CanadianSushi
Registered
Hey everyone! This is a follow-up thread to my other Okinawa diving thread. Well, we got home in one piece, and I've finally gotten around to processing all the pictures we took and putting them up on my Flickr photo blog. Okinawa was a blast and we enjoyed some nice 22C days almost the whole week we were there. In case you're wondering... Is that the water temp? Air temp? Both, actually were hovering in the low 20s range.
Anyway, to sum it all up, we landed in Naha early in the morning on Christmas Day, where the car rental company was already expecting us. They showed me how to plug in addresses into the GPS navi system, which made finding everything a breeze! By mid-morning we made it to our uhh... "hotel". And by afternoon we made it out to the town of Chatan where I met Doug Bennett of Reef Encounters. We had a nice chat and made arrangements to join them on a boat dive the next day.
Everything went according to plan, and many, many thanks go to the entire Reef Encounters crew... Doug, Otis, John, Kumi, Miho... They run a good operation there -- I especially appreciated the fact that just about everyone was bilingual in English and Japanese, and knew their stuff quite well. Kumi was our DM and guide for most of it all, but we also went out and explored one of the nearby dive sites on our own as well.
Also, an extra-special thanks to Doug for helping us out with our uh.... "hotel" woes. Some background... We booked (and paid for) a week at "Stella Resort" in Naha, but after our third night, realized what kind of crapshack it really was. Our room was literally a garden shed errected on the roof of the four-story building, immediately adjacent the hotel bar. Which meant, that no less than 5 times during our short stay, we had people barge into our room, unannounced, mistaking it for an outhouse. Didn't matter that there was a sign on the door indicating otherwise... And no one even said "excuse me" or "sorry." The loud partying till the wee-hours and tomcat howling incessantly really were the final straws and the next morning I went down to the lobby to demand a partial refund. Even better yet -- the dang tomcat was sitting right there in the middle of the lobby, licking his nuts on the marble tile. Classy.
A quick phone call to Doug, and he did a whole buncha legwork for us, and in spite of the holiday weekend (EVERYTHING was full) managed to find us a super-nice, super-quiet 2-bedroom, fully furnished apartment-style hotel room about a block away from the shop (and the nearest dive site). That was awesome! Plus, with the refund we got back from Stella's, it really didn't even cost us any more in the end.
Anyway, viz was anywhere from 7 to 15m, the coral reef was a nice change from the rock formations in Izu, and it was cool to see a slightly different variety of fish than the ones we get up north here and it was good to get out of the cold for a week too. Thanks again to the Reef Encounters crew -- we hope to see y'all again on our next trip out to the islands.
Here are some of the photos I took on the trip that I figured I'd share with everyone.
First we have your standard, garden variety anemone fish. But man they're hard to photograph well. But I did my best....
Then, we have a Black Saddled Toby,
a really nice blue starfish,
a pair of Moorish Idols,
and a Sergeant Major fish... These guys are awesome! You can get huge schools of them teeming and nipping your fingers if you offer them a Vienna sausage (a tip taught to us by the locals)! I'll have to remember that it makes good bait! Good thing I had my neoprene gloves on though. :11:
Anyway, to sum it all up, we landed in Naha early in the morning on Christmas Day, where the car rental company was already expecting us. They showed me how to plug in addresses into the GPS navi system, which made finding everything a breeze! By mid-morning we made it to our uhh... "hotel". And by afternoon we made it out to the town of Chatan where I met Doug Bennett of Reef Encounters. We had a nice chat and made arrangements to join them on a boat dive the next day.
Everything went according to plan, and many, many thanks go to the entire Reef Encounters crew... Doug, Otis, John, Kumi, Miho... They run a good operation there -- I especially appreciated the fact that just about everyone was bilingual in English and Japanese, and knew their stuff quite well. Kumi was our DM and guide for most of it all, but we also went out and explored one of the nearby dive sites on our own as well.
Also, an extra-special thanks to Doug for helping us out with our uh.... "hotel" woes. Some background... We booked (and paid for) a week at "Stella Resort" in Naha, but after our third night, realized what kind of crapshack it really was. Our room was literally a garden shed errected on the roof of the four-story building, immediately adjacent the hotel bar. Which meant, that no less than 5 times during our short stay, we had people barge into our room, unannounced, mistaking it for an outhouse. Didn't matter that there was a sign on the door indicating otherwise... And no one even said "excuse me" or "sorry." The loud partying till the wee-hours and tomcat howling incessantly really were the final straws and the next morning I went down to the lobby to demand a partial refund. Even better yet -- the dang tomcat was sitting right there in the middle of the lobby, licking his nuts on the marble tile. Classy.
A quick phone call to Doug, and he did a whole buncha legwork for us, and in spite of the holiday weekend (EVERYTHING was full) managed to find us a super-nice, super-quiet 2-bedroom, fully furnished apartment-style hotel room about a block away from the shop (and the nearest dive site). That was awesome! Plus, with the refund we got back from Stella's, it really didn't even cost us any more in the end.
Anyway, viz was anywhere from 7 to 15m, the coral reef was a nice change from the rock formations in Izu, and it was cool to see a slightly different variety of fish than the ones we get up north here and it was good to get out of the cold for a week too. Thanks again to the Reef Encounters crew -- we hope to see y'all again on our next trip out to the islands.
Here are some of the photos I took on the trip that I figured I'd share with everyone.
First we have your standard, garden variety anemone fish. But man they're hard to photograph well. But I did my best....
Then, we have a Black Saddled Toby,
a really nice blue starfish,
a pair of Moorish Idols,
and a Sergeant Major fish... These guys are awesome! You can get huge schools of them teeming and nipping your fingers if you offer them a Vienna sausage (a tip taught to us by the locals)! I'll have to remember that it makes good bait! Good thing I had my neoprene gloves on though. :11:
