Papua New Guinea on Paradise Sport

By Steve Pearson

It all started off suspiciously well. Myself and Trevor sitting on the flight to Cairns with the prerequisite amount of beer consumed looking forward to a good Ozzie breakfast in the morning. We arrived at Cairns International airport on time; there was a taxi waiting, no traffic so the journey into town took but a few minutes, and then the first hiccup……..everything was shut, and I mean everything!

We wandered the streets for 45 mins in search of sustenance (well black coffee mainly) but to no avail and in the end we gave up, went to the Hilton hotel and sat in the lobby, and waited…… and waited, for them to start to serve breakfast. My introduction to 24 hr (not!) Cairns.

After breakfast we headed back to the airport for the flight to Port Moresby, which was fairly uneventful, the fun really started when we got to Moresby and tried to check in for our domestic flight to Alatao when Air New Guinea dropped the bombshell "it’s been cancelled!"………. So there we were in Moresby, the only flight of the day to Alatao 300 miles away, having been cancelled, a place which has no road links, and Paradise Sport was leaving in 5 hours time for a ‘one off’ 10 day cruise.

Err a bit of a problem..!!

Just as the level of panic was starting to get near the ‘I’m going to have to hit someone’ stage, Trevor spotted another group of ‘foreigners’ who also seemed to be stranded. "You're not booked on Paradise Sport by any chance are you?" "You are, great!" "Well, it’s not great actually, but the more people who are here the less chance of them sailing without us".

It was about this time that Air New Guinea did the maths that putting us lot up in a hotel was going to cost them a pretty penny, like more than flying us the 300 miles to Alatao, so they did the obvious thing……They cancelled a different flight (one with less troublesome locals on it) and then used that plane to take us! Things were looking up, we were in the departure lounge with ‘boarding passes’ when the power to the airport went off, still no A/C didn’t matter as we had ‘boarding passes’.

3 hours later and we are sitting on the tarmac in a Fokker friendship when an Ozzie ground crew worker came to inform us we couldn’t take off as we were 450kg over the maximum takeoff weight..!! He then went on to explain that the ‘local’ ground crew were just about to unload ‘all that heavy dive gear’ when he pointed out that we might not be too pleased with this solution. The final decision was that 5 people had to get off the plane so…………we did the obvious and sat still until 5 locals gave in and got off, and with that we finally got underway.

Paradise Sport is a brand new 120 foot purpose built dive catamaran and is definitely the best liveaboard I’ve been on to date. We settled into the sofas in the lounge with a beer or 6 and listened to the briefing by the crew. This was actually quite amusing as we were part of a one off "Wreck Special" planning to dive some of the deep-water wrecks off the PNG coast. The briefing contained all the usual don’ts and ended with "but I’m sure you’re all going to ignore all of that so just be careful..!!"

First dive was on one of those ‘reef things’. I spent 40 mins looking for some brass without success, this task being made harder by the number of fish which kept getting in my way. The first wreck dive was on the remains of 3 PT boats in an old harbour. "This was more like it" down a very steep slope under a decidedly rickety looking pier to a depth of 50m where we came across the remains. ‘Remains’ being the operative word as ‘PT’ boats were made of marine plywood and all that was left was the engine blocks, a bunch of scrap and 3 torpedoes. Even for a hardened ‘wrecky’ like myself I had to admit it was a bit of a disappointment.

We then went and dived another reef thing.

Next day we did 2 dives on "Blackjack" a B17 flying Fortress wrecked in 48m off an isolated beach. The plane is in amazingly good condition considering her 50 years under the sea. The rear machine runs still moved freely in their mounts and the wreck is still completely intact, and no I didn’t take anything from it, honest!! Vis was very good and there were even lots more of those fishy things to look at while we carried out or lengthy decompression on EANx40. For the technical among you the boat was equipped with a ‘membrane filter’ to create its Nitrox thus meaning 40% O2 was the richest mix available.

