| Operator | Site | Dive | Depth | Bottom Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bubbles Below | Koloa Landing | 25 | 40.0 | 58 minutes |
| Koloa Landing | 26 | 40.0 | 71 minutes | |
| Hale o Honu | 27 | 62.0 | 64 minutes | |
| Happy Talk | 28 | 62.0 | 57 minutes |
Koloa Landing
These were Josh’s first dives, so the dive started with him on skills, though I hovered around the area checking out the aquatic life. The vis to start with, because it was a shore dive, was pretty miserable; however, that quickly corrected itself. The number of endemic species around Hawai’i is wonderful. These dives gave us the opportunity to see domino fish, lizardfish, surgeons, and many more! The best sight was the dragon eel, which I saw while Josh was doing his cert work, but didn’t get to capture a great pic of.
We stayed pretty shallow (40′), so got over two hours of bottom time on these dives. They were great introductions to diving for Josh. My observations on this dive, having dove Kona and Maui before this, is that Kauai definitely lacks the color and variety of the main island. Whether it’s the 3 degrees cooler water, or the sugar and the algae growth winning the algae/coral war, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe both.
Hale o Honu and Happy Talk
Large turtle population. This area is an industrial runoff from a sugar processing plant, so the algae is prolific (winning the algae/coral war), however, it attracts turtes. Pictured at the right is a turtle that I got three minutes of video footage, as it hovered at a cleaning station. Notice its lowered head, several fish were cleaning the algae from around its neck.
Running across a school of Heller’s barracuda was intriguing, having been a very different picture than my previous barracuda encounters. These guys school, but are significantly smaller than their caribbean counterparts.