Before we built Telita in 1986 there was no dedicated liveaboard dive boat established in Papua New Guinea (PNG). If divers wanted to explore they roughed it on chartered fishing or cargo vessels, and slept on deck.

Solatai was our original 36 ft. day dive boat and twice a year I would close down our dive school and take clients, mostly my own certified students but with a growing number of tourist divers, on adventurous “Scuba Safaris”. We initially camped ashore but where we found villages that we liked we had them build a bush materials house for us. These were more comfortable (and rain proof) than tents - but not by much, and many clients caught malaria.

In the late 1970s, sometime salvage diver Kevin Baldwin bought a handsome trading vessel he renamed Seang that had accommodation for 12 passengers and carried two inflatables to dive from. He ran one long scientific charter but soon realized that he needed to go trading to raise the money to keep the boat going, and it never got into tourist diving.

But by the early 1980s the world wanted to dive PNG and See and Sea Travel’s dive adventurer Carl Roessler was leading the pack, as he usually did. Carl contacted me to investigate the possibility of getting a PNG boat to use for exploration diving.

We made a trip to Wuvulu Island together where an enterprising American lawyer had built a small beach dive resort for his son who had married a Wuvulu lady. It had some pleasant but not exceptional diving, but no anchorage nor wharf, was weather dependent and required flights on weight-limited small aircraft.

Jean Michel Cousteau had used Wuvulu for his Project Ocean Search expeditions and for that it was ideal because the project’s hardy young people were able to walk the extensive reef flats to discover marine critters and make the occasional dive. The dive resort was never a success, however in 1988 the Cousteau team went back to Wuvulu and it produced some of the most spectacular footage of all the expeditions to PNG. Orcas killed a shark and brought it to the cameramen on the surface to film in a scene many still remember.

Melanesian Explorer was a 130ft. passenger vessel owned by Melanesian Tourist Services based in Madang and mostly used to take tourists for village visits along the length of the Sepik River. The operator decided that it could be used for dive charters and I worked out that I could put portable compressors on board and some dive gear and it would be a liveaboard of sorts. I had run one dive trip on her with a group of crazy Italian divers but they mostly just wanted to sunbathe on deck, play cards and shout at each other. Not what I call divers.

I hated this boat since it had very low headroom. It was built initially as a Japanese ferry. At 6 ft. 3 inches tall I continually banged my head on low bits of the ship. Carl thought I was doing that deliberately.

See and Sea Travel was bringing some of his regular dive travelers and we would have to provide some real diving. Carl had an agreement with the owner that he would have the boat just for his divers but when we turned up we discovered that we were sharing the boat with a group of general tourists who wanted to go ashore, and not dive. I had to restrain Carl, or violence would have ensued.

Since the Explorer could not be anchored on the dive sites we had to rely on one of the two ship’s boats to take us diving. All went reasonably well until one of these boats inevitably broke down and we were competing with the land tourists.

One day we were diving at the Trobriand Islands. The north coast had a shallow fringing reef that sloped away into deep water. We decided that the boat would drop us off at a likely looking spot and that we would then slowly drift/swim along the reef. The plan was that the boat would stay with us and pick us up as we finished our dives. However as we were getting in the water the boat driver told us he had been instructed to return to the ship to drop some people ashore and he would then immediately come back for us.

Two hours later we were out of air, still without a boat and had been drifting along the reef for an hour. We had just made the decision to swim across the shallow reef flat and get to the beach when it finally turned up. It was about this time I decided I needed my own proper liveaboard dive boat.

No sooner had we re-boarded the Melanesian Explorer than the boat went off again with land tourists aboard. As they moved away, Orcas appeared right behind them. No boat was available for us so we hurried into the water with snorkeling gear but were unable to catch up. I seem to remember banging my head on the ship more often after that to the tune of “Get – Your – Own - Boat - Halstead!”

Although I had experience of some good dive sites I was relying on information from poor sources for others. A wreck we tried to dive turned out to be up a saltwater inlet and had 3 ft. visibility. That was the first and last time I went there. Another good wreck dive, usually with fair visibility, had experienced a torrential tropical rain the night before and had a raft of filthy water floating on top. We all complained about it - however I did note that three photographs from that one dive were published in one of Carl’s books – so we did find some critters, including a perfectly posed Wobbegong shark.

One site I will never forgive myself for. And this is my first confession to Carl. I directed the Melanesian Explorer to Alcester Island in the Solomon Sea. This island is surrounded by deep clear water and a fringing reef. It has a splendid village on it and is one of the few places even today to still grow ebony timber. “For every tree we cut, we plant four”, the proud village leader told us.

I picked a point on the reef on the lee side of the island near the village so others could go ashore, and that was our dive site. It was very ordinary. Years later, on my own boat Telita, I was able to spend more time exploring and checked out a passage between the main island and a small islet to the east. It is one of PNG’s great dives! A boat ride to the outer wall, into the prevailing current, puts divers into a maelstrom of fishes. Barracudas, jacks, surgeons, Dog toothed tuna, fusiliers, batfish all surging around against a pristine coral background in crystal water. After time with the fishes divers make a leisurely drift back to the boat. It is a superb dive.

But early days were like that, barren dives next to fabulous dives. I once sank a derelict tug boat, the Henry Leith, in Madang with Kevin Baldwin because we thought it would make a super dive site next to a picturesque island. It does – but we did not know at the time that just 200 yards away was the brilliant wreck of a B25 Mitchell gunship from the War.

We discovered that it was difficult to predict the quality of a dive site just by looking at a chart, or even by looking from the surface. There is only one way to find out. You have to dive them all, and that is what I set out to do. We started building Telita (from beautiful PNG hardwoods) in PNG in 1984 and in December 1986 she made her maiden voyage of discovery

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