To locate the Falklands you can head down the west coast of South America, make a left at Cape Horn and kinda head nor'nor'east a bit. The islands are approximately 750 miles north of Antarctica. You would think that running into some dots in the middle of the South Atlantic that cover an area roughly 160 miles (west to east) by 85 miles would be hard, but that hasn't been the case. Ships of all manner have been slamming into the Falklands for a couple hundred years, and we're heading off to dive one: the Helen A. Miller, an American barque wrecked in 1859. It's taken us - myself and Dave and Carol Eynon - about three hours of serious four-wheel driving to reach San Carlos Water, the narrow inlet on the west side of East Falkland where the Miller is located. East Falkland is one of the two major islands in the Falkland group; there are some 420-plus isles and some of them are home to the 600-plus citizens of the country's 2,700 or so who don't live in the capital of Stanley. Most of them aren't home to anything except penguins, birds, seals, sea lions and kelp. Dave Eynon runs South Atlantic Marine Services in Port Stanley, the only dive operation in the islands. When winds canceled my inbound flight to San Carlos from Sea Lion Island, Dave and Carol pick me up at Mount Pleasant Airport, load me into the Land Rover, and we hit the track (road) for the 75-mile return trip through the Camp (as everything outside of Stanley is called). Dave drives, and I open and close pasture gates as we buck, slalom and roll through some austerely beautiful landscape.The Falklands Most people are familiar with the Falklands as a result of the 1982 British-Argentinian battle over the remote islands. Reminders of the war - memorials, graves and battle markers - linger throughout the islands. Land mines from the '82 conflict remain as well. The locals mark off suspect areas and some of these are beautiful white sand beaches fringed with kelp forests and blue waters. Sheep, cattle and horses roam the countryside nonetheless, and the British military EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) men have a lifetime worth of employment. A particularly striking feature of the Falklands, not completely understood in geological terms, is the stone runs: river-like courses of huge granite blocks. The best explanation of the phenomenon is that it is the result of glaciation, melt, mud atop ice, glaciation, ad nauseam, but no one's dead sure. From the air the runs look like rivers, meandering through moonscape hills and valleys. The islands are virtually treeless, and over the 4,600 square miles, tussock grass, a bladed shrub growing 10 to 12 feet high out of individual hummocks, reigns supreme. What the landscape lacks in texture, the sea more than makes up for, however. The Falkland Current, an offshoot of the circumpolar West Wind Drift, hits the islands and causes upwellings; and wherever there are upwellings there's food. The shores are rife with kelp forests - giant kelp and tree kelp predominate - and the sealife and avifauna are astounding. Huge male elephant seals lie in the sun, occasionally hauling their bulks along to slam their 4,000-pound bodies against each other, testing for supremacy. Traipsing through the tussock, you're likely to stumble on solitary male southern sea lions; and a 600-pounder can provide a heart-stopping moment when it charges. Diving near frisky young fur seals can sometimes border on manic, and often the seals are too curious to stay in the water with. Penguins waddle Chaplinesque everywhere - gentoo, rockhopper, jackass (Magellanic) and king abound. Orcas cruise the rookeries, and leopard seals are not uncommon. And the wrecks - man, there are a lot of wrecks in the Falklands, and you needn't be a diver to see them. A walk into nearly any cove will reveal the incredible specter of some three or four masted wooden hulk lying high and dry. Cape Horners, barques, brigantines, old slavers, packet boats, freighters and steamers crowd the beaches. And underwater there are more. Eynon, who's been diving the Falklands for 16 years, started the Wreck Survey Group for the government in 1991 and so far has located 150 untouched wrecks. We know of another 150 or so, he says, and who knows how many we don't know about.Real Adventure Diving in the Falklands is an adventure in its truest sense. You'll get to dive, but don't consider it a dive vacation. There is simply too much to see, too many places to see it, and there are the vagaries of wind (averaging 16 knots) and weather