Dive Review of
Loloata in
Papua New Guinea/Port Moresby

Indonesia, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Caribbean, Cocos, Galapagos, Channel
Islands, CA

Dive Conditions

No decompression diving  

There is no central place for charging batteries and working on cameras
near the dive shop and the rooms weren’t set up for it either.  We resorted
to using the room’s ironing board for a work station.  There was no rinse
bucket for cameras on the boat, but after each dive one of the dive guides
used a fresh water shower to rinse off the cameras.  The staff handled the
cameras with great care.  

Overall Rating

Loloata Resort on Bootless Bay in Papua New Guinea is located on a small
island about 30 minutes by car then 15 minutes by boat from Port Moresby. 
The resort itself has about 21 rooms, 15 without air conditioning and 6
with. We had a deluxe queen bedroom that was a good 5-minute walk from the
main lodge where we had breakfast and dinner.  The grounds of the resort
were very rustic with several dozen wallabies freely roaming the grounds,
and a dozen or so large victoria crowned pigeons.   One of the pigeons was
nesting and quite aggressive rewarding us with a couple of welcoming pecks
but nothing serious.  The room we stayed in was very nice, with gorgeous
hardwood floors and interesting woven tapestries on the walls.  Our room
had a large picture window looking out onto the bay and a very nice large
porch with two comfortable chairs to sit in and watch the sunrise.  The
only blemish in the room was the shower, where the enamel had rusted
through with large rust spots on the floor. Water was hot and the water
pressure was impressive, much better than many US based hotels.  Each room
had a small daybed that was useful as a charging station and storage
facility for camera gear, a small table and a refrigerator stocked with
safe drinking water as well as gear for making coffee and tea.

Food was quite good, with cereal and toast available at 6 AM and hot
breakfast at 7 AM.  Lunch was buffet style and dinner included soup, a main
course and dessert. Wine and beer were available at reasonable prices but
the red wine by the glass was not very appealing; sweet and not very
interesting.  Overall the accommodations were very good and the staff was
friendly and accommodating. 

The diving in Bootless Bay was very good and quite varied.  The dive boat
was a 30-foot Reefmaster set up with 24 tank racks.  The first dive of the
day was done with Aluminum 80s and the second dive was done with Al 65s. 
We had only 3 divers on the boat so it felt spacious but with 12 divers it
could be crowded.  No head on the boat, but the ocean was close by.  Dive
entry was a giant stride off the back, then follow the mooring line to the
dive site. All the sites we dove had permanent mooring buoys.  After the
dive you hand up your camera and fins, and climb what has to be the best
dive boat ladder I have seen with broad steps, a platform at the bottom and
a nice angle, not straight up.  Between the two morning dives there was
tea, fruit and cookies.  After the second dive we headed back to a hot
lunch, dove again at 2 PM and then a night dive for those interested.  The
dive guides, Francis, Archie and Sibo were helpful and always adept at
finding the small critters that we were interested in filming.  After our
last dive, the dive team washed our gear and carried up to our room where
they hung it out on the balcony to dry. Putting our gear together on the
first day and putting it back in the bag for the flight to dive on the
Febrina were the only times we had to even touch our gear. It was put
together on the boat each morning and taken off and rinsed each evening.

We dove 3 wrecks and 6 other sites, all relatively close to the lodge since
it was often quite windy.  We saw both the biggest grouper either of has
ever seen at more than 6-ft long and some very tiny pygmy seahorses. 
Diving conditions were varied as well, some sites had 80-foot visibility
but one site we dove was green with 15-foot visibility but lots of small
critters.  The critter list included pygmy seahorses, a beautiful orange
rhinopias, twin spot gobies, large groupers, two very big olive sea snakes,
numerous nudibranchs, small red frogfish, pipefish, moray eels, white leaf
scorpion fish, porcelain crabs, several types of anemone fish including
true clowns, mantis shrimps, some very small (1 inch) octopus, a very large
ugly stonefish, several crocodile fish, many lionfish on the wrecks, an
interesting red dragonet that remains nameless, lots of tiny shrimps and
crabs, particularly at night. At one pinnacle we swam with a large school
of sweetlips, and a Napoleon wrasse came to visit and on our last dive we
filmed a long nose filefish swimming in the Staghorn coral.

Overall, it was a very nice experience in a lovely spot and we would highly
recommend both the lodge and the diving. 

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