Scuba Diving Vacations

Well, besides watching turkeys - yes turkeys are gettting quite common at elevation here, we've got 2 hens with chicks up our road right now - you've got all sorts of stuff to do here. This particular shot was taken just up the hill from us, those are mac nut trees in the background. We tend to see more pheasants than turkeys in our yard.

The two things that you can do here which I consider to be world class, as in you are unlikely or hard pressed to be able to do this anywhere else in the world, are the manta ray night dive and visiting the lava flow. The lava flow does happen to be on the other side of the island, which is a bit of a trip (2 .5 hours or so by car) but well worth it when the lava is flowing and you can approach it. The lava flow is also worth a blog on it's own, I'll leave that for someone else.

Today Bob and I finished off a student's Open Water certification class. It was a very easy day as he was very well prepared and had better buoyancy control than many of our certified divers. Bob lead the first dive at "Golden Arches", a fish filled area south of the Kona airport in the "Pine trees" area which features two sizeable underwater archways off shore. We did our second dive at "Turtle Pinnacle", a turtle cleaning station I've mentioned in earlier posts. We only had one turtle, but saw lots of cool stuff, including a horned helmet snail, a flame angel, a divided flatworm, coral banded shrimp, several eel species and other goodies. It's always fun introducing a new diver to the underwater world. Whooohoo!

Since I had a student today, I didn't have the camera with me. Here's a picture I took on yesterday's fun dive of a couple of yellow tangs. I mentioned in an earlier post that tangs are also known as surgeon fish, and have a scalpel they use for defense. The scalpel on yellow tangs is retracted except when in use, it's the white spot near the tail.

later,

Steve