Hawai'i and Scuba Diving Blog
Hawai'i is great. It's right around 80 degrees every day and has a very laid back feeling. The roads can be busy, but nothing worse than Boston traffic and the people are really cool about letting people merge. Other than a few items (milk) the prices don't seem much higher than the mainland. Well, things are pricey in Waikiki corner stores, but that's to be expected.
I've been diving with a divemaster named Gabe who runs Kaimana Divers and has been very cool so far. After taking myself and Craig out for Craig's qualifying dives he invited me to join him and his dive club on a trip out to the west wide of the island, which was great. Doing laid back diving with a club is so much better than doing it on a commercial boat with 2 other groups.
Kaena Point I got to meet some of the locals (all imports from other places) and then the girl I dove with brought me out to the beach at the very end of the road going west (you can't circle the island, eventually you hit military land). The beach was nearly empty (certainly compared to Waikiki Beach) and had the most beautiful surroundings for a beach that I've seen. The water was crystal clear with green mountains in three directions and you'd sink into the dry sand up to your ankles. Unfortunately I forgot that I'm incredibly pale and burned the crap out of my shoulders in an hour and a half on the beach. Next weekend I'm going to see the people I dove with again at a north shore barbecue and shore diving club event.
Paradise ParkYesterday Craig and I went hiking in Paradise Park. We intended to just do an easy hike up to Manoa Falls, but got adventurous and took a more forested side path (that we later realized wasn't intended for visitors) and ended up hiking half the way up Tantalus Ridge along mudslick rocks. The hike was enjoyable even though I was totally unprepared for it, as we walked through a bamboo forest and saw some of the largest trees I've ever seen (all types of Hawaiian trees are awesome). I've decided that bamboo forests are the absolute perfect type of forest to walk or hike through. They shade the sun but don't block the breeze, provide wonderful handholds, and create a very pleasant rustling sound. When we eventually got to Manoa Falls we found it to be more of a vertical stream than a waterfall, but the 150 foot trickle was still a nice sight.
I've set up a blog to record my dives at http://zackss-diving.blogspot.com/. Each of my Hawaiian dives has links to a photo album of the pictures I took during it. So far the highlights have been a trio of sea turtles, an octopus, and a titan scorpionfish I found personally (a girl who'd been diving all over the island said it was only the second one she'd seen).
I'd like to cross-post these divelogs over to LiveJournal so people don't need to go there to see information about my dives. For those of you who cross-post entries, how do you do it?
I've been diving with a divemaster named Gabe who runs Kaimana Divers and has been very cool so far. After taking myself and Craig out for Craig's qualifying dives he invited me to join him and his dive club on a trip out to the west wide of the island, which was great. Doing laid back diving with a club is so much better than doing it on a commercial boat with 2 other groups.
Kaena Point I got to meet some of the locals (all imports from other places) and then the girl I dove with brought me out to the beach at the very end of the road going west (you can't circle the island, eventually you hit military land). The beach was nearly empty (certainly compared to Waikiki Beach) and had the most beautiful surroundings for a beach that I've seen. The water was crystal clear with green mountains in three directions and you'd sink into the dry sand up to your ankles. Unfortunately I forgot that I'm incredibly pale and burned the crap out of my shoulders in an hour and a half on the beach. Next weekend I'm going to see the people I dove with again at a north shore barbecue and shore diving club event.
Paradise ParkYesterday Craig and I went hiking in Paradise Park. We intended to just do an easy hike up to Manoa Falls, but got adventurous and took a more forested side path (that we later realized wasn't intended for visitors) and ended up hiking half the way up Tantalus Ridge along mudslick rocks. The hike was enjoyable even though I was totally unprepared for it, as we walked through a bamboo forest and saw some of the largest trees I've ever seen (all types of Hawaiian trees are awesome). I've decided that bamboo forests are the absolute perfect type of forest to walk or hike through. They shade the sun but don't block the breeze, provide wonderful handholds, and create a very pleasant rustling sound. When we eventually got to Manoa Falls we found it to be more of a vertical stream than a waterfall, but the 150 foot trickle was still a nice sight.
I've set up a blog to record my dives at http://zackss-diving.blogspot.com/. Each of my Hawaiian dives has links to a photo album of the pictures I took during it. So far the highlights have been a trio of sea turtles, an octopus, and a titan scorpionfish I found personally (a girl who'd been diving all over the island said it was only the second one she'd seen).
I'd like to cross-post these divelogs over to LiveJournal so people don't need to go there to see information about my dives. For those of you who cross-post entries, how do you do it?