Bilikiki - Solomons
In the midst of the South Pacific, the Solomon Islands is part of the coral triangle and home to some of the best, least visited scuba diving in the world. There is an amazing diversity of marine life, dive sites and experiences, all a short flight from Australia or Fiji. Bilikiki Cruises has been running liveaboard scuba diving trips in the Solomon Islands for over 25 years and our experienced crew know the best dive sites that the Solomon Islands has to offer, so come dive the Solomons in comfort and style!
The Diving in the Solomon Islands
The Solomon Islands are home to some of the best reefs in the world and the diving is spectacular, diverse and colorful, there is not just one type of diving but an array of different habitats and ecosystems. There are pelagices and critters, wrecks, caves, amazingly healthy coral gardens, sand slopes, mangroves, walls and sea mounts. There is no ice diving but pretty much everything else is covered!
Amazingly there are very few dive operators in the Solomon Islands, and this means that its extremely rare to see another dive boat during the trip. Having dive sites to ourselves is one of the many great things about the Solomon Islands.
On a trip you can expect to see some of the healthiest hard corals in the world, sheer walls covered in huge fans, magical caves and cuts with spectacular light beams, a unimaginable array of colorful tropical fish, tornados of schooling fish, sharks, tunas, trevallies and mackerel hunting shoals of fusiliers. There are WW2 shipwrecks, modern wrecks, plane wrecks and dump sites complete with underwater trucks and bombs, a dive site where mantas pass overhead almost as though they are checking divers out more than the other way around and another where the healthiest reef imaginable can be enjoyed to the sound of a rumbling underwater volcano not too far away. There is also an amazing diversity of macro life and cuttlefish, octopus, a mardi gras of nudibranchs, pygmy seahorses, coral hermit crabs and crocodile fish are just a few of the things seen on nearly every trip.
Diving From MV Bilikiki
We offer 4 dives a day with a night dive as well. Bottom times are unlimited except on the odd dive where there are long transits to the next dive site, when we may limit things to 60 minutes.
Most of the dives are done using our tenders (called tinnies in the Solomons), which offer a shuttle back and forth to the dive site picking up guests where they surface and running them back to the boat straight away. The exit and entries for the tinnies are very easy and guests with mobility issues find them very manageable. Our crew load and unload diver's equipment and fill tanks so there is nothing for our guests to do other than to turn up and dive!