5/26/2006

2006 Kona Classic Day 6: On Our Own

Filed under: — Anastasia @ 10:27 am

Friday morning, we left town early to squeeze in a morning dive down south at Place of Refuge. We’ve dived this site on both our previous trips to Hawaii, but always in the late afternoon or evening. The morning light was incredibly beautiful, and the water was clearer than I remember seeing there before.

Jeff and I were basically “same ocean” buddies, keeping each other’s bubbles in sight but otherwise steering clear so as not to interfere with each other. We really need to get pony bottles…

I had a great dive: cleaning stations galore, a tiny lizardfish, and – well, more cleaning stations. That was pretty much my goal for the day, anyway. Jeff found a snowflake moray out hunting towards the end of the dive. We were back on the road by 10:30am.

Surgeonfish gets a bath:

2006KC_6a.jpg

Jeff really wanted another shot at turtles, so we followed the advice of one of our boat captains and tried to hit Turtle Heaven, theoretically reachable from shore just north of the harbor.

I say theoretical because it’s A) a long walk from the car to the beach, B) a long swim in 3 feet of water from the beach to the boat channel, C) there’s a boat channel, and D) the only turtles we actually saw were in a foot of water, with an inch of visibility.

We got some great exercise in, but I doubt we’ll try that again. Luckily, I did manage to nab some usable footage of a juvenile hawaiian dascyllus bobbing in and out of an urchin, so it wasn’t a total waste! And anyway, even a crappy Hawaiian dive is still better than most of our SoCal dives..

Finally learning to just hover and wait:
2006KC_6b.jpg

1 Comment

  1. Please tell me you were in less than 50 feet of water diving effectively solo like that!

    Comment by Ben — 5/28/2006 @ 10:04 pm

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