I got in 6 dives this past Tuesday. Ok so four of them were for work. Two of then were only a few minutes long to take some pictures of our vehicles at 20 feet or so. The other two were about 10 mins at 70 feet to recover and then later that day deploy a subsurface buoy.
The real diving came that evening when my friend drove up from Kona with two DIN tanks he borrowed from work.
Puako End
Like most driving directions in Hawaii these weren't very involved. Often they don't even require street names. When I called the water department to get setup for billing the lady in Hilo (an hour and change away) told me to go to my local office it was "Right behind Merriman's restaurant in Waimea." The same goes for this dive site. Basically go to the end of the road and it's there. You cannot miss the shore access signs which I guess are required by state law or something. Before I left work I printed out the dive site description in hopes of finding as many lava tubes as possible but the printout remained on the printer as I drove away.
Finding a put-in seemed challenging but he had already scoped a good one in the lava:
I was glad we came here during the last of the daylight. A 4x4 is required to get to this site and I was psyched to finally get to use my little gray dive mobile. As everywhere on the Big Island locals dotted the rough road with their giant pickups watching the water, drinking beer in their camp chairs, and playing with children. The dive site site is also some sort of park that has a bunch of Hawaiian petroglyphs in the lava. I only know this because some French dude asked us about them. This of course caused me to speak in a French accent for the rest of the day annoying my friend, and myself after a while.
My friend geared up in a flash. All my gear was already set up and still wet from work but still I gave him the patent Bdub "Slow down turbo!". To which he responded "Back off man I'm a professional." The walk down was pretty easy and we landed in deep enough water to put our fins on. A small channel in the lava allowed us to swim out rather than crawl or walk in 2 feet of water.
Looking back to the entry before we got underway. You can see his truck's tail light to the right:
The viz wasn't great still (relative to great Hawaii viz of course) since the wind really kicks up at night this time of year, so they say. But I was hard pressed to complain. The dive started off a little boring as we made our way away from shore along a ridge of lava and coral at about 30 feet.
I was really struggling with my camera that night. The particulate in the water kept fooling me. Of the many I took on this dive only a few are worth keeping. This is as close to this little bastard he allowed me to get without swimming away. And he was tiny!:
To some folks fluke and/or flounder are boring but being from the northeast sometimes that's all you see on a dive. And this mofo is what my Long Island Sound fishing friends called a doormat. He didn't swim away until I was ready to take a closeup of his eyes. I was jazzed to watch him lift his top pec fin up vertically as he took off. I'd never seen that before:
I managed to catch a little moray eel the size of a gunnel. This was the best photo I could nab of the little bugger:
The reason I was there was for lava tubes not fishies. And as we rounded the end of the ridge we came into a valley that led us right into a cave:
Anyone home?:
I heart my salvo:
We saw turtles sleeping in these caves but I couldn't get a clear photo of one. Since my friend finds critters for tourists on a regular basis he found most of the stuff I took pictures of. Like this crazy looking crab... wtf is it? Creeeeepy!
Shortly after I took that photo I laid on my stomach on the rocks at the bottom of the lava tube. I like to rest and just take in the sights where I know there isn't any harm in laying down. The moment my right thigh touched the rocks I left a stabbing pain just above my knee. Mother F! I was nailed by an urchin at some point in the dive and if I hadn't decided to take a siesta they might have have been driven en masse into my leg. Amazing they could just be slightly embedded in 3mm of neoprene and not go anywhere. The punctures still hurt and itch a little as I type this a few days later. I guess when I was trying to take a photo early in the dive I brushed up against it but I have no clear memory of every touching anything with any part of my body.
We weren't sure where we were diving next so we decided to cut the dive short and climb out of a hole near the end of the cave after 45 mins of bottom time. I could have stayed in the tube all night but it was best we got out while it was daylight. Stupidly we climbed out onto the flats and had to swim/crawl back to the exit in a bit of a surge.
Not a spectacular sunset but purdy enough for a kodak moment:
I'll reply to this thread with the details of our second dive in the muck of Kawaihae harbor.
-Eric
