Santo Diving – the SS President Coolidge
July 2, 2009 by T J Fisher
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Santo diving offers great access to some of the world’s best reefs and underwater caves, plus two of the world’s most accessible shipwrecks. On the reefs, and in the underwater caves, you can see hundreds of colourful and interesting fish.
Wreck and reef diving in Santo is suitable for divers of any ability, provided they have completed basic training.Great reef dives can be found in most areas of the coastline. Dive operators tend to stick to the south-east coast, where you can find the wrecks of the SS President Coolidge and the USS Tucker and an area known as ‘Million Dollar Point’.
For anyone diving on the island of Santo, Vanuatu, the SS President Coolidge and the USS Tucker wreck dives are just meters from the Vanuatu coastline and both are highly accessible. Both wrecks are American ships that during World War II.
The worlds biggest accessible wreck dive, the SS President Coolidge is a American luxury liner that was converted to a US troop ship during the second world war. It sank just meters from the shore and is the premium dive in Santo. Novices can dive the main bulk of the ship, and more experienced divers can go deeper into the wreck to look at life on the inside.
The SS Tucker was an American destroyer stationed in Vanuatu during the second world war. It was accidently sunk by one of the USA’s own mines, and now it too lies just offshore.
Diving the relatively shallow Million Dollar Point, divers can see huge areas of military war surplus that was simply dumped into the ocean when the Americans left Vanuatu at the end of WWII. This Santo dive includes ammunition boxes, military vehicles and the odd bulldozer – items which make this one the most popular sites when diving in Santo.
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