Next morning we found ourselves anchored over the S’Jacob a 500 foot long armed freighter lying 10 miles off shore on a flat sandy bottom in 60m. This was to be one of the highlights of the trip as the wreck had only relatively recently been found and was entirely intact. The deck was at 50m with the top of the wheelhouse about 40m. The first dive we had planned as a general swim round to get the feel of the ship prior to later more ‘intensive dives’.

As we got to about 30m descending on the shotline I spotted an open engine room ventilation hatch emerging from the blue below us. Obvious change in dive plan required, right?…….so straight in ("like a rat up a drainpipe" to quote Trevor after the dive) so there I was inside this great intact engine room at about 55m, steam gauges etc as far as the eye could see and no bloody fish to get in the way……heaven! I turned round to see Trevor grinning at me, obviously another happy diver! We spent the next 15mins having a good mooch round and reluctantly left the ship after 20mins with our air low and computers non too impressed to start our decompression.

We stayed over the S’Jacob for 2 days managing to get a total of 5 dives in on her (you work it out!) and managed to have a pretty good look round in the hour and a half total bottom time we achieved. One slightly annoying incident involved a Manta Ray which kept blocking out the sunlight by circling 5m above the deck. Great dives, and the Yokohama Maru still to come!

The next wreck was an American ‘Lightning’ fighter aircraft. For those of you into this sort of thing, Lightning’s were very distinctive as they were of a twin boom, twin engine, configuration. They are very rare with only one left flying today. This dive was good but not exceptional.

The Yokohama Maru is a massive 18,000-ton armed freighter sunk close to the shoreline down the coast from Lae. Even though the wreck is only 200 yards from shore she sits in over 80m of water. We were to spend 2 days here also. Our first dive found us ‘head down, bum up’ and swimming down the shot-line in the rush to see how good this is really going to be. At about 40m the huge bulk comes into view and we settle on the deck at 62m. I look over to my right and guess what some kind previous diver has left a crow bar for me!

We start swimming along the deck, in exceptional vis considering the depth, and perfectly still water, and come across a triple barrelled AA gun still pointing skyward. We make it up to the bow where one of the huge anchors is ‘hooked’ over the edge of the deck, rather than hanging from the chain way in the side of the bow. General consensus after the dive is that she must have suffered a near miss from a bomb that blew the anchor up onto the deck before she finally sank. On the bow is a large deck gun on a 25-foot turntable that is overshadowed by the ‘A’ frames once used to load her holds. Too soon we have to leave the deck to start our lengthy decompression.

Over the next few dives we get to see more of this huge shipwreck including the upper portion of her 20m high Cathedral like engine room, but unfortunately must leave large sections of the ship unexplored. The ship has 4 levels of holds and on my deepest dive I was still only at the second level. At this depth I must have been seriously narked (although I didn’t feel too bad - a sure sign in itself!) and was right on the edge of the envelope for air (most would argue already well outside) This is a wreck that should be dived on Tri-mix and what a dive it would make..!!

On our last dive I reached 30m where we were switching to EANx40 (yeah I know that’s a PPO2 of 1.6) and looked up to see the deco trapeze full to brimming with divers doing their stops. It was like a sort of underwater synchronised ballet as one group of dives entered the arena at 30m and another finished their last stops at the final stop level. As I got up to the 9m stop trapeze I glanced at ‘Doc’ (an American Dentist living in Oz of all places) he showed me his dive computer, he still had over an hour of deco to do..!! (We had surface supplied deco gas on the trapeze) He took my slate and wrote "what could I do? The wreck was too good to leave" that just about summed up the Yokohama Maru.

In all seriousness some of the diving we undertook was right on the edge of acceptable limits. However it was all very well planned, carried out by very experienced divers, and without incident. This is one of those "do as I say, not as I do" instances!

Oh yes, we did some more of those reef type dives on a couple of other days too.

Steve Pearson

BSAC Regional Coach-Hong Kong

South China Dive Club
Mike Ball's Paradise Sport


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