reubencahn
Contributor
Here's the second part of the trip report: I'll try to add some pics soon.
Walindi/Star Dancer Trip Report
Part II: Star Dancer
We boarded Star Dancer after a week of diving Kimbe Bay from Walindi Resort. We had learned there would be only eight divers on board and were looking forward to the uncrowded boat and diving.
The Boat
Star Dancer is large steel hulled boat built for servicing oil platforms in the gulf. It’s been extensively altered adding a superstructure and converting it to use for liveaboard diving. There were reports from the spring and summer of 2008 of a tired boat, suffering a number of mechanical problems, and in dire need of a refit. Star Dancer was sold over the past year and underwent a two month refit over the winter. It was not drydocked, and work was done in PNG rather than Australia, but all mechanical gear on the boat worked fine. Cosmetically, new wallpaper, cabinetry, etc. was evident. Only the bathrooms showed evidence of aging, but they were perfectly functional.
Cabins
Our cabin was toward the bow of the boat. Equipped with a large picture window, the room was bright. Air conditioning was individually controlled for each cabin. The room was outfitted with a queen bed with storage space underneath, a small closet and several drawers. It wasn’t large, but space was adequate, and storage was fine. The bed was comfortable. Pillows weren’t, and I sometimes just threw mine on the floor. The head contained a small sink, marine toilet, and shower/tub. I don’t think the tub was functional but it was nice not to have every shower leave the bathroom floor soaked. There was plenty of hot water, though as always, we tried to be frugal with fresh water. Turndown service occurred each night as we ate dinner. Laundry left in the supplied bag was returned clean within a day.
Dive Deck
The boat is well designed. All cabins but one are on the dive deck level. The dive deck itself is spacious with plenty of tank slots and room beneath each for a gear basket. There were racks with hangers for wetsuits. Tanks are filled in place, so once you’ve set up your gear the way you want it, it stays that way. Fills were made quickly to 3000 psi or higher. The membrane system produced consistent 31 to 32% nitrox. On the dive deck, there’s also a decent sized camera table with compressed air. However, it wouldn’t be large enough if everyone was diving with dslr’s. Charging stations are nearby with regulated 110v voltage available.
Food
Coffee and light breakfast was available upon wake up at 6:00. If you wanted, coffee service could be brought to you in your room earlier. After the 6:30 dive, a full breakfast was served with the usual suspects, eggs, pancakes, French toast, and bacon, available. There was always fruit and toast as well. I generally stuck to those, but I did have French toast once, and it was fine. Lunch was the best meal of the day. It was served buffet style. There was always a soup, two choices for a main dish, and more than one salad or vegetable. Fruit was also available. Dinner was served at the table. There was always a soup, followed by an appetizer, and then a main course with starch and vegetable. The main course usually involved a sauce heavier than I like. Desert was always served. The date pudding was a highlight. Overall, Star Dancer’s food was as good as I’ve had on most liveaboards. Only Golden Dawn and Billikiki were better.
Diving
All dives were done from the Star Dancer, though the tender once ferried a diver who wanted to begin his dive at a more distant point. We donned our gear at our station, the walked down a short flight of steps to water level where fins were kept, put on fins and jumped in. Wide steps made re-boarding easy. Help was available for divers who needed to hand up bc/s though this was one of the few instances where the otherwise excellent crew was less than attentive.
Star Dancer follows a fairly rigid schedule. First dive is at 6:30, and divers are asked to limit their dives to 60 minutes so that the kitchen staff can keep on schedule in serving hot breakfasts. Second dive was at 9:00. Third Dive was at 11:30. Lunch was followed by a break until 3:30 when we would make our fourth dive. Night dive was at 6:30 with another request that divers limit themselves to 60 minutes so the kitchen staff could serve dinner. A couple of nights, dives were particularly interesting and ran longer with no complaints. Water temps were consistently 86 degrees fahrenheit, and, other than night dives, I wore only board shorts and a 3mm vest.
Two dive guides were in the water on every dive. Generally, either Kelly, the New Zealand born cruise director, or Yuki, a Japanese born instructor and videographer, would join either Joe or Martin, both PNG natives. The guiding was not exactly organized, and we would often lose the guides only to find them later. Sometimes, it was my sense that Kelly and Yuki didn’t necessarily know the sites that well. But both had good eyes and were always pointing out something interesting. Martin and Joe both seemed to gain in enthusiasm as a dive went on. At the end of a given dive, they could always be counted on to spot something worth seeing.
