I suddenly felt like I was in a neon video game with the underwater world transforming into vibrant greens, reds and yellows. A bright, glowing light snaked across the sand, and on closer inspection, it was an eel that was vivid green. Later in the dive, I saw the outline of a red fish in the sand. It turned out to be a scorpionfish with only the outline of its body glowing reddish-pink while its lacy appendages along its body did not. Hard corals, which during the day were a bland ivory color, were now dazzling green and yellow, with tinges of maroon.

The video documentary about Ebadon Island is a kind of short travel diary made with the aim of documenting the construction of a laboratory to study the effects of climate change in one of the most remote places on the planet, located in a chain of 92 islets and islands that make up Kwajelein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. 

Bikini Atoll is arguably one of the most remote and adventurous dive locations left on Earth. It is literally in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; depths here allow only trained technical divers to reach the wrecks and the atoll feels (and has been) abandoned and deserted in every way. But Master Liveaboards has returned to the location, post-Covid, to bring divers to the wrecks in luxury and comfort—even with internet connection to the outside world via Starlink. I cannot think of a better way to dive this bucket-list location.

This was my third trip to Bikini but this didn’t lessen my enthusiasm to getting back there. Traveling to this Atoll, deep within the Marshal Island group, takes some doing. Getting there from Auckland, New Zealand, I flew to Cairns, then Guam, then onto Kwajalein via an island hopper, which stopped at four other Micronesian islands. Some 27 hours later, getting into Kwajalein meant that we were only half way there.

The Marshall Islands consist of 29 atolls with a total land mass around 180 square kilometers (70 sq. miles), (about the size of Seattle), but the atolls cover over 750,000 square miles of ocean (think the size of Mexico.) Anyone looking at this region of the Pacific would guess the diving would be pretty amazing and it doesn’t disappoint. Healthy reefs, plenty of fish, and a lagoon filled with WWII shipwrecks, airplanes, discarded military supplies, and even a ship that almost survived two nuclear bombs. Welcome to Kwajalein Atoll.

It was January 1943 when the heavy battle of Kwajalein took place during World War II on what was the outer ring of the Japanese force in the South Pacific at that time. The runways on the Atoll have been destroyed within a few days by the US troops and the following air raid sealed the fate of several big Japanese cargo ships which have been bombed to the seabed of the lagoon. Sixteen of these ships can be dived today.