Oahu

Next time I come to Hawaii, I need to schedule our time on Oahu first then go to the other islands to wind down. This place has crazy traffic, a spaghetti mess of roads, and streets that all sound the same.

Oh, and no parking lot is safe from thieves (thankfully, as of yet, I have not had a break in). So, snorkeling on the beach? Well, we'll have to take turns as we don't have anyone to watch our stuff. We might as well be in Mexico or some other Caribbean backwater. sheesh.

Alrighty, just to catch you all up to speed:

Friday night, we went to Haleiwa Joe's. The food was excellent, but let me tell you....the beer....they had.....THE Beer! Deschuttes Black Butte Porter. As soon as I found out it was on tap, I ordered a pint! Yummy yummy yummy!!! It's been at least four years since I had that beer. /sigh, I was in heaven.

Saturday, I went SCUBA diving with Ocean Concepts. The dive was a three tank dive with dives scheduled for afternoon, evening (dusk), and night. What they turned out to be was afternoon, afternoon, and dusk, so I was a little disappointed that we didn't dive in total darkness.

As far as the quality of the dives, they were pretty good. We did two dive sites with the first being 100 feet and the second 80 feet. We dove the second site twice; the second was just after sunset.

At the first site, we saw the head of a pretty big moray eel sticking out of a hole, lots of fish, and an old airplane. The visability was decent, and I didn't have any problems with my gear or with my equalization.

The second dive was at an old landing craft that had been sunk to create an artifical reef. We did a swim through the cabin, which was new for me. I cut my hand on something and started chumming the water for sharks. None showed up. We also saw some lobsters, a number of fish, and little moray eels.

The last dive was technically a night dive, as we started after the sun went down, but in reality, it was dusk for a while. We all had dive lights, and we attached glow sticks to our tanks so we could see each other. There wasn't too much difference except that it was darker and visability wasn't as good. I thought we'd see the stuff that was active during the night, but I don't think we waited long enough to let the light fade.

I had a bit of a problem with my bouyancy this time on the swim through and had to let some air out of my BCD (Bouyancy Control Device - my SCUBA vest, for lack of a better term). It wasn't very easy to let the air out in the confined space, but I managed to make it happen...oh, yeah, in the dark too. That was the one place where it really was dark without the dive light.

We saw a ghost shrimp, a spiny lobster, and some red fish that I didn't see on the previous dive, so I guess some of the nocturnal creatures were waking up. And, at the end of the dive, I turned off my light and waved my hand around in the water to see the bioluminescence. I saw a couple of "sparks", but not too much.

And today, we hiked Diamond Head. It was a bit challenging as the hike is up hill - sometimes almost straight up hill as there are two long stair sets and a shorter spiral staircase, but the view from the top was worth it! We could see almost all of the southern shore of Oahu. It was really impressive.

And that's about it! We head home on Wednesday and hope to get in some snorkeling on Tuesday and maybe the flea market on Wednesday before we leave. Aloha!