Million Dollar Point

In 1945, when postwar sale negotiations for America's Santo base equipment collapsed, the departing forces drove the lot off the point: bulldozers, six-wheeled trucks, cranes, jeeps, crate after crate, all pushed into the sea. The result is diving's strangest reef. Tires stand in coral like planted rings, gearboxes sprout anemones, and a diver can descend forty years of industrial archaeology from snorkel depth to 30-plus meters. Glassfish own the engine bays; morays own the exhaust pipes. It is comic and mournful at once: a monument to waste that the ocean has spent eighty years quietly redeeming.

The moment you come for: Bulldozers and trucks stacked down the slope; coral colonizing machinery; easy depths that suit any certification.

Topography: A slope of dumped military equipment (bulldozers, trucks, cranes, forklifts) descending from the shallows past 30 m

Entry: Beach entry near Luganville over coral rubble; the debris field starts within a few fin kicks.

Hazards: Sharp, shifting metal; entanglement in cable and machinery; surge in the shallows on windy days.

Conservation: Protected as an historic site: bottle hunters and souvenir takers have already thinned it; leave every relic where the bulldozers dropped it.