Zac, Bernadette, Ken and I were on the Big Island from Wednesday to Sunday and now that I've had a day to recover I finally have some energy to recap the trip. It was a great trip. It's always a good sign when you can travel with friends and everyone comes home still speaking to each other. We arrived Wednesday morning and spent the afternoon snorkeling at the Place of Refuge. It was a little strange moving from scuba diving back to snorkeling. I kept thinking, "I wish I could get closer to all that cool stuff down there."
At once point I realized that Bernadette and I were about 100 yards from shore. (Maybe. I'm terrible at estimating distance.) We were pretty far out anyhow. And yet I wasn't panicked at all. 1.) There was no current or waves, 2.) I was wearing my diving fins, so it was easy to swim, 3.) The water was really clear, which somehow calms me, 4.) I felt light as a feather because usually when I'm in the ocean I have my BCD with 16 pounds of weight in it. I was just amazed that I was that comfortable being that far out from shore. (Granted I could see the bottom as clear as day due to the water conditions. But I'd guess the water was 40-50 deep out there, so it wasn't like I was in the shallow end of the pool.)
After snorkeling we checked into our hotel and went to dinner. We walked around Kailua-Kona for a little while and then retired for the evening. Thursday morning we went out for breakfast and hung out until the afternoon when we had to go to Big Island Divers to check in for our manta ray dive. I was getting nervous and excited about the dive. The water had looked a little choppy as we were driving around in the morning, so I had started my regime of Triptone (like Dramamine) around lunchtime way before it was time to get on the boat.
The manta dive is a two tank dive: The first dive is in the afternoon while there is still light, the second is after the sun set. The boat ride out was bouncy shall we say? I would like to thank the makers of Triptone. I believe that I was able to enjoy my manta experience because of your product. I don't think I ever got my sea legs, but at least I didn't want to vomit. Once we moored ourselves to the dive site we did our afternoon dive. After boat diving, I might not ever want to go back to shore diving. It's so easy. Just suit up and jump in. There's no exhausting surface swim and because of that I could stay down longer. As a matter of fact, I was down for a little more than an hour (personal best) and reached a depth of 84 feet (personal best) on the first dive. I was pretty darn stoked about diving by the time we got back to the boat.
We sat on the boat, eating sandwiches, waiting for the sun to set. I added another layer under my wetsuit for the night dive because I was told that people get cold because of the lack of sun and the fact that you're just sitting there, watching, not swimming. I even added a couple of pounds of weight to help with staying on the bottom. We were all given large flashlights and then we hopped back in the inky water. The first few seconds of being in dark water is strange, but so many people had flashlights that pretty soon you feel really comfortable. We descended at set up shop with about 50 other folks (yes, 50!) on the ocean floor in about 30 feet of water, waiting for the mantas to show up.
Mantas eat plankton. Plankton is attracted to light. So if you shine a bright light, plankton will come followed by mantas. At least that's the way it usually works. I was still a little buoyant on the bottom so I had to grad a rock with my knees to keep me down and still. It was chilly. But then the first manta arrived and you forget about everything else. It was one of the most amazing experience of my life. Mantas are just mesmerizing. They're so graceful, so beautiful, so agile in the water. And they're HUGE. I'm used to little fish, little eels, little sharks. And then this 10-foot wide behemoth comes cruising two-inches over my head. Just unreal. Zac actually got bumped by one. (Rule: Mantas can touch you, but you may not touch the mantas.)
Here is some of what we saw:
We were down there for about 45 minutes. I don't have a large enough vocabulary to describe how fantastic it was. Zac took some amazing videos on the underwater camera. I'm so pleased that we had that for this trip. It was fantastic being able to record what we saw. We headed back up to the boat and headed back to the marina. We were back to the hotel around 10:30, and we were all pretty tired. We headed to bed because we had to be at the marina by 8:15 the next morning for another two-tank dive.
I'll pick up there in the next post.
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