Dive Review of Peter Hughes Diving/Star Dancer in
Papua New Guinea/New Britain

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Peter Hughes Diving/Star Dancer, Jul, 2009, by Reuben Cahn, CA, U.S.A. ( 2 reports). Report 5197.
No photos available at this time
Ratings and Overall Comments 1 (worst) - 5 (best):
Accommodations		Food
Service and Attitude		Environmental Sensitivity	N/A
Dive Operation		Shore Diving	N/A
Snorkeling	N/A
Overall Rating
Value for $$
Beginners
Advanced
Comments	Boat recently refurbished. Not a complete dry dock, but all mechanicals in good shape and cosmetically nice as well. Food decent to good. Crew always enthusiastic, always helpful, especially Kelly and Yuki. 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. 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.\ All in all, a great trip. Highly recommended.
Reporter and Travel
Dive Experience	Over 1000 dives
Where else diving	Florida, Belize, Caymans, Honduras, PNG, Fiji, Hawaii, Komodo, Lembeh, Sipadan, Mabul
Closest Airport		Getting There
Dive Conditions
Weather	sunny, windy, rainy, cloudy, dry	Seas	calm, choppy
Water Temp	84-26°F / 29--3°C	Wetsuit Thickness	3
Water Visibility	20-80 Ft/ 6-24 M
Dive Policy
Dive own profile	yes
Enforced diving restrictions	60 minutes bottom time for first and last dives of day.
Liveaboard?	yes	Nitrox Available?	N/A
What I Saw
Sharks	Lots	Mantas	None
Dolphins	None	Whale Sharks	None
Turtles	> 2	Whales	None
Ratings 1(worst) - 5 (best):
Corals		Tropical Fish
Small Critters		Large Fish
Large Pelagics
Underwater Photography 1 (worst) - 5 (best):
Subject Matter		Boat Facilities
Overall rating for UWP's		Shore Facilities	N/A
UW Photo Comments	Large table on dive deck with rubber matting. Towels and compressed air available. Very convenient but would be crowded if a full complement of photographers. Crew handled cameras carefully.

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Dive Review of Peter Hughes Diving/Star Dancer in Papua New Guinea/New Britain

Peter Hughes Diving/Star Dancer, Jul, 2009,

Ratings and Overall Comments 1 (worst) - 5 (best):

Overall Rating

Reporter and Travel

Dive Conditions

Dive Policy

What I Saw

Ratings 1(worst) - 5 (best):

Underwater Photography 1 (worst) - 5 (best):

Dive Review of Peter Hughes Diving/Star Dancer in
Papua New Guinea/New Britain