented many of the deep wrecks with expensive and advanced deep sea technology. However, there are also a lot of wrecks that are in the shallower waters near the main islands and these were our targets.

Below is a map from Wikipedia of the wrecks that are in the area. According to the expert Neil Yates, these aren’t entirely accurate, but it will be good enough to paint a canvas of our plans:

On this trip, we were not planning to dive the USS Atlanta since it is much deeper (400+ feet) and really requires a focussed expedition and since this was our first trip to the area. Instead, we had a lot of other targets but the “main prize” for the trip was the USS Aaron Ward.

On a trip like this with currents, different conditions, etc. you really need to be flexible and adaptable. For example, one day we had planned on diving the USS John Penn (APA-23) but it had been raining and the visibility was bad from the rivers running into the ocean and there was a ton of current. That would have been a bad decision so we made alternate plans.

The table below contains a summary of the wrecks I dove while there. I plan to have separate, detailed posts with plenty of history and photographs for quite a few of the key wrecks and will add links below as I complete them. I built photogrammetry models of the Mavis airplane and the Japanese I-1 submarine that I will be publishing with those posts.

Wreck	Photo
USS Kanawha (AO-1) Auxiliary Oiler Max Depth : 185 feet
HMNZS Moa (T233) New Zealand Minesweeper Max Depth : 140 feet
USS Aaron Ward (DD-483) Destroyer Max Depth : 225 feet
“Mavis” Airplane Kawanishi H6K Max Depth : 100 feet
I-1 Submarine Japanese J1 Type Sub Max Depth : 90 feet
Azumasan Maru Japanese Freighter Max Depth: 210 feet
Kyusyu Maru Passenger-Cargo Ship Max Depth: 142 feet
Hirokawa Maru Japanese Cargo Vessel Max Depth : 120 feet

I have marked below on the map the approximate path we took during our 9 days of diving and numbered the 11 dives I did along with the side-trip to the World Discoverer. I started to develop a cough mid-way through the trip so I ended up sitting out a dive or two but did see most of the wrecks on the itinerary.

One thing to note about the wrecks in the Solomons: most of the shallower wrecks have been salvaged so some of the guns, props, engines, etc have been removed. However, there is still plenty to see.

Additional Activities

Because Dirty Dozen charters the whole boat, we can somewhat determine the agenda and events and that allows Aron to customize the itinerary to go see things and do things that would normally not be included in a “standard” trip on the live aboard.

World Discoverer

During the trip, we stopped at a few places along the way. One of the more interesting stops was at the abandoned cruise ship, the MS World Discoverer. The back story is pretty interesting. Apparently, the ship was underway in April 2000 and hit a charted rock or reef in the Sandfly Passage which gashed a big hole in the hull. A ferry was dispatched which got all of the passengers off the boat. The Captain then started steering the ship towards the nearest land in Roderick Bay and grounded it to avoid sinking.

I’ve heard two “stories” about the aftermath. The first is that the local tribe demanded that the insurance company pay them. The insurance company offered $5M to which the tribal leader countered with $20M. At an impasse, they then said “give us the ship and we’ll drop the claim.” The insurance company gladly took that offer and then later when the ship was leaking wanted more money. You can guess at the response from the insurance company.

The second story is that it was declared a “constructive total loss” after an underwater survey of the vessel. The closest salvage companies were in Australia and hewn they arrived, they found the ship ransacked by the locals and tides had caused additional damage. A salvage was attempted sometime in 2000 but was abandoned after gunshots were exchanged with the local tribe. The ship has become a local tourist attraction for locals and cruise ships passing through. If you look very closely at the drone picture below, you can see a zip line from the bridge amidships to the trees.

Aron got his drone out and got some really great overhead footage of the vessel that gives a sense of scale and location:

We took a short RIB tour around the boat and I snapped a few pictures from my iPhone. It is crazy how the jungle has started to invade and take over the ship.

Beach BBQ

We had tried to do a BBQ on the World Discoverer but it didn’t work out so we decided to do a Beach BBQ on the last day on an isolated beach. It was a lot of fun and the scenery was beautiful.

Final Thoughts

Both Bikini Atoll and Chuuk (Truk Lagoon) have a lot to offer in terms of wreck diving. However, there is something unique about the Solomon Islands.

Chuuk is mainly cargo ships and Bikini has a lot of warships but they were not sunk by enemy fire. If you want to see a US warship sunk in a “real” WW II battle then Guadalcanal is for you. Personally, I could do a three hour dive on the USS Aaron Ward every day for a week straight and not get bored. We did no penetration on the wreck and I did three dives on her and I wish I could have done more. The USS Atlanta is the real “prize” but at 400+ feet deep, that requires a special expedition focussed on that wreck.

The diving isn’t as “easy” as Bikini or Chuuk because you don’t tie the main vessel into a permanent mooring line and just jump off the dive platform. The result is that you need to shuttle to and from the dive site via RIBs. You need to be comfortable in that environment with a rebreather and stage cylinders. There can also be currents and other factors involved that are generally not present in Bikini or Chuuk. However, if you really want to get a sense of what an epic WW II naval and land battle was like, then I highly recommend a trip to the Solomons with Dirty Dozen Expeditions. You can find out more information at their website or register your interest in a future expedition by emailing them at info@thedirtydozen.org.

[NB: I have no financial relationship with Dirty Dozen Expeditions but I have done three trips with them.]