Saturday, May 28, 2016

Long Range Diving

Temperature 84 degrees, mostly sunny - beautiful day!

Today Carrie and I had what they call a long-range dive charter which is a three tank dive to some more obscure and unusual dive sites up north.  Carrie was unable to go however as she was having ear issues.  I ended up going and had a fantastic day of diving.

I dove with Gus and Salina from the Bay Area and Kerry (dive shop owner) was our DM.  She was great to dive with.  I think most of my dives were near 90 minutes!

We first tried to dive a site called Touch of Grey but the current was ripping.  Too bad - the viz looked incredible!  Apparently Jerry Garcia put up the money back in the 70/80's to put in the mooring balls around the island to save the reef from anchoring boats.

We went to Kua Bay instead which they said you can only dive from May-October as the winter swells just pummel the beach.  There is a bunch of sand between the coral heads so the contrast is quite stunning.  All kinds of cool things to look for in the sand.  We also saw a bunch of big moray eels, a viper eel, an undulated moray eel and a lot of other cool stuff.  Very, very relaxing dive.

We saw a couple of frog fish on the second dive site called the Black Hole as well as a bunch of juvenile wrasse which are spectacular.  They call it the Black Hole because there is a lava tube that runs straight down from about 60 feet to 85.  I saw a nudibranch in there but now much else.  I never do care for diving lava tubes much.  There was also a leaf fish which I hadn't seen since Kosrae so that was cool.  A very fishy dive with at one point a large school of pyramid butterfly fish hanging out with us.  There were also these fish (can't recall the name) that school around the antler coral and they literally chirp at you when you get close.  It was really neat to have 40 fish trying to communicate with me.  I'm sure they didn't appreciate me as much as I did them.

The last site we dove which was by the airport was called Hoovers Tower.  It was a nice fun relaxing dive with the hopes of seeing dolphins as we saw them while mooring.  And sure enough - they came and swam with us for about 5 minutes.  It was magical.  Such majestic animals.  So glad I got to spend some time with them.

Got back to the marina and had to wait for Carrie so went to the Harbor House bar and had a couple of ice cold coors light "schooners" which are 18 oz.  In college, schooners were 8!  Carrie finally met me and she had a beer and we shared some edamame.  We made our way back to town and stopped in at the Fish Hopper restaurant for some pupus and beer.  The coconut prawns were delicious as was the Ono salad served with tortilla chips.

I needed a shower, took one, and then we walked to town for some dinner.  We were both so tired at that point that we only made it as far as Humpy's.  Carrie got pizza and I got a Kalua pork calzone.  They were just ok.  There was a jam band playing next door at Laverne's so the music was great.




No comments:

Post a Comment