to deal with. Falklands diving is not for anyone less than an high intermediate and you'd best be skilled at diving in cold, sometimes quite rough waters. Man, woman or child, every Falklander lives with the wind, but the downside to that is they have a rather odd conceptual grasp on what high winds are. "We'll gear up in the lodge," says Eynon, "and head out to Wreck Bay and dive the Miller." "Uh, Dave? It's like, uh, blowing 35 knots. I just heard it on the radio," I note. I also can hear and feel it through the windows of the Blue Beach Lodge, the cozy, incredibly hospitable bed and breakfast where we're staying. "Not to worry mate, it's just a bit of a blow. We'll dive a lee." "Dave, there ain't no lee in a gahdamn 45-mph wind!" I sputter. He looks at me as if I'd just announced that the sky is green. "Ah, jeez, all right," I say resignedly. We dress, load the gear into a rigid-hull inflatable, put our masks on so we can see where the hell we're going and pound out through the 6-foot chop that is literally roaring down San Carlos Waters. No, wind doesn't make a big difference to a Falklander. Be prepared to dive in conditions about which even this Northeastern diver thought, OK, I'll just roll over and go back to sleep. We reach Wreck Bay, and there is a lee of sorts - either that or I'm getting used to the diving. The wreck is really shallow (Dave has the only recompression chamber in the islands, and it's currently awaiting a part from the U.K.), so we hit it. The tide's out, the Miller is covered in kelp, but there's no denying you're investigating the 100-plus-year-old hull of a wooden ship. I shine my light under the hull's curve and something glimmers. Wrecker that I am, I can't resist, so I wiggle and force myself down under and grab what turns out to be a seamless blue bottle. I click my tank and Dave swims over and I point to it. The islanders are well aware of the value of their wrecks and wrecking is a no-no; I slide the bottle back under the hull. We find plenty of others, some sheets of copper that once covered the Miller's hull and huge chunks of bunker coal all around. The brass fittings of the hull sparkle in some places as well. A pretty neat dive and we run about 15 feet of vis, the best I get during the trip. We untie from the kelp, board the inflatable and head south down the Waters for Ajax Bay, where a former abattoir - slaughterhouse - served as a British field hospital during the wars. As we tie up to the old pier, I spot dorsals following us into the bay. My gloves and fins are off, as is my weight harness, but I leap into the boat, grab a mask and flop back out. Commerson (piebald) dolphins, some six or so in number, have come to play. The locals call these orca-colored dolphins puffin pigs, and they're extremely curious about us. Four to 5 feet long, they whiz, whirl and spin around me in the 6-foot vis of the bay. Whenever they leave, I slap my hand and they return to play around some more. Kelly Rocks My first shot of Falklands diving came the day after my arrival. Dave, local diver Mickey Reeves and I load into Dave's 6-meter rigid, cuddy-cabin inflatable and head out of Stanley toward Kelly Rocks, some 6 miles out in the South Atlantic. It's an incredibly sunny, almost warm day, though the wind coming aboard makes it more sensible to seek shelter behind the cuddy. Rocks being a large part of the Falkland landscape, it seems sensible that these particular rocks were named after the boat that found them - the J.R. Kelly, a 2,209-ton wooden barque that, er, discovered the rocks on May 15, 1899. The Kelly sat on the outcrop for about four weeks before a storm broke her back and she went down, thereby naming the implements of her destruction. She's in about 40 feet of water and isn't always discernible as a wreck, but the straight lines masked by the towering kelp appear every once in a while, and close inspection reveals timbers lying all about. I scrounge around in the wreck and come up with quite a keeper - a bottle filled with some kind of miniature pepper-looking things. The cork is intact and there's no water in the bottle; the temptation is ... ahhhhh! I crawl back into the hull and place it where I found it. I'm not a underwater critter aficionado, but I do notice plenty of typical cold water fauna. I roll onto my back and look at the glittering surface through the strands of giant kelp. No seals appear this day, though Eynon and a film crew were driven out of the water once by juvenile seals who were waaaay too interested in being part of