Recently returned from a week on Lissenung Island resort, located near Kavieng (New Ireland Province) in Papua New Guinea. Relatively easy to get to from the East Coast of Australia, you can leave early morning and be diving the following morning, assuming the Air Niugini flight leaves on time. The issue is they need to land in daylight on the last flight of the day and if the plane is delayed, you have to overnight in Port Moresby and they fly you over very early the following morning.

The resort itself is a small island about 250m by 150m or so with 8 bungalows and they dive around the semi enclosed waters among islands sitting between the Pacific ocean and the Bismark Sea. the features are some WWII aircraft wrecks, some in surprisingly good condition and diving in the inlets between the islands where currents can be strong and where pelagics and harks can be found. I also dived the mangroves there - more like snorkelling on Scuba for some interesting shooting opportunities, making use of Snell's window to include the above water parts of the mangroves in the shots. They have day boats that take you out from the resort each morning.

Getting there is interesting as they pick you up from the airport and transport you to a banana boat (local open boat) and convey you out to the island, about 20 minutes. You are travelling after sunset or before if you are catching the 6:00am flight back. Navigation aids is a guy standing up front with a torch. On the return trip leaving at 4:00am for the 6:00am flight, it's a straight run towards town and without the light your eye adapt and you can see the water surface quite well ahead of the boat.

First up the resort was nice, basic but comfortable bungalows, all meals provided. The food was excellent featuring locally caught seafood - other ingredients can be hard to come by as it is quite remote. In PNG the reefs are owned by local villages and fees are paid to dive on them and apparently works quite well. However the headman who was being paid for one area died and two people are claiming rights to the area and as a result the drift dive in Albatross passage was unavailable. An unavoidable part of running a dive resort in this area. Dive boats were reasonably comfortable, though were having issues with their outboards - being remote they need to organise their own service, having said that we got out on our dives every day.

I was there in early October, usually the best diving though the strong El Nino had other ideas generating strong SE trade winds, quite strong before I arrived but had calmed down a bit while I was there. The other side effect is the water was a couple of degrees cooler at 27-28°C rather than the expected 29-30°C. This was fine for me, I still dived in dive-skins but the water was refreshing when you jumped in. Surface temperatures reached 30-31°C most days but the humidity was pretty high so rather sticky weather and the cooling dip was welcome.

While I was there I dived quite a few walls, plus the WWII floatplane, Deep Pete, a Mitsubishi biplane, the WWII Catalina wreck and a deliberately sunk long line fishing vessel the Der Yang. as well as some more macro focused sites On all the dives, ours was the only dive boat. Visibility ranged from 15-40m with better vis on sites lining the Bismark Sea. Fish were plentiful on the reef which seemed to be in quite good shape and on the current dives pelagics made their appearance. The Adapted Canon 8-15 stayed on my OM-1 for the entire trip.

Overall I enjoyed the diving and resort and I hope to get back there.

Here's some images from the trip:

Deep Pete WWII biplane-float plane, the bottom here is about 40m:

Big school of snapper in front of the wing:

Overall view of wreck taken on the ascent:

Part of the Reef at Frank's reef on the Bismark sea, consisting of a series of pinnacles dropping down to the sand at around 40m depth.

Fish swarming above a staghorn coral, Frank's reef

Large sea fan on the wall at the Matrix dive site, this part a wall beside the channel leading in from the Bismark sea

Some more images:

This cave was on the Nusa Blowholes site on the Pacific ocean side:

This is the wreck of the Catalina flying boat near Kavieng Harbour. It was taking off when it hit a swell causing an dunderwing bomb to explode, sinking it instantly.

This is Halimeda Ghost pipefish, quite a few around on the Nusa Blowholes divesite. It's only about 70-80mm long, shot taken with the 8-15 fisheye at 15mm, in very close.

Some mangrove shots, water is only 1-2m deep.

Nemo in the mangroves:

I identified around 15 fish species in this shot and there's at least 5 more I can see are different but the view wasn't good enough to ID.