President Coolidge

The highlight of our trip was diving the SS President Coolidge, a 198 meters long shipwreck. The ship was actually a luxury cruise liner built in 1931. At that time it was one of America’s largest merchant ships and also one of the most luxurious, with swimming pools, telephones, beauty salons and art deco interiors. She was aimed for Americans wanting a holiday in the pacific and she was one of the fastest boats available. In the early parts of World War II she was used for evacuating Americans from Hong Kong and Asia. In June 1941 she went into service with the American Army and after Pearl Harbour she was rebuilt and stripped of all her luxury to become a troop ship. She could in fact carry over 5000 troops when the reconstruction was finished. At that time the entrance into Luganville (the largest village in Espiritu Santo), where the Americans had one of their bases, was filled with mines to prevent the Japanese from entering. As the weather conditions were not that great when entering the port in October 1942 the captain decided to enter between two other islands than usual. President Coolidge hit a friendly mine and sank in less than 90 minutes. There was however not any victims as the ship headed for the beach and coral reefs and many could walk ashore. When high tide came the ship however tipped over and is now lying on its port side. Salvation operations removed quite a few objects, such as propellers and electric motors from the ship after the war, but the Vanuatu government declared that no such things were allowed after 1983 and the wreck is only used for recreational diving since.

We dived with a Divecenter called Allan Power and met Allan himself on several occasions. Allan is the most experienced diver on the wreck with more than 12000 dives. Allan also had a very nice dog which was a mix between a rotweiler and a dobberman. Our guide had also done around 8000 dives on the wreck. Unfortunately it did not make us feel any safer as we were offered to dive up to 60 metres on air and they thought it was enough that they knew the entrances and exits for a 50 metre long penetration. As it was only the four of us with the guide we set the limits ourselves however, so we did not dive deeper than 40 metres and only did minor penetrations.

We did the majority of the dives at starboard side or front deck, since the ship had tipped over as earlier mentioned. Particularly interesting was the promenade deck with old gasmasks, rifles, helmets etc. You can see some of these things here in the pictures below.

As you can see our guide also played a little trick on us standing as a bouncer with a rifle on the side when we entered the deck.

Markus and I were also very thrilled about finally getting our underwater camera house and starting to practice underwater photography. It was much trickier than I had ever imagined and I think we are going to struggle a little bit before we start taking some really nice pictures but Anders was of very good help, teaching us the basics. We also dived into the cargo holes which were filled with all sorts of military equipments such as trucks, SUVs etc. The most amazing dive was in my opinion the night dive we did into these cargo holes. We went into the water while it was a little bit light and started descending, torches off, against the wreck. Down by the wreck we were totally relying on the guide to show us the way as the only light source was the phosphorescence (mareld) in the water. For those of you who don’t know what phosphorescence is; it is a little bacterium that glows in the dark when there is movement. Down at 36 metres we swam into the second cargo hole and sat perfectly still. Then all of a sudden a school of fish that were glowing in the dark appeared in the shape of a hart just in front of us. I think they are called flash light fish as they keep flashing. We sat at the bottom for quite some time watching several schools of this glowing fish circle around us. Quite a few of them even followed us out of the cargo hole as we were ascending towards the surface. At about 10 metres the phosphorescence was really strong and we all moved as much as possible to see the magic sparkles. Unfortunately we could not take any pictures.