DiveMaven
Contributor
We're back from 10 days on Maui and already have "Post Trip Maui Depression" (PTMD).
We started out doing our Rescue Diver course with the folks at Maui Dreams, and I can't recommend them highly enough. Teri was our instructor and Kris assisted with the water portions of the course. He did an excellent job as a victim, helper, and instructor and it's clear from spending 2 days with him that he's going to be an outstanding instructor if he chooses to go that direction. We would have liked to have done more diving with him, but my husband and I really hate shore diving and spent the rest of our trip diving off of charters. We did 2 charters to Lanai with Lahaina Divers and 3 charters with Ed Robinsons.
Our charters with Lahaina Divers were good, with the highlight being hanging out and diving with Wyland. He told me about his experiences with the Blue Whales in the Sea of Cortez, and was the nicest, most down to earth guy. He basically told us that he was lucky enough to make enough money to enable him to live his passion.... photography and art. I have to admit that after our second charter with Lahaina Divers, we decided that we've "outgrown" them and likely won't be back. We have no complaints about the service we received from them, we're just not beginners who need close supervision or hand holding anymore.
We did two 3-tank adventure charters and a 2-tank charter with Ed Robinson's. Our experiences with them were amazing. We did mostly S. Maui sites and saw critters we've never seen before, not to mention a zillion nudis and sea slugs. We dropped in on 5 spotted eaglerays on one dive and a manta on another. We saw no less than 10 lionfish, many different types of shrimp, 5 or 6 scorpion leaf fish, a devil scorpionfish, a hawksbill turtle (as well as Hawaiian turtles), a bandit angelfish, some curious wormfish, 2 flame angelfish, many bicolor anthius, and a couple of frogfish to name a few. Of course we saw the "regulars" of parrotfish, triggerfish, eels, etc. Whale song was very loud on most of our dives, and that's always super cool to hear.
My husband took over 300 pictures, so now I'm going through them to resize and label them....I see a laptop in my future so I can label and edit daily, as this is likely going to take me a good week or more to do. :11:
We won't be back on Maui until next Christmas (already have our timeshare reservation), and we're really looking forward to returning and finding even more new critters that we haven't seen before. But first we "have to" spend 2 weeks on the Nekton Pilot in the Bahamas this summer.
We started out doing our Rescue Diver course with the folks at Maui Dreams, and I can't recommend them highly enough. Teri was our instructor and Kris assisted with the water portions of the course. He did an excellent job as a victim, helper, and instructor and it's clear from spending 2 days with him that he's going to be an outstanding instructor if he chooses to go that direction. We would have liked to have done more diving with him, but my husband and I really hate shore diving and spent the rest of our trip diving off of charters. We did 2 charters to Lanai with Lahaina Divers and 3 charters with Ed Robinsons.
Our charters with Lahaina Divers were good, with the highlight being hanging out and diving with Wyland. He told me about his experiences with the Blue Whales in the Sea of Cortez, and was the nicest, most down to earth guy. He basically told us that he was lucky enough to make enough money to enable him to live his passion.... photography and art. I have to admit that after our second charter with Lahaina Divers, we decided that we've "outgrown" them and likely won't be back. We have no complaints about the service we received from them, we're just not beginners who need close supervision or hand holding anymore.
We did two 3-tank adventure charters and a 2-tank charter with Ed Robinson's. Our experiences with them were amazing. We did mostly S. Maui sites and saw critters we've never seen before, not to mention a zillion nudis and sea slugs. We dropped in on 5 spotted eaglerays on one dive and a manta on another. We saw no less than 10 lionfish, many different types of shrimp, 5 or 6 scorpion leaf fish, a devil scorpionfish, a hawksbill turtle (as well as Hawaiian turtles), a bandit angelfish, some curious wormfish, 2 flame angelfish, many bicolor anthius, and a couple of frogfish to name a few. Of course we saw the "regulars" of parrotfish, triggerfish, eels, etc. Whale song was very loud on most of our dives, and that's always super cool to hear.
My husband took over 300 pictures, so now I'm going through them to resize and label them....I see a laptop in my future so I can label and edit daily, as this is likely going to take me a good week or more to do. :11:
We won't be back on Maui until next Christmas (already have our timeshare reservation), and we're really looking forward to returning and finding even more new critters that we haven't seen before. But first we "have to" spend 2 weeks on the Nekton Pilot in the Bahamas this summer.
