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Published: August 31st 2008
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Scuba Diving - Onna ToiletBowl, Maeda Point, and Diamond Beach
Today was awesome. I went to Torii Station at 0800 to take advantage of their 10%!o(MISSING)ff sale on all Aqualung equipment. I bought the Aqualung Legend LX ACD (with first stage), and Aqualung Legend Octo (used in case my dive buddy runs out of air), a Suunto Cobra 2 dive computer, plus a bunch of little gadgets to hold my gear and make my dive equipment more streamline. It was a huge chunk of change but the equipment has a lifetime warranty as long as I have it serviced each year. I figured it was a good investment. Everything that I bought worked awesome. My dive computer is great and really easy to use. It tells me depth, air pressure in my tank, time in the water, has a digital compass, tells me my surface interval, water temperature. It'll store all this information and whole bunch of other things in a memory card which I can then transfer over to my laptop. Very very cool. I can download all the information to my laptop and view charts, plus there are a ton of other features. In addition to the
10% that I had already received, the saleclerk gave me another 10% off (for no particular reason). I saved a ton!
I did 3 dives today: Onna ToiletBowl, Maeda Point, and Diamond Beach. All were amazing.
At Onna ToiletBowl I saw 2 sea turtles and was able to snap a ton of pictures. When my dive buddy and I surfaced that waves were crashing into the coral, and it looked as though it was going to be a nightmare getting out. Luckily, it wasn't too bad but it did take a little too much effort. Beginner divers would have have liked the conditions at all.
Maeda Point was packed with people as always. Instead of going to the left at the entry point, my dive buddy and I decided to head right and surprisingly, we hardly saw a soul. We were greeted immediately by a school of batfish. These fish are fearless. They will swim right in front of you, or swim right at you and then dart away (like playing chicken). Of the few times I've seen batfish, they are always in a large group. My dive buddy and I also came across two Black-Saddled Toby
Pufferfish that looked as though they were kissing or fighting. Right as I got my camera out to start filming, they swam around really fast and then went back to their staring contest/kissing pose. I'm very curious to find out what was going on.
Diamond Beach was by far the neatest and most difficult dive I've done since I have been here. The tide was coming in when my dive buddy and I entered the water, and since we were new the the area we decided to snorkel out about .5 mile or .75 mile off shore where a chartered dive boat was located. We figured they must know of a good spot. Once we reached the boat, my legs were burning and we relaxed on the surface for a couple of minutes to catch our breathe. Once we were under the water, there was amazing coral outcroppings, a sandy bottom, and tons of fish. We continued to swim further out from the shoreline, going over the coral fingers. We came across 1 sea turtle that had 2 fish swimming under it's belly. It's like they were attached to each other. While swimming along the sandy bottom. my dive
buddy grabbed my leg all of a sudden and I instantly though, "Shark!" I turned around and saw a spotted eagle ray darting along the bottom. He was so fast that I didn't have time to get a picture. We also saw another ray that was the same color as the sandy later on in the dive. My dive buddy swam after it trying to get a picture while I waited in one spot and it changed directions and swam roughly 10 feet from me in the water. I definitely plan on going back to Diamond Beach for another dive. My dive buddy and I got a good kick out of the dive boat too, as we were able to see the same things and save ton of money too! Suckers!
To see even more photos, visit:
http://s165.photobucket.com/albums/u53/kimdupak/Okinawa/Maeda%20Point%20-%2030%20Aug%202008/
http://s165.photobucket.com/albums/u53/kimdupak/Okinawa/Onna%20ToiletBowl%20-%2030%20Aug%202008/
http://s165.photobucket.com/albums/u53/kimdupak/Okinawa/Diamond%20Beach-%2030%20Aug%202008/
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