I never had the habit of putting things off. However, for my last few magazine article deadlines I have found myself frantically editing text and massaging photos up to the last minute. My article on Black Jack, the B-17 Bomber near Boga Boga in Milne Bay Province was due this afternoon. It’s a little after 14:00 now, and I just took the DVD over to the publisher’s office.

I’ve got to stop doing that.

Anyway, I though you might enjoy seeing the remaining photos that I submitted:

I had a meeting with Mr. Tamlong Tabb of the Tab Island Marine Wildlife Management Area. He’s a nice fellow. We were able to work out arrangements for us to continue diving in the area. I only recently discovered that the person who has been collecting money for nearly fifteen years (K200 per year) for the use of the area is a fraud.

Fortunately, Mr. Tabb is a very reasonable guy and has allowed me to pick up the payment at the same rate. I had to pay twice for this year, since the con man was here only a few weeks ago to get his payoff.

It is good to meet with a local landowner who has the grace and understanding to treat casual, non-commercial users as a class different from business owners.

All of you Madang divers out there, take note. We can deal with this man. He has his head screwed on straight!

I’m working on an article for Our Way magazine about our dive on Black Jack, the B-17 bomber. I wanted to test my gallery plugin for WordPress to see if it’s working now.

These are the images that will appear in the article. (Don’t write to the publisher to say, “I saw them on Madang – Ples Bilong Mi first”)

Here are the shots:

When the slide show comes up, your screen will go dark and you will see the first image. You’ll see ‘next’ and or ‘prev’ to navigate through the images. Click [esc] or the ‘X’ box to exit.

I hope it works.

One of the many highlights of my recent eight days at sea on Miss Rankin was diving Black Jack.

I’m posting from home this morning, so I have to deal with TELEKOM’s ridiculous 28.8KBs speed – the best I can get at my house. Therefore, I must be brief.

You can find a complete history of this famous B-17 bomber here.

Because the dive is beyond the PADI recreational limit, it’s a bit exciting, regardless of what you might see. The bottom is about 46 metres (150 ft). I’ve been considerably deeper than that, but I don’t like to make it a habit.

The biggest problem is light. The water is not crystalline. Combined with the depth, it makes for difficult photography.

This is the most colourful of the shots that I got. You can see the huge vertical stabilizer and the aft machinegun placement:

Here’s a shot of the dorsal twin .50 machineguns:

Here is Tony Collins between the starboard engines:

We were able to spend about ten minutes on the bomber before we had to come up. We had about a fifteen minute decompression stop at ten metres. We had put two drop tanks on the reef in case we needed them, but none of us ran low on air, so we didn’t use them.

I reckon that most of the dives that I did last week will be ‘once in a lifetime’ for me, so I appreciate the hospitality of the Collins brothers on Miss Rankin. I probably never would have gotten the chance to do such a world-famous dive otherwise.