Kavieng

I’d read about Kavieng in a decade-old surf magazine article somebody had left in a Port Moresby guesthouse, a grainy photograph of an empty, glassy reef break with a caption that undersold it badly. New Ireland’s provincial capital sits at the northern tip of the island, a scatter of trade stores and a fish market along a channel that separates it from a scatter of small islands, and it has a reputation among a very specific, very quiet circle of surfers and divers as one of the last genuinely uncrowded spots in the Pacific. Having now surfed there, I understand the quietness. Nobody who finds this wants to share it either.

The wave itself breaks over a reef pass a short boat ride from town, a long, peeling right that on a good swell holds its shape for what felt like an unreasonable distance, and on the two mornings I paddled out there were at most three other people in the water, all locals, all far better than me, all cheerfully unbothered by my presence. Between sets I could see the green hump of a small island a few hundred meters off, and past it nothing but open water toward New Hanover.

Kavieng’s waters are also full of WWII wrecks — Japanese ships and planes sunk during Allied bombing raids sit in accessible depths just offshore, and I did two dives on a fighter plane resting almost intact on a sandy bottom, its cockpit now home to a resident lionfish that eyed me with what I choose to interpret as mild irritation. The dive operator, a New Zealander who’d moved here in the nineties and never quite gotten around to leaving, told me the wreck count around Kavieng is still being added to as fishermen report new sonar contacts.

Onshore, the town runs at the speed of its fish market — busy at dawn, near-empty by mid-morning — and I spent one long afternoon at a small trade store’s veranda drinking warm SP lager with two off-duty deckhands who patiently corrected my pronunciation of Tok Pisin words for about an hour and found the whole exercise enormously funny.

When to go: Surf season runs roughly November through April when swells from the north Pacific arrive; diving conditions are best May through October in calmer, clearer water. Flights connect Kavieng with Port Moresby and Rabaul a few times a week.