Our itinerary began in Kimbe Bay, then moved to Father’s Reef (a submerged reef system well offshore, then to the Bainings Islands and finally on to the Rabaul area. Each had something a little different. Kimbe Bay is lush coral, huge seafans and barrel sponges. Fish life is plentiful though not overwhelming. This is wide-angle, reef-scene paradise. A few sites, like Bradford Shoals, offered a good amount of action, with jacks, tuna and the occasional shark feeding in the current. We had dove this same site with Walindi but had seen nowhere near as much action. I ascribed it to timing. On Star Dancer, we were in the water at 6:30 watching the dawn feeding, while with Walindi’s 1 ½ hour boat ride to the site, we didn’t hit the water until 9:30. On the whole, we saw more fish with Star Dancer while diving many of the same sites we dove with Walindi.
After, Kimbe Bay came Father’s Reef. Our first dive there was Killibob’s Knob, an exposed pinnacle patrolled by grey reef and white tip sharks. The dive was done as a feed, and the sharks didn’t disappoint. The white tips were exceedingly bold bumping into divers as they rushed to the bait box. The grey reefs were more reticent, keeping a bit of distance. Jacks and a few tuna appeared together with what appeared to be wahoo. After a while we drifted away to the upper part of pinnacle which was covered with hard corals, sponges and fans, though not as lush as Kimbe Bay sites. Killibob’s set the pattern for the Father’s Reef dives, current, lots of fish, and often big predators, tuna or sharks, hunting. I think I saw more tuna at Father’s than I’ve seen in any five other dive trips.
After three days at Father’s we moved on to the Bainings where we spent a day. There are only a couple of sites there, and none were particularly memorable, though none were particularly disappointing either. From there, we traveled to the Rabaul area. Rabaul was to be more of a macro area. The Atun was a tuna boat sunk a number of years before and somewhat encrusted. I didn’t find the macro to be great, but on our second dive there, I put my wide angle lens back on to capture some silhouettes. Porky’s and Hoshu’s offered quite a few nudibranchs and crabs, etc., but nothing on the level of Indonesia. The best critter diving came on the final dive day at Vunapope jetty in Rabaul. The sands, discarded junk and patch reefs around the jetty offered lots of nudibranchs, banded pipefish, snake eels, sea snakes, crabs, and even a pair of ornate ghost pipefish hanging around a discarded tire at 50 fsw. It wasn’t Lembeh, but, all in all, it was pretty good diving.
Tavurvur (Rabaul’s Volcano)
After our last dives, we did a land tour arranged through Ropopo resort. First, beware the dive shop operator there who arranged the tour and then tried to double the fee. The matter was handled admirably by Kelly and Ben, our captain, but not without some initial unpleasantness. We were taken to see the tunnels where Japanese soldiers hid themselves and the larger tunnels where Japan’s navy hid its landing craft. There was also a museum of sorts. It was marginally interesting, but unless you’re really excited by WWII, I would skip most of the tour. The exception was the old airport and the “hot springs” near Tavurvur, the volcano that erupted in 1994 destroying much of old Rabaul and silting over the famous wrecks of the harbor. The scene at the old airport is amazing. Miles and miles of black volcanic ash have left a landscape worthy of some post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie. Desolate doesn’t begin to describe the area. The “hot springs” are vents spewing sulfur fumes and heating the water to scalding temperatures. No life is to be seen except the women and their young children who run across the ash fields to spread their goods for sale. It’s really an amazing, if disturbing, scene.
Conclusion
I enjoyed our trip on Star Dancer immensely. Both Kimbe Bay and Father’s Reef diving was excellent. Bainings and Rabaul diving was good to very good. The crossings were never more than 6 hours and generally occurred at night as we slept (or tried to in the case of rougher crossings). Sometimes during the day as the boat moved, the captain would alert us all to pods of dolphins playing in the bow wake. The boat itself, while not sparkling new, provided everything I need and most of what I want. The crew was great, always helpful and usually attentive. I’ve been told that the trips that begin and end in Walindi are preferable to those that move from Walindi to Rabaul and back. The former travel to the Witu islands which are reputed to be a great muck diving area. I was also told that the Witus have more of the flavor of remoteness that I experienced on my first trip to PNG, traveling from Wewak to Madang on the Golden Dawn, and which was missing on this trip. The Walindi-Rabaul trips are run during June, July and August because the prevailing winds during June, July and August make the crossing to the Witus and mooring there impossible. As it was, for a time, it looked as though our crossing to Father’s reef was going to be very difficult and mooring there the same. So if you’re planning a trip on Star Dancer, it might be best to avoid late June through early August.
Note: In Cairns, Qantas runs Air Nugini's counter, and they are baggage ****s. Any bag over 7 kilos will have to be repacked, no exceptions. Unless you have some other reason to go to Cairns, fly through Brisbane and avoid the hassle.
