Hawaii Day 3

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Day three started out the same as day two, we woke up early to watch the sunrise from the beach; Kim ran a bit while I sat and enjoyed a cup of tea. Kim has been working on getting scuba certified and this will be her first open water dive. We dove with Aaron’s dive shop out of Kailua. (Things are going well with them so far, I’ll fill in more after our second set of dives on Tuesday.) We checked in early for the dive, filled out the proper paper work and then hopped in the van with Mel and Jeff to catch the boat, Nacho, to our dive location. The swells were pretty big for our dive and we were expecting pretty crappy visibility, I was going to be diving with three divers who were finishing up the PADI course, Kim and another were going through their first day of open water. I was happily surprised to see that the visibility was much better than expected for the first dive, 35 feet versus 15 feet. That extra 20 feet makes a huge difference underwater. Our group dropped the 55 feet to the bottom right away where the three others preformed a few skills they needed to demonstrate. Shortly after Jeff pulls an octopus from a crevice that he had seen hiding out; it was cool to see the clever animal try to find its way to Jeff’s back and ink a few times trying to get away. The best part of the dive was a six foot white tip reef shark that came within about 8 feet from me. It must have smelled the octopus on Jeff from earlier, being the first one to see it I rushed over to take a few pictures. The distance made me slightly nervous, but it was also pretty effing exciting.

The swells were the worst part of the dive. As eight feet of water ebbs and flows over you the water column changes, one has to continually equalizing the pressure, not to mention the ride you take back and forth with the waves. Right and left, back and forth, up and down constantly, I climbed back on the boat pretty nauseous. Kim had done really well and was excited to have completed her first dive. The conditions deteriorated as we switched out gear and prepared for our second dive. The tide was moving out and with it came sand. The visibility was down to a cloudy 15 feet. My group headed for the decent line, being the only certified diver I took up the rear. The girl in front of me stopped and didn’t descend any further. I gave the hand signal for “all okay?” and she responded with a motion indicating that she couldn’t equalize her ears, which is a big deal. I assisted her to the top and was swimming her back to the other dive master as ours had already descended. Luckily he recognized our absence and assisted her back to the boat and I headed down to wait with the two other divers. The wait was awful. I was already nauseous from all of the up and down and back and forth, but now I had to hold onto this rope for a good 10 minutes getting jerked around in mid-waters waiting for three newbs to go through their dive skills to become certified. The tossing finally got to me and I ended up vomiting about five times underwater. Really a pretty complex little feat. I felt my guy wrench and I had a few options, I decided not to go to the top but just try to expel down the 40 or so feet. I took my regulator out, vomited, hawked and spit, replace my regulator, cleared, and then started breathing again. I did this five or so times. Pretty unnerving underwater. The only thing cool I saw on this dive was a white mouth moray eel. At the end I made the surface, vomited two or three more times, climbed onto the boat and we headed back to Oahu.

We loaded back up in the van and took off for Kailua, Mel and Jeff were nice enough to take us to a local taco stand to pick up something to eat before the drive back. Mel and Kim had time to discuss their dive and I had a chance to recover. I also had a chance to tell them that Kim and I had met the Fire Knife Dance guy from Germaine’s near the bath house just before we boarded our boat out. They told us that his name was Pete and that he was kind of famous on the island; like when Oprah comes into Maui she hires Pete. I thought it was kind of cool that he recognized us from the night before and not vice versa.

Back in Kailua we decided to do a little shopping before heading back, so we picked up a few trinkets and some groceries before heading back to Waimanalo. Dustin met us back at the condo after we got cleaned up and we all headed out to dinner, but not before we ate a couple of bananas off of a tree I had discovered in the court yard. I mean how suite is that? We ate bananas that we picked ourselves from a tree. I thought it was cool as hell. Anyway, we did a bit of driving around and looking at a few menus before settling on Lucy’s in Kailua. They had great food and we had a ton of fun chatting. We headed straight home after dinner as we planned on getting up early, 5:30, to make a hike up to the top of a peak that Dustin knew about. Day three was a great one and I was already looking forward to the early morning hike.

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Photos

Rescue Squad
Random boat pulled in followed by three emergency rescue vehicles before our dive.

Bubbles
I couldn't blow rings with the conditions, still pretty

Comments

[gypsy2010]

hi
i did snorkelling...next scuba diving perhaps.