I’ve been pretty woeful about posting pictures. There are all sorts of excuses, like the fact that there was not much to look at in Santo that wasn’t underwater (at least the part of Santo that I was in; the hills and highlands are, I hear, very scenic, but I never went to see them), that it rained all day in Port Vila and that Nadi is notorious for pickpockets and conmen and it is advisable not to draw attention to oneself. But they’re all just crappy excuses.

Local Ni-Vanuatu kids are always hanging around the little staging area where divers prepare to make their entrance to the Coolidge down a gently sloping beach between two stone breakwaters. On a non-diving day, I just sat with a few of them while they fished for guppies with spools of string. Incidentally, in a number of countries here—namely the Solomons and Vanuatu—both natives and expats refer to native children, perhaps offensively to American ears and sensibilities, as “pickaninnies.”

Gerard Cole, an Australian I dived with a few times, took these pictures on one of the night dives on the Coolidge. Diving the Coolidge--day or night--can be pretty hard to capture on film. David Doubilet, one of the great underwater photographers, tried for a 1998 issue of National Geographic. His pictures look great, but at that time only limited parts of the wreck were accessible, and most divers now, even relatively inexperienced ones, reach all of the places he photographed on their first two dives. I don't know how one would capture the sensation of actually being inside or the scale of the bloody thing. But it doesn't stop people from trying.

And this is why I did not take more pictures in Santo--this is most of what there is to see there if you stay dry and don’t make it up to the mountains and villages.

I'm in Tuvalu now, being constantly reminded of how frustrating "island time," or using clocks and calendars as only rough guidelines, can be.