“You and Dirk go over there and see what you can find,” Clive said.

I was staring at a chart; the water showed two-thousand-foot maximum depth in the Strait.

“What do we use for a boat?” I asked wisely.

“Not to worry,” Clive said. “My son Dirk has been talking to the local dive shop owner. He has a few boats for charter.”

“What else?” I asked.

“I’d get a malaria shot if I were you,” he said, “and typhoid — just get whatever immunizations they have.”

It was late July 2001, and I was sitting on the back porch of Clive’s house in Colorado. It was all of about sixty degrees outside, we were discussing malaria and tropical breezes, and I was looking at a map of a series of islands halfway around the world.

“What exactly do you want us to accomplish?” I asked.

“Find out where it’s not,” he said, “and have some fun. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”

Clive has a strange idea of fun.

A few days before, I’d flown from Fort Lauderdale to Phoenix, stayed the night with Dirk, Clive’s son and the president of NUMA, then rented a car and driven north. After editing what we had finished on this book, I was due to leave Clive in the morning to drive back to Phoenix.

“Anything else?”

“Stay out of the casinos in Australia,” he said, “and don’t believe Dirk’s system for blackjack. The house always wins.”

I left at first light for Phoenix. Somewhere in Arizona, I picked up a Navajo who was hitchhiking and dropped him at the hospital in Phoenix. Strangely enough, this was the same day that President Bush was awarding the Medal of Honor to some of the remaining code-talkers. It seemed fitting, so I asked him about Native American philosophy.

“There is a pace to everything,” he said.

“So what’s the key?”

“Must be pacing,” he said, just before he fell asleep.

The pace on July 28 was fast. We raced from store to store, trying to buy anything we felt we would not be able to find on Gizo, the island that would be our base in the Solomon Islands. Batteries, duct tape, tools, and trinkets. T-shirts for gifts, a portable depth sounder from Wal-Mart.

“What about rope?” asked Dirk.

“Buy it,” I said.

“Water purifier?” I asked, as we steered a cart through the discount store.

“But of course.”

“Check out these Planet of the Apes action figures,” I said, as we passed an end display.

Dirk’s girlfriend wanted us to take her to the opening tonight as a last celebration in civilization.

“We need those,” Dirk said.

Into the cart they went.

We bought a large wheeled plastic tub for storage.

The following morning, Kerrie, Dirk’s better half, arrived to drive us to the airport in her new Honda. She stared at the piles of equipment.

“No way,” she said.

We had managed to cram it all inside, but just barely.

Arriving in Los Angeles that afternoon, we retrieved our luggage, propped the bags on a pair of carts, then rolled them over to the international terminal and checked in with Air New Zealand. Later that evening, we were on our way. Our route was Los Angeles to Auckland, New Zealand, a short stop, then onto a different plane for the flight to Brisbane, Australia. We arrived at the airport in Brisbane, where we had a night’s layover before we caught one of the twice-weekly nights to the Solomon Islands, so we rented a car and set out.

Dirk drove us to the hotel, and we checked into our room.

Then we walked across the street to the casino.

The next day, a few hundred dollars lighter, we flew on a 737 to Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands. Honiara has all the charm of Manila after the fall of Marcos. Sporadic power outages and deserted buildings seemed the norm. The Solomon Islands had experienced a recent coup d’etat, and the U.S. State Department had a travel warning in place. We met with Ms. Keithie Sauders, the American consular officer, who filled us in on the situation. After assuring us we’d have no trouble, she wished us well and asked that we keep her up-to-date on our progress.

By now, the long flight was catching up with us, and we tumbled into bed for a few hours’ sleep. The next morning, we gathered our gear, took a cab to the airport, and caught a DeHavilland Otter turboprop to Gizo Island. The flight was uneventful.

From the air, the Solomon Islands look like the tropical paradise that people always imagine. Blue and green waters lap at small tree-clustered islands. The sand ringing the islands forms a white outline, while small boats and canoes form gentle wakes when viewed from the air.

The pilot brought the DeHavilland down on the grass runway, and we rolled to a stop.

The airport for Gizo is located on Nusatupi Island just across the water from Gizo. It consists of little more than a cement block shack, a tank for refueling, and a path that leads to a dock where small boats transfer arrivals across the water to Gizo. We climbed out of the plane and looked around. A man who looked like the cartoon character Yosemite Sam walked over.

“Dirk, Craig?” he asked.

“You must be Danny Kennedy,” Dirk said.

Danny has a great story. He worked as an electrician involved in the construction of Disneyland, then took his money and set out to travel the world. After a short stint as a dive instructor in Hawaii, he started to wander throughout the South Pacific, landing in the Solomon Islands in the early 1980s. Finding the people and diving to his liking, he decided to stay. Now he’s an institution. I think it’s safe to say that most people visiting Gizo will at one time or another bump into Danny. An eternally optimistic and friendly man given to repeating bad jokes and local legends, he proved to be a valuable ally. He lives above town in a beautiful house, with his Australian wife Kerry and their teenage daughter, who was born in the Solomon Islands. Danny knows the history of PT-109. In addition, he knows the waters around Gizo like the nose on his face.

“How was the flight?” he asked.

“Not too bad,” I answered.

“You’re lucky,” Danny said. “A couple of weeks ago, the pilot came in too low and hit a dugout canoe on approach — luckily, the islander saw him coming and jumped over the side. He was aggro, though, I can tell you that.”

“Aggro?” asked Dirk.

Danny speaks a strange combination of English, Australian slang, and pidgin, the local language.

“Aggro,” Danny said, smiling, “aggravated.”

Grabbing some bags, he started for the dock.

After loading the luggage aboard a small boat, we crossed the short span of water and docked in front of the Gizo Hotel. We checked in and stowed our luggage, then walked through the town to Adventure Sports, Danny’s dive operation. Gizo is not a large town, and the main business district is clustered along the waterfront. Directly in front and to the left of the hotel is an open-air market. To the right is a concrete pier, where the local island tramp steamer docks. There is a strip of pocked, potholed pavement left over from the time the Solomon Islands was a British protectorate, but for the most part the roads are packed dirt.

This is not a tourist-tainted town.

The few stores in Gizo are owned by Chinese traders, and entering them gave me the feeling that I had arrived through a time warp into a northern California gold-rush hamlet after the vein had run out. The selections ran from tin tubs for washing to bolts of cloth. Food choices for lunch included coconut flour crackers, canned tuna flavored with curry, and cookies.

The town has three restaurants. The one at the Gizo Hotel we quickly grew tired of; the Nest, midway through the town, had an actual television hooked to a satellite receiver so the customers could watch CNN; and the PT-109 restaurant, which featured the best food.