Tag Archives: diving

Diving photos

Here are some photos from diving!

Starting with my only two photos from The Pit. It’s a big hole in the ground…so cool!

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This line is our direction through the caves, there are two lines running through this section and they loop around back to the beginning. I’m told that they are also used for actual cave divers to find their way back from when they go out and lay their own lines into dark caves.

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I was told that this is the “Barbie line” so named because an alligator ate a tourist named Barbie. And that the alligator was still out there…Erik made a chompy hand signal when we reached this…I shook my head and you couldn’t see my “funny…” face because of the regulator. 😛

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This is a picture of our air bubbles collecting in the rock crevasses. Because, of course, it has no where else to go down there!

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Another scuba group. They looked cool over there.

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We swam to the “bat cave”. So called because of the bats…

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This is the snorkelling area. Miranda and I came back here the next day because I absolutely had to show her this!!

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Me!

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Yesterday

So now I’m on the iPad…installed wordpress and have gone through yesterday’s photos…but now it’s time for sleeping, so I have only a video to show you from yesterday’s haul. It’s from in the middle of diving Dos Ojos, my new favourite place. It’s “cavern diving” not “cave diving” so it’s ok. The difference being that in cavern, you are always within 150ft (I think) of visible, unobstructed surface air. The dive is no deeper than about 10 to 25 feet, but man is it cool! So cool that I convinced Miranda to go there to snorkel today!

Most of the dive looks like this, swimming through underground passages and around rocks and such.

Most of the photos weren’t great anyway, since it’s bloody dark in underground caves, but I think I have enough to show you the gist of it. Tomorrow…

You’ll have to wait for an update on today though…such is life with a backlog.

That elusive turtle

I love turtles. The first time I saw one underwater while diving, I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen (some exageration). Seat turtles just seem to fly effortlessly through the water, like a bird on a warm, thermal day. One of the reasons I’m in Hawaii is because Sean mentioned one day, a few years ago, that when he was in Hawaii he saw tons of turtles. I’d love to be diving and see a whole pack of them flying through the water. I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave Hawaii without that dream being realized. I also haven’t gotten a single photo of a turtle. I’ve seen 4 turtles over the last 2 weeks. 1 was my very first time I went in the water 2 weeks ago. We were at that first beach park in Lahaina and it was my first time snorkeling and I left my camera on land as I wasn’t certain of snorkeling, let alone snorkeling with a massive camera on hand. I was just floating about in this fairly uninteresting section of beach when ey came flying into my view. I followed em for a few minutes before I got distracted by some scuba divers below me and lost em. The second one was in a beach cove at some tiny little beach on the south end of Maui, south of Kihei. We had just parked and put out lunch down on the grass when some people appeared out of a mass of broken trees and mentioned a turtle sunbathing on some rocks nearby. Ey was just sitting there on the rocks, having a great day. I walked away to get my camera, and apparently ey decided that was a good moment to slowly turn and drift into the ocean again. Damn turtle. The last two were at a restaurant named Ponds, in Hilo. Miranda and I were having lunch. The place was built up on stilts, and they had a pond directly underneath them. There was a huge number of koi in the pond, as well as two turtles who were alternatively swimming around, or sunning on a rock. Though, these were the types of turtles with claws instead of wings. So yeah, no turtles. Next time I come here, I’m going to tell the dive master specifically that I want a pod of turtles to appear in front of my camera lens. Also a humpback whale. This place is just lousy with them. Throw a breadroll and hit 5 of them and a baby.

Dive Day Two

I’m officially a day behind…lots of great photos and stories from today. But dive day two has some absolutely fantastic photos from it.

I’ve learned that when I import photos to my tablet, that the time on them is set to the import time, which serves to completely mess with the order of them. And the tablet has no facility to re-order, and I can’t brain enough (particularly after some amount of rum…) to order them manually.

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No idea what day it is.

I figured out why my keyboard wasn’t working last night, so we’re back in action! This keyboard is so awesome, I can’t type a blog post on the on-screen one anymore.

The first photo from yesterday needs some explanation. (perhaps they all do). I was trying to take a photo of some fish floating around, when suddenly a dark shape appeared overtop of me. I pulled the camera away from my face to see that it was Sean…photobombing my scuba photo. >.> Hilarious!

Today the diving was much better. More fish, more photos, more fun, less cold, less rain (none). I’m a little disappointed that I was unable to get a photo of a whale underwater…but that was a pipedream of a photo opportunity anyway, so it’ll be ok. I have a ton of awesome photos to post from today! Later…

Diving again at 6am. Then we gathered our things and drove to the top rated restaurant (Trip Advisor) on Kihei – a food truck called the Kinaole Grill. We grabbed some garlic shrimp scampi, coconut shrimp and panko mahi mahi (all with rice and pasta salad) and drove to a beach called Makena Landing. Lots of waves. We ate lunch and then went snorkeling with Sean while the ladies sunned and read and stuff on the beach. I’d say this was the first time that snorkeling showed me how it could be lots of fun – found a great little wall that we swam beside with tons of life and caves to dive and explore and lots of little fish (I love the little fishies).

We were there for a few hours and then drove back into town for more shave ice (actually…I didn’t blog about yesterday – we went shopping in Lahaina, and got shave ice). Shave ice is delicious. But you almost certainly have to have ice cream in the bottom. It’s like…ice cream and ice with a ton of syrup on it.

Came back, looked through some photos and now out for dinner and then more gaming and drinking. No diving tomorrow, so it could be a later night. A lot of options for tomorrow’s fun – we’ll see what happens!

(photos to follow tomorrow)

Diving Day One

My keyboard has inexplicably stopped working and I don’t like typing a lot on the standard one…so here is a lot of diving photos with little explanation.

Diving at Molokini and a nearby WW2 wrecked tank and amphibious vehicle. The new camera is tons of fun, and the wreck was pretty bad ass, but over all the dives weren’t as awesome as we had hoped. Maybe we’re just being fussy.

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Day 6 – Diving and San Pedro

Having arrived on the island of San Pedro, it’s time to go diving!

The view from the deck on our villa. This was a little shared lagoon with the bar and resort office in the middle of it.

Our villa from the outside.

There was a dock named Coco Loco near our place. We drove the golf cart over and waited at around 8:30am and the dive shop would send a boat around to pick us and our gear up. Very convenient! (Note Kerry and her Kindle :P)

The dive shop, getting some equipment. We brought wet suits, masks, snorkels, fins and boots, but had to rent BCDs, weights and…air.

Chilling on the dock. In our sexy, sexy wet suits.

The neat thing about diving at 9am, is that after two dives it’s about 1pm. You’ve been productive, you’ve had an amazing day, you’ve seen rocks and fish and turtles and it’s great. And. It’s 1pm. So you have an entire afternoon/evening still to be amazing in.

We played Agricola :P.

The streets of San Pedro. Note the golf carts parked all over the left. And the SUV. I feel sorry for people who drive SUVs/real cars on this island, there isn’t really a lot of space for them.

This is a Polaris. The SUPER gold cart.

MOAR BELIKAN

Sean and I went for a drive up island and found this crazy little restaurant on a dock over the water. They had a little bouyed/fenced in area with inner tubes – apparently during the day you can sit in the water and they will bring beer to you :P. I had…a grouper! And we spoke to this strange man who apparently builds US military bases. Secret military bases. That you can find on Google Maps very easily.

That’s unfortunately about it. As I said, most of the awesome was diving :P. Anyone want to add anything here? I bet we took a nap…seemed like there was a lot of napping around 1pm…