We have sailed to the vicinity of New Georgia Island and anchored off the Zipolo Habu Resort on nearby little Lola Island. Rod is reliving old times here. On his travels through the Solomons a dozen years ago aboard Uwilhna he laid over here for several months and replenished his cruising funds by running the resort dive shop.
The proprietor is Joe, an American originally from Seattle, but he has been running this resort in excess of 30 years, has a Solomon wife named Lisa, and three grown daughters currently pursuing their diverse lives in Australia and New Zealand. He says the rain is warmer here!
The resort hosts the Stunned Mullet Fishing Tournament scheduled for early November, right before we fly home. The entry fee is free and the grand prize is SD$1,000. When the tourney is over Joe keeps half the fish and the other half is donated to the local hospital. So Joe is expecting 150 entrants – 50 or so in the power boat/fishing reel category and 100 in the hand fishing category for locals in their dugout canoes. I suggested Rod take my kayak and join the latter but he had two excuses: one – catching something really big and being towed out to sea, and two – being shown up by the locals who have insider knowledge of all the good fishing spots. A stray fishhook in the inflatable kayak might cause trouble as well!
We enjoyed listening to Rod and Joe reminisce, an excellent dinner in the resort restaurant, and Sirius XM Margaritaville music playing on the sound system. The resort was between guests so we had the place to ourselves while the staff had their own party just outside celebrating a night off. Lobster, mud crab, and bumphead parrotfish were on the menu.
Yesterday we went on a two-dive outing with the local dive shop from nearby Munda. The reefs here in the Solomons are all controlled by local families or villages and the dive shops pay kastom fees for access. As a result it is often more politic for us to go out with the professionals rather than dive on our own.
We took the resort’s open boat into the town of Munda, not too much to speak of. Bank of New Zealand has closed it’s doors and left town, only leaving an ATM behind which was non-functional, at least on that day. We joined a long queue waiting for cash from the only other ATM in town. At the general store we acquired a beach umbrella to provide a bit of shade for working on projects on deck in the hot sun. We had lunch at the Agnes Resort, and then Mike and I went on a visit to the WWII museum, run by Joe’s wife’s cousin Barney.
Actually the museum is more of a collection than a true museum, but it is obviously a labor of love. Ten years ago Barney happened to find the dog tags of an American soldier, David Joseph Santini, and this sparked his interest in collecting all the memorabilia still lying around the island, naming the resulting creation The David Joseph WWII Museum.
Munda has an airport where Dash 8s commute to the bigger towns of Gizo and Honiara. In 1942 Munda was an important Japanese base of some 4500 troops. In November of that year the airstrip was constructed in secret and populated with a fleet of 30 Zeros preparatory to launching an attack on the US airfield on Guadalcanal. The Japanese went to great lengths to camouflage the runway with a canopy of coconut palm fronds and maintain its secrecy, but the Solomon Islanders quickly ratted on them to the US and a month later Allied Forces attacked the island, destroying many of the planes and capturing the base. For the duration of the war the airstrip was controlled and expanded by the US.
In the Agnes Resort at lunchtime we noticed a work crew of New Zealanders wearing heavy work boots and wielding computers and satellite phones. Barney told us they were an exploratory crew, preliminary to a planned renovation of the airfield, here to survey the multitude of artifacts embedded beneath the runway including unexploded ordinance. Presumably too old to detonate, but it would give one pause as one’s commuter plane taxis for take-off!
The Solomons are littered with war relics. The fighting was hard and bitter here. The last Japanese combatant came down from the mountains of Guadalcanal to surrender in 1965, having fended for himself twenty years after the end of hostilities! Hulks of crashed planes rust in the jungle or disintegrate on the bottom of the sea. Off Guadalcanal a body of water is aptly named Iron Bottom Sound for its multitude of sunken ships.
Barney’s museum collection, all gathered up from Munda Airfield and nearby, includes helmets, grenades, medical supplies, tommy guns, torpedoes, knives and bayonets, canteens, dog tags, buttons and a myriad of other assorted items. He has recently acquired the engine of a Japanese Zero and is thinking of heading up a nearby creek to salvage one or more of several crashed planes. I met another man previously near the Diamond Narrows who had salvaged a wrecked plane by ferrying it in pieces (wings, fuselage, etc.) across the lagoon to his island in the bigger of his two wooden dugout canoes.
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