Walindi/Star Dancer Trip Report
Part II: Star Dancer
We boarded Star Dancer after a week of diving Kimbe Bay from Walindi Resort. We had learned there would be only eight divers on board and were looking forward to the uncrowded boat and diving.
The Boat
Star Dancer is large steel hulled boat built for servicing oil platforms in the gulf. It’s been extensively altered adding a superstructure and converting it to use for liveaboard diving. There were reports from the spring and summer of 2008 of a tired boat, suffering a number of mechanical problems, and in dire need of a refit. Star Dancer was sold over the past year and underwent a two month refit over the winter. It was not drydocked, and work was done in PNG rather than Australia, but all mechanical gear on the boat worked fine. Cosmetically, new wallpaper, cabinetry, etc. was evident. Only the bathrooms showed evidence of aging, but they were perfectly functional.
Cabins
Our cabin was toward the bow of the boat. Equipped with a large picture window, the room was bright. Air conditioning was individually controlled for each cabin. The room was outfitted with a queen bed with storage space underneath, a small closet and several drawers. It wasn’t large, but space was adequate, and storage was fine. The bed was comfortable. Pillows weren’t, and I sometimes just threw mine on the floor. The head contained a small sink, marine toilet, and shower/tub. I don’t think the tub was functional but it was nice not to have every shower leave the bathroom floor soaked. There was plenty of hot water, though as always, we tried to be frugal with fresh water. Turndown service occurred each night as we ate dinner. Laundry left in the supplied bag was returned clean within a day.
Dive Deck
The boat is well designed. All cabins but one are on the dive deck level. The dive deck itself is spacious with plenty of tank slots and room beneath each for a gear basket. There were racks with hangers for wetsuits. Tanks are filled in place, so once you’ve set up your gear the way you want it, it stays that way. Fills were made quickly to 3000 psi or higher. The membrane system produced consistent 31 to 32% nitrox. On the dive deck, there’s also a decent sized camera table with compressed air. However, it wouldn’t be large enough if everyone was diving with dslr’s. Charging stations are nearby with regulated 110v voltage available.
Food
Coffee and light breakfast was available upon wake up at 6:00. If you wanted, coffee service could be brought to you in your room earlier. After the 6:30 dive, a full breakfast was served with the usual suspects, eggs, pancakes, French toast, and bacon, available. There was always fruit and toast as well. I generally stuck to those, but I did have French toast once, and it was fine. Lunch was the best meal of the day. It was served buffet style. There was always a soup, two choices for a main dish, and more than one salad or vegetable. Fruit was also available. Dinner was served at the table. There was always a soup, followed by an appetizer, and then a main course with starch and vegetable. The main course usually involved a sauce heavier than I like. Desert was always served. The date pudding was a highlight. Overall, Star Dancer’s food was as good as I’ve had on most liveaboards. Only Golden Dawn and Billikiki were better.
Diving
All dives were done from the Star Dancer, though the tender once ferried a diver who wanted to begin his dive at a more distant point. We donned our gear at our station, the walked down a short flight of steps to water level where fins were kept, put on fins and jumped in. Wide steps made re-boarding easy. Help was available for divers who needed to hand up bc/s though this was one of the few instances where the otherwise excellent crew was less than attentive.
Star Dancer follows a fairly rigid schedule. First dive is at 6:30, and divers are asked to limit their dives to 60 minutes so that the kitchen staff can keep on schedule in serving hot breakfasts. Second dive was at 9:00. Third Dive was at 11:30. Lunch was followed by a break until 3:30 when we would make our fourth dive. Night dive was at 6:30 with another request that divers limit themselves to 60 minutes so the kitchen staff could serve dinner. A couple of nights, dives were particularly interesting and ran longer with no complaints. Water temps were consistently 86 degrees fahrenheit, and, other than night dives, I wore only board shorts and a 3mm vest.
Two dive guides were in the water on every dive. Generally, either Kelly, the New Zealand born cruise director, or Yuki, a Japanese born instructor and videographer, would join either Joe or Martin, both PNG natives. The guiding was not exactly organized, and we would often lose the guides only to find them later. Sometimes, it was my sense that Kelly and Yuki didn’t necessarily know the sites that well. But both had good eyes and were always pointing out something interesting. Martin and Joe both seemed to gain in enthusiasm as a dive went on. At the end of a given dive, they could always be counted on to spot something worth seeing.
