Big Island Diving: to fit all tastes and budgets!

There was a bandwagon created by the first of our group arrived in Kailua-Kona. The first two L siblings who arrived the day before me got oriented and started diving right away. They got me to meet them the next day at the very reasonable hour of... 6h15 am. That day, we dove at 7h30 am, went to the airport to pick up the third L sibling, dove twice afterwards - once with dolphins, and then I went to pick up S in the evening at the airport again.

It continued like that for the rest of the week, almost like a liveaboard. Thankfully the weather turned out to be very cooperative and there were no more flash flood warnings like last week on Oahu. Since we are all diving fanatics (1 instructor, 2 divemasters and 1 to be, and 1 rescue) and there were 5 of us, it was quite easy logistically to get organized, and we were on a roll. 5 days of diving, 17 dives, 12 of which exhausting shore dives, 5 night dives. Scuba diving itself is not a sport, but shore diving is a completely different matter! Logging tanks and weights and hopping with dive gear on lava rocks, yay! I've learned that I'm a boat divemaster and not a shore one; that I tend to have very unclassy exits on shore dives; that bloopers is my specialty on videos, even when it's really the manta's fault; that one can have coughing fits underwater; and that I am definitely not gifted at underwater navigation, but then again, that's no news. Other things that I have discovered: tangs are surgeonfishes, sea urchin spines can go through my new 5 mm wetsuit (ayoye!), and dolphins can be heard cackling and whistling from very far underwater...

So diving in the Big Island can be either very cheap or very expensive. Try to guess which dive was expensive and which wasn't:

Hence:

1) Shore diving with unlimited tank filling and weight rental: 16 dollars for the day. We pulled 3 dives/day for a few days on that. We saw Hawaiian spinner dolphins, tons of moray eels, fish of the Pacific including moorish idols and yellow tangs (as opposed to the standard blue tangs of the Caribbean), turtles, and spotted eagle rays.

2) Boat diving all the way to Au-Au Canyon, blackwater diving in the great (black) big blue looking for pelagic jellyish spaceship-shaped things, and night manta dive: somewhere between 70 to 120$ a dive. Ouch!!! But it was definitely worth it. On our manta night dive in front of the Sheraton Hotel, it was a young female named Wing Ray who came to visit us, still awkward and tumbling around and hitting people with a wing here and there. Apparently she is less than 2 years old and 'only' has a wingspan of 6-8 feet. Notice the big-eyed diver on the manta picture above - that's me :). On our video I actually get hit by Wing Ray, and on my footage you can hear my onomatopeia when I have to dodge her.

S and Wing Ray

My footage of Wing Ray

So that manta curse that I was carrying around - not having seen any mantas in spite of having spent some significant time underwater in South East Asia... well that curse is broken now!