Solomon Islands, Uepi 18-25th July 2014
Tour Leader: Katie Glasheen
Uepi has magnificent reef diving. Dive sites vary from coral gardens with magnificent drop-offs, ledges and gutters featuring an enormous diversity of reef fish. Turtles, mantas and eagle rays are fairly common sights, as well as the (friendly) Uepi hammerheads.
Many of Uepi’s dives are conveniently located within a 5 to 10 minute boat ride from the resort. Uepi also has some wreck diving. There are three wrecks lying in Wickham Harbour, all are Japanese freighters sunk by the US during World War 2. All are upright, relatively intact and display varying degrees of artefacts and marine life. All wreck dives are excursion dives and they are approximately one hour from Uepi by boat.
Uepi Island sits on the meeting place of several major currents, making it an excellent place for both drift dives and stationary dives, allowing you to watch the activity of the reef play out before you
When diving in Uepi, it’s common for divers to stay in the water for an hour or so on each dive because the top 5-10 metres have endless species to discover, allowing a diver to get maximum value from each dive. Rarely will you view such high concentrations of fish, sponges and corals in such a diverse environment, ranging from coral gardens to vertical drop-offs into 2000 metres of ocean, most within the confines of a three kilometre reef. Water clarity is usually very good and water temperature is about 28-30 °C.