I love not waking up to an alarm. Still, we were up and running by 8am (probably has something to do with being in bed at 9 last night). Our goals for today: relax, do a shore dive, relax, get some food, relax, go on the Body Glove sunset cruise with the Kona Classic folks, and get to bed early.

For our shore dive, we headed down to Place of Refuge, which we dove last year. That time around, it was a Wednesday evening, and we were the only ones in the water. This time, it was a bit more crowded. There were a handful of other divers, about a dozen freedivers of various levels of skill, some kids, and lots of locals hanging out and discussing the diving.

After a quick test dunk to cool off and find out if my camera rig was buoyant or negative (it’s very slightly buoyant), we scootched down the two steps into the water and headed off. There were hundreds of hawaiian dascyllus (little black-and-white damselfish) out and about today, and after a bit of observation we realized we were seeing some spawning action. The fish milled about high in the water column, and occasionally two of them dashed vertically up towards the surface together and released a cloud of “spawn” (the polite term for it, in the world of ictheology). It was actually the sight of many clouds of spawn gunking up the water that finally tipped me off to what I was seeing.

Other highlights of this dive were a turtle fly-by (he didn’t get too close), two juvenile rockmover wrasses, some freedivers goofing around at the “Aloha” spelled out of concrete blocks, and – of course – simply learning how to use the camera. I really enjoyed it; I like the opportunity to capture fish behavior, and the housing is terrifically simple and robust.

Juvenile Rockmover Wrasse:

Getting out of the water at Place of Refuge is a wee bit tricky. The exit itself is pretty simple; there’s a rock shelf underwater that you let a wave carry you onto, and another rock shelf right at water level that you can step up onto after removing your fins. The hard part is that both those rock shelves are full of holes, and those holes each contain an urchin. There are enough people walking around on them that they stay retracted into their holes, but only just; if you bend a finger the wrong way and wind up grabbing the inside of a hole, you’re likely to get stuck! So: flat hands only, and it’s a lot easier in a wetsuit.

In the evening, we grabbed dinner at Sibu before the Body Glove cruise, neither of which was worth writing about in much detail. I would, however, like to mention the ice cream concoction I had at Hula Bean: Volcano. It’s banana ice cream mixed with strawberry, with chunks of Oreos. I’m seriously going to have to try to put this mixture together on my next trip to Cold Stone.