Tawali Dive Trip Report
Click here to go to back to cruise and dive report page...
June 2006
How is Milne Bay... this is a truly fantastic place for diving, sadly Tawali Resort is too far away from the best reefs and hottest critter sites. Deacons Reef is probably the best reef that we saw nearby to the resort. On a previous trip to PNG I was leading a group of well travelled divers, we stayed a little over 3 weeks, diving Walindi Plantation - fantastic reefs, then Loloata - more fantastic reefs and some excellent critters. Though our real reason for going to PNG was to dive with FeBrina in Milne Bay. During this trip saw nothing but fantastic reefs and amazing critters, see my gallery to see what we saw! The only reef we dived where we saw any impact was Deacons Reef and in all honesty, James our captain and dive director didn't really want us to dive there as he said it had been fairly heavily impacted due to coral bleaching, we dived there and saw what he meant though the shallow reef was excellent and this is all we wanted to dive it for anyway really. Since my first visit a huge chunk of the mainland has fell and covered a section of Deacons shallow reef with fallen rocks and trees.
A few months after the first trip to PNG I was asked to lead a lead/join a trip with some great friends. I thought I'd done a good job of convincing him to join an expedition with Golden Dawn, mentioning that if not the Golden Dawn then it would be best to book the Chertan, we may even have been able to take the whole boat. I knew that this way we would be able access all the great Milne Bay dive sites. However it seemed the marketing staff for Tawali Resort in the USA done a great job of convincing my friend otherwise. Saying Tawali had excellent access to all the best dive sites and there was no need to do a live aboard in Milne Bay at all! The worst thing was the marketing staff had even said that the Chertan was not available. So it was a huge surprise when we saw the Chertan in Milne Bay without guests onboard. I asked Rob about his and said he hadn't had any bookings for the past 3 weeks, obviously we weren't too happy to hear this at all!
After long flights to get to Tawali Resort, then there is a drive that takes a few hours on a bumpy and dusty road to the Tawali dock, our transportation from the airport had no air conditioning so we had to have the windows down, which made the journey rather dusty. Once at the dock we boarded a small boat that took us about 15-20 minutes to the resort. The resort is great, all staff are very welcoming and hospitable, serving great food and plenty of it, the rooms are the largest I've seen in any dive resort and very comfortable indeed. There are not many comfortable lounging areas outside of your room. The main inside lounge is good, though kind of like a hotel waiting room, the outside lounge area overlooking the ocean is great but not the best place to relax with no really comfortable chairs. The best place to relax is your own room, which is not really that sociable for dive resort where generally divers like to sit and chat about dives, new places, marine life and general dive chit chat!
One issue for some divers maybe the walking to and from the dive boats. For some divers the walk may be a bit far and all on up and down sloping walkways. These long walks were even less enjoyable when we would reach one jetty only to find no dive boat and being told it was at the other jetty which was back from where we came, up the sloping walkways, then down again to other jetty. This happened a few times, obviously we not too impressed with all this messing round, especially after I asked which jetty we would board at the night before.
The dive staff - this was the most surprising thing of all -- we didn't even get a dive guide who knew the area, what we got was a western instructor who was only at the resort to train the local staff with dive courses, he admitted to us that he didn't even like guiding dives - first ever dive resort I've been to that had no knowledgeable guides. I really thought that with Rob van der Loos's great reputation, his dive staff would have been the number one priority! The boat skipper was great, in general a really nice bloke with a great nature, though sadly he was not really clued about what were the best sites for photographers or film makers.
The dive sites - also a really disappointing factor for Tawali Resort. The skipper would generally give the briefing, even though he didn't dive. Quite often his briefing included "and there is a chance you can see a hammerhead or a manta on this dive". We did tell him we not so bothered about chance encounter dives and would prefer colourful reefs or mucky critter sites, I even asked if we could be dropped in on any old black sand bay rather than an average reef. The reefs we started to dive were some of the worst dives I had seen, many of which I'd be embarrassed to take paying guests on over here in Indonesia. Especially as they were so called dive sites and not some kind of exploratory site! Most of the north coast of Milne Bay where the Tawali Resort is, has been impacted and now most of the reef has been left rather baron with lots of turban weed covering most reefs. The highlight of one the nearby reefs is a few very large elephants ear sponges with possible chances of seeing big fish, very few fish on the site and really very average for a site they dive most regularly. After seeing so many really poor reefs I asked the skipper if knew a site called Black & Silver, he did, and said "yeah, that's a great reef". I eventually convinced him to go there the day after, this was the best reef dive we saw from Tawali albeit 45 minutes to an hour away from the resort. As for the critter diving, we did see some great critters though only because I had dived Dinah's Beach and Kathy's Corner before. We had constantly asked to dive Kathy's Corner, however for some reason unknown to us we were taken to Dinah's Beach again and again, which at the time we were there, was no where near as rich as Kathy's Corner. Another day we had arranged a critter dive, all divers were set up with macro, as it was raining the skipper decided he would take us to elephants ear sponge reef and told us once more about our chance of seeing a big fish. His reason behind not doing the critter site was low viz', we explained we didn't need viz, we just wanted a critter dive, even not seeing critters but having a good time searching in an interesting environment was OK, but diving a very poor reef is just sad in my mind!
Very sad story - One fairly nearby reef we dived had some good lettuce coral formations, though on descent from the back of the boat to the reef we saw that the skipper had threw anchor right into one of these formations, this was really sad as there wasn't too many great live coral formations anyway, when I told him that he had just thrown anchor into a great formation he didn't seem to be too bothered!
In all if you are going to Milne Bay, do a live aboard, if you really want to go to Tawali, do so for only a few days. One quote direct from Rob van der Loos when we arrived was "oh your the ones staying for 11 days of diving, it'll be difficult to keep you busy with sites for that length of time", this is direct from the resort owners mouth, not so positive at all! Maybe a stay of a few days would be OK, though if you have dived this region before with a live aboard I would really suggest thinking again before booking!
I would highly recommend both Loloata Resort and Walindi Plantation, if you want to see Rhinopias aphanes (Lacy Scorpionfish) then for sure the only real place to go is Loloata. If you want to see great reef scenery then Walindi is the place, the reefs we saw from both these resorts were very rich and healthy.
Click here to mail us for more information!
top