the movie. On the way back from the Kelly, we spot the usual hordes of penguins and even encounter a lone sea lion. When we spin the boat to try and dive with him, he disappears. As we motor through Port William Bay, which will lead to the entrance of Stanley Harbor, dorsals break the surface: Peale's (blackchin) dolphins. The backchins are less inquisitive than the Commersons, but as long as we keep the boat circling they stay with us. So we don snorkels and swim with them for a while. The weather goes to a hard blow that afternoon and the sky grays, so we cancel our afternoon dive and hope for the morrow.Kidney Island We plan a dive off Kidney Island the next day, and the weather - which has gone from blow to gale to sleet to calm - cooperates; we dive a 50-plus-foot rock reef/wall off Kidney Island, some 10 miles out of Stanley. After the dive we head to Kidney for lunch and some exploration. Kidney is a government sanctuary, one of 21 (there are 34 private reserves as well), and permission is required to land on the island. Dave gets the permission, and he, Carol and I go for a yomp - local-speak for humping the boonies (which is U.S. Army-speak for walking in the woods). The yomp is incredibly hard. We pass an old shack, built there originally for shipwreck victims, and head across island to a southern sea lion colony. The females, and pups are sleeping on the rocks and a large male cruises the water, watching us. Finally a pup wakes a mother seal, and the herd heads off to the water and their male. We cross the island again and reach a cliff about 150 feet high atop which are perched a colony of rockhopper penguins. You've got to fig God must have a sense of humor to make penguins climb cliffs. Sweaty, muddy and tired, we finally get back to the beach and head back to Stanley. How They Hit the Rocks We decide to try and dive the sea lion colony off Kidney Island the next day, and again, the weather goes through its usual eight changes, but we luck out and grab a bright blue sky. We shoot out into a nice 4-foot rolling sea, swing around Menguera Point and head toward Kidney.On the way we see a 200-foot Korean squid jigger and notice that it has seemingly changed course for our direction. "Hey, Dave," I say, "is that sucker following us?" Dave doesn't think so, but he does note that whatever it is doing, it's doing it at full speed. Our attention to Kidney wanes as we watch the boat close. There's some laughter, and what the?, but the boat keeps on coming. Eynon gets on the radio but elicits no answer from the ship, which is getting waaay too close. He gooses the engines, we spin the boat and head off on an angle, all the while trying to make radio contact to no avail. The Korean boat is heading for a shoal reef about 6 feet deep. The boat draws about 13 feet, our bottom is reading 12 feet, and the crazy sucker is pounding 13 or 14 knots and not showing any inclination to stop. This maniac's going to pile it up on the reef, says Eynon rather calmly. He climbs up on the pontoons and starts waving his hands for the captain to back down and go back, something the squidder's squire seems to have no inclination to do. I climb on the other pontoon, and while very anxious to actually see a shipwreck happen (I'm figuring Admiralty Laws, salvage rights and whatnot), decide I'd better get into the spirit of things. I start making throat-cutting gestures as the big boat passes us, and this seems to do the trick. The engines idle down, the ship goes hard aport, and arcs a big turn back toward us. "Bloody hell," yells Eynon as he powers over to the open loading door of the rust-blood-gut-stained white hull. "Anybody speak English?" he yells. We get that look that children give teachers when they ask Who has the answer? to math questions. Well, to make a long story endless, this ol' boy had hauled all the way from Korea, and thought the entrance to Stanley Harbor was where we were heading, so he decided to follow us in. Nice navigating. Right up until the - almost - end. Well, at least the shoal was already named, sparing the area from an indignity like No. 55 Jai Won Shoal. But I sure would have liked to seen him hit the beach. Seven days was not enough time to explore the outdoor wonders of the Falklands. I barely tapped the diving, never tired of the varied wildlife, the people, the rivers, hills and waters. I lugged my dive gear, but if I'd had the luxury of filling up the plane with outdoor toys, well ... I guess I wouldn't be back here writing this; I'd still be out yomping the camp.