Scuba Diving Vacations

The ocean was really nice yesterday morning and we decided to make the long trip down to Au Au Canyon/Crater (whatever it's called, it's cool). We don't get down there much, it's an 85/90 minute boat ride in my boat and we need a sizable enough group of good divers to make a go of it. Au Au is an underwater canyon with sheer vertical walls that run about 80 feet high or so on the shore end to well over 200' high on the seaward end. It's one of the true "walls" we have here. Most of our "walls" are more like steep dropoffs or slopes.

It was a gorgeous dive. On the second dive I was Captain while the others all dove. We did a drift dive around the western end of Kealakekua Bay. Right on the corner the current was screaming, and the divers got to play Superman, "flying" with the current, for about 70-100 yards or so before reaching the calm water on the other side of the corner.

It was a long day. On the way back it got a bit choppier, then by the time we got to the middle of Kailua the winds picked up, then the last mile into the harbor was crazy windy... it got very wet very fast. One of the divers commented it was like doing a third dive. Other than a lot of spray over the bow it was uneventful and over in 10 minutes. Turned out it got apparently really nasty about mid-day up around the harbor. We came in at 5pm, around 2pm I'm told it was like a mini-hurricane there. It was sunny and windy when we arrived, Pat and I (Pat tagged along for the dives) went to the shop after cleaning up the boat and there was water all over the walkways, we thought maybe the landlord had sent in a pressure washer.

It's looking great today. Occasionally in the winter we'll get a cold front passing through that can make it nasty for a bit, this apparently was one of those days.

Aloha,

Steve