Scuba Diving Vacations

And yesterday afternoon we could color it kinda green. During the first dive yesterday (Golden Arches)the viz wasn't so great, but not all that bad. It was a three tank dive day so we went quite a bit north for our second dive, and it wasn't too bad for viz. On the third dive we came back in to the Pine Trees area to do Aquarium and Suck 'Em Up... now that dive had poor viz. It was down to maybe 20 feet or so by then. We had some kind of unusual algae bloom or coral spawn or something. I've seen really heavy algae blooms diving twice since I moved here in '99, it usually lasts for a couple of days.

It was a fun day of diving though. The sky north of Kailua was clear, with little vog and beautiful "puffy" clouds in the distance.... I should have taken a picture, it was gorgeous. We could see Maui from the water. The water temperature has bumped up nicely, I saw 79 degrees my entire dive. The seas were very flat and we were doing a three tanker with a couple of very good divers from Oahu so we took them to a special spot we don't make it to often due to water conditions, distance and such. I got to dive the second dive so it was a blast for me, Cathy dove the other two dives. I'm betting the divers were tired... first dive 77 minutes, second dive 100 minutes and the third was 60 something (the divers were getting cold at that point, despite the extra shorties we threw on them... nearly 4 hours underwater dims your furnace).

Speaking of color, the photo at the top of the post is a closeup of a Fried Egg Nudibranch, one of our most common sea slugs here. Here's the full photo, it wasn't one of my best efforts, but in good focus for the cropped version.

I thought I'd post another interesting blog... I earlier posted a blog from Saipan, this one's from an obviously enthusiastic California Diver and has a bunch of local shots, both above and below. Some people knock cold water diving, but there's a lot of color if you can get past the freezing. I'm looking forward (well sort of anyway) to one day doing some cold water diving again now that I have more of an eye for little stuff than I had back in the day when I was diving in Oregon.

Aloha,

Steve