Let me just say, that dive made this entire trip to Kona worth it. Seven massive rays, flying around, brushing (or knocking into) the top of our heads, twirling, dancing, feeding… it was absolutely amazing. The pictures and video just don’t do it justice. While I can’t say it’s my best dive ever, it was amazingly unique, wonderful, and an astounding experience.
The videos don’t do justice to the experience. The lighting is a bit off, and the clips range from short to long, but they’re absolutely worth visiting. The dive just reinforced to me why I like Jack’s. Their crew are great, with a great attitude, the dives they choose are wonderful, and I can’t understate that anyone going into Kona NEEDS to do one of these dives.
Highlights: Back in a more pleasant dive environment, and the Javanese Lowlights: How can you not see ANY eels at a site called eel cove?
The Dive
Josh and I went out on this, my thirty-something dive, back again with Jack’s Diving Locker, my favorite charter I’ve used over the past few years. As always, the boat was amazingly clean and nice, the crew was laid back and fun, and the location, well, I came back to Kona for a reason, ya?
The first site we dove was called Pipe Dreams. As you can see by the album cover, it’s an area where the energy lab placed some large pipes to do research, and in this case, one giant pipe that they laid just to see how well pipe held up in the environment. This pipe is the only remaining segment from that experiment, and is, as always, teeming with life. The neatest part is that insite, a giant Javanese Eel was hanging out.. and I do mean giant. Probably two to three feet in diameter. It spooked and swam away, just as I was going to take a picture, but it was an amazing sight.
Also spectacular on the first dive was my first octopus sighting. I didn’t get a good look, as it had wedged itself under a rock, but the blinking eye and the one look at the suckers on its tentacles were enough to make me smile in memory. Other than that, what this dive gave me was a remembrance of why I loved Kona so much, the color, and life well exceed the other dive vacations I’ve taken.
The second dive, at “Eel Cove” was quite the disappointment. Our DM Shep mentioned that the last time he dove the site, he saw no less than eight different species of eel, and that I might get to once again see a dragon eel (which I’ve seen now twice, and are quite beautiful). The grand total at the end of the dive for eel sightings were a whopping zero.
That’s right, no eels in eel cove, at least for us. I did get a great shot of a pair of lizardfish, had fun getting swarmed a few times by schools of raccoon butterflyfish hoping that I scare away the parent fish on guard over their egg nests, and got to see a couple of beautiful cornetfish and trumpetfish. So in honesty, a good dive, only disappointing in the expectation of numerous eel.
Molokini was a huge disappointment. The center of the crater is so over-dove, that there was very remaining coral and life. Yes, I’m excited that I got to see a 5-6′ black-tipped reef shark, and many young spotted boxfish, but the dive was also dominated by a beginner who breathed so heavily he ran out of air quickly, and the second dive was cut short while I still had 700psi to go, getting pulled out so the operator could depart.
We did see a gray reef shark and a white-tipped reef shark on the second dive, and an unusual box-fish with spots top and bottom, white stripes at the corners, and black sides. But overall I will not be visiting Molokini again, at least not the inside of the crater.
One other thing about diving with the old timers, they weren’t particularly fond of cutting a dive short due to newbie divers. Our surface time was spent on learning to breathe. Lessons about how, holding your breath and not actively exhaling are two different things, yoga type breathing, and more. This showed in our 56 minute and 66 minute bottom times, with massive depth to start.
The first dive was impressive with the amount of ocean life. Triggers, hybrid butterflies, tangs, and more. While the second dive, I learned lessons on dive plan management, and extending bottom time through a long, shallow finish after a deep start.
There is a massive difference between Jack’s beautiful boats, and young energetic dive masters, and a dive operated by seasoned vetarans.
One passenger on the boat publishes the photo books of Hawai’ian fish, and used Dive Makai exclusively to find particular species. “I’d like to get a shot of XX” “Oh, we know of one that’s hanging out at this dive site, we’ve named him Ed”
The first site had amazing sea life, the most aquatic life of any of the dives this trip, including a huge eel named “Satan”, a psychedelic wrasse and his harem, and more. We visited one of the arches, and then went down to the drop-off.
The second site had two very large eel, a fried egg nudibranch, leaf fish, and many more.
My first tropical dives since being certified. Jack’s impressed me with the quality of their boats and service. While this log is coming almost two decades later, I do recall with fondness the service from Jack’s, enough so that subsequent trips, they were my go-to provider (and still are).
As a newbie, all the basics of butterfly fish, parrot fish, tangs, and everything else that dominates the Hawai’ian sea life were enough to keep me satisfied. But the first dive included a great frog fish sighting (aka “living playdough”), and some amazing diversity.
The second dive site, regardless of the name, had no turtle sightings. Yet, many eels, and a triton shell being brought to a crown of thorns for feeding, were fascinating sights.
Less than thirty days from being certified, Amy and I decided to make a quick trip down to San Diego to begin our diving adventures. Dive Adventures took boat trips from San Diego out to Coronados, so we booked a charter, and made our first weekend dive plans.
Just a few words can describe this trip. Diesel. Vomit. Choppy. Abrupt.
The diesel fumes from the boat, mixed with the serious chop, led to my first test of SCUBA training… when down at the bottom, vomit through your regulator. Yup. It works. The 24 pounds on the 14 mil of wetsuit worked perfectly, and I had no issues once I was down underwater. Except… the dives were pretty short, cut short by being pulled out of the water. 40-50 feet of depth, nearly a third of the tank left, seeing not a lot in the way of ocean life or views, this was definitely a disappointment of a trip. Definitely wouldn’t recommend the charter, nor the dive, in general.
