Nusa Island Beach

Nusa Island lies a few hundred metres off Kavieng, at the northern tip of New Ireland in Papua New Guinea, reached by a banana boat that runs all day. The beach faces the passage between the island and the town.

The passage is the point. Currents run hard through it, which brings clear water and a great deal of life, and produces a right-hand wave that breaks over reef from November to April — Kavieng has a small surf economy built on a management plan that caps the number of surfers per break, agreed with the customary landowners who own the reefs. It is one of very few places in the world where a surf resource is rationed by the community that owns it, and it works.

The water holds Japanese and American aircraft and ships sunk in 1943 and 1944, several of them in snorkelling depth. Papua New Guinea sits on the western edge of the Coral Triangle and the marine biodiversity here is among the highest recorded anywhere; the reef in front of the beach is in good condition because almost nobody visits. New Ireland is long and narrow — nearly four hundred kilometres of it, rarely more than twenty wide — with a single road down the east coast.

Development is a lodge of a few rooms and a village. The country's tourism is expensive relative to what it provides, internal flights are the only practical transport, and security elsewhere in Papua New Guinea requires local advice rather than a guidebook. Kavieng town across the water has a market, an airstrip and not much else, and the Tigak islands north of it are reached by the same boats.

Reefs owned by the people who live on them, a surf plan that caps how many can be in the water and pays the landowners, and wrecks from 1944 in snorkelling depth. Papua New Guinea is expensive and difficult and this corner of it is calm; take local advice about everywhere else.