Our itinerary began in Kimbe Bay, then moved to Father’s Reef (a submerged reef system well offshore, then to the Bainings Islands and finally on to the Rabaul area. Each had something a little different. Kimbe Bay is lush coral, huge seafans and barrel sponges. Fish life is plentiful though not overwhelming. This is wide-angle, reef-scene paradise. A few sites, like Bradford Shoals, offered a good amount of action, with jacks, tuna and the occasional shark feeding in the current. We had dove this same site with Walindi but had seen nowhere near as much action. I ascribed it to timing. On Star Dancer, we were in the water at 6:30 watching the dawn feeding, while with Walindi’s 1 ½ hour boat ride to the site, we didn’t hit the water until 9:30. On the whole, we saw more fish with Star Dancer while diving many of the same sites we dove with Walindi.
After, Kimbe Bay came Father’s Reef. Our first dive there was Killibob’s Knob, an exposed pinnacle patrolled by grey reef and white tip sharks. The dive was done as a feed, and the sharks didn’t disappoint. The white tips were exceedingly bold bumping into divers as they rushed to the bait box. The grey reefs were more reticent, keeping a bit of distance. Jacks and a few tuna appeared together with what appeared to be wahoo. After a while we drifted away to the upper part of pinnacle which was covered with hard corals, sponges and fans, though not as lush as Kimbe Bay sites. Killibob’s set the pattern for the Father’s Reef dives, current, lots of fish, and often big predators, tuna or sharks, hunting. I think I saw more tuna at Father’s than I’ve seen in any five other dive trips.
After three days at Father’s we moved on to the Bainings where we spent a day. There are only a couple of sites there, and none were particularly memorable, though none were particularly disappointing either. From there, we traveled to the Rabaul area. Rabaul was to be more of a macro area. The Atun was a tuna boat sunk a number of years before and somewhat encrusted. I didn’t find the macro to be great, but on our second dive there, I put my wide angle lens back on to capture some silhouettes. Porky’s and Hoshu’s offered quite a few nudibranchs and crabs, etc., but nothing on the level of Indonesia. The best critter diving came on the final dive day at Vunapope jetty in Rabaul. The sands, discarded junk and patch reefs around the jetty offered lots of nudibranchs, banded pipefish, snake eels, sea snakes, crabs, and even a pair of ornate ghost pipefish hanging around a discarded tire at 50 fsw. It wasn’t Lembeh, but, all in all, it was pretty good diving.
Tavurvur (Rabaul’s Volcano)
After our last dives, we did a land tour arranged through Ropopo resort. First, beware the dive shop operator there who arranged the tour and then tried to double the fee. The matter was handled admirably by Kelly and Ben, our captain, but not without some initial unpleasantness. We were taken to see the tunnels where Japanese soldiers hid themselves and the larger tunnels where Japan’s navy hid its landing craft. There was also a museum of sorts. It was marginally interesting, but unless you’re really excited by WWII, I would skip most of the tour. The exception was the old airport and the “hot springs” near Tavurvur, the volcano that erupted in 1994 destroying much of old Rabaul and silting over the famous wrecks of the harbor. The scene at the old airport is amazing. Miles and miles of black volcanic ash have left a landscape worthy of some post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie. Desolate doesn’t begin to describe the area. The “hot springs” are vents spewing sulfur fumes and heating the water to scalding temperatures. No life is to be seen except the women and their young children who run across the ash fields to spread their goods for sale. It’s really an amazing, if disturbing, scene.
Conclusion
I enjoyed our trip on Star Dancer immensely. Both Kimbe Bay and Father’s Reef diving was excellent. Bainings and Rabaul diving was good to very good. The crossings were never more than 6 hours and generally occurred at night as we slept (or tried to in the case of rougher crossings). Sometimes during the day as the boat moved, the captain would alert us all to pods of dolphins playing in the bow wake. The boat itself, while not sparkling new, provided everything I need and most of what I want. The crew was great, always helpful and usually attentive. I’ve been told that the trips that begin and end in Walindi are preferable to those that move from Walindi to Rabaul and back. The former travel to the Witu islands which are reputed to be a great muck diving area. I was also told that the Witus have more of the flavor of remoteness that I experienced on my first trip to PNG, traveling from Wewak to Madang on the Golden Dawn, and which was missing on this trip. The Walindi-Rabaul trips are run during June, July and August because the prevailing winds during June, July and August make the crossing to the Witus and mooring there impossible. As it was, for a time, it looked as though our crossing to Father’s reef was going to be very difficult and mooring there the same. So if you’re planning a trip on Star Dancer, it might be best to avoid late June through early August.
Note: In Cairns, Qantas runs Air Nugini's counter, and they are baggage ****s. Any bag over 7 kilos will have to be repacked, no exceptions. Unless you have some other reason to go to Cairns, fly through Brisbane and avoid the hassle.
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