February, Waters stood out of San Diego, bound for the South Pacific. After a five-day stop at Pearl Harbor, she resumed her voyage and reported for duty with the South Pacific Amphibious Force at Noumea, New Caledonia, on 21 March. Five days later, she got underway for Espiritu Santo where she arrived the following day. For the next three weeks, the high-speed transport conducted amphibious training at Espiritu Santo with units of the 4th Marine Raider Battalion. On 18 April, Waters headed for the Fiji Islands. She arrived at Suva two days later, embarked men and equipment of Carrier Air Group 11, and proceeded via Espiritu Santo to the Solomons. She arrived off Guadalcanal on 25 April, disembarked her passengers, unloaded cargo, and departed the same day. During the next nine days, she made a circuitous voyage that took her first to Efate, thence to the Fijis, and from there back to Espiritu Santo where she arrived on 4 May. Eleven days later, the warship exited Segond Channel and set a course for Pago Pago in American Samoa where she stopped from 19 to 23 May. The next stop on her itinerary was Auckland, New Zealand, where she laid over from 29 May to 5 June while her crew enjoyed their last real shore leave for quite some time. Waters returned to Nouméa on 8 June and got underway the following day with a convoy bound for the southern Solomons. She and her charges arrived off Guadalcanal on 14 June, and the high-speed transport began patrolling the anchorage off Koli Point. With her arrival in the Solomons, Waters began almost a year engaged in the type of operations for which ships of her type were ideally suited. The remnants of the Japanese defense forces had evacuated Guadalcanal over three months before, and the American Navy, Marine Corps, and Army possessed relatively secure bases—at that island and across Ironbottom Sound at Port Purvis on Florida Island—from which to begin the climb up the Solomons staircase toward the Bismarcks and Rabaul. Operating from Purvis Bay at Florida Island, Waters shuttled troops and supplies north to the invasions of various central and northern Solomon Islands—New Georgia, Vella Lavella, Bougainville, Treasury Island, and the Green Islands subgroup. After the move toward the Bismarcks began in earnest, she supported both initial invasions and consolidation operations. New Georgia, the center island of a cluster which, with