RICHinNC
Contributor
A friend and I tried to do a shore dive Saturday but divers coming out of where we were planning to go in said the currents were really picking up. So we decided better to be safe than sorry.
Sunday morning I got up and drove the one hour to the West coast where I had made arrangements for a boat dive with Ocean Concepts. I had been told that they do reef dives on Sun....and wreck dives on Sat.....but when I got there the locations were still up in the air because of conditions.
We started with an in house safety briefing that had to be written by lawyers. But I can live with it. They got down to such detail as to where you sit on the boat, who your buddy will be and much much more. No biggie.
We get to the boat and our gear that had been taken up earlier was in our "positions" ready to be assembled if we wanted to do it ourselves....or assembled if we wanted to let them do it. I do my own, and they were good about that. I have had dive ops get pushy about them doing it. Then we got another safety briefing. Then we got a site briefing and another safety briefing at each site.
We take off from the dock and it was decided we were going to do two reef dives. One place we went to was called Keau....and the other called...Land of Oz.
Without a doubt Oz was the best location of the two. We saw a turtle there that must have been the great grand daddy of them all in that area. He was monstrous in size. And, we saw numrous 50 gallon barrel top size ones too.
I found a humongous eel that must have been as thick as my calf and about 4 or 5 ft long.
The rock formations of Oz were really great too. And, there were lots of swim throughs. Vis wasnt too bad and I would guess at about 85 ft or so.
On our surface interval moving between sites.....and heading back to the dock too... each time we got within 50 yards of two to three whales surfacing, blowing and just splashing around. They did the big tail flop and all.
The food on this boat was totally unreal. They had two of those long composite sandwiches dellys make and cut up into smaller sandwiches.....they had fresh fruit...and they had all kinds of juice. You could get fat diving with these people.
If you are either active or retired military....the price drops significantly from a little over $100 for two bottles of air....to $65 for two bottles of air. If you want nitrox...it is $10 per bottle more....$85.
I hope work and my back will allow me to go out again this Sunday and if we have to do Oz again I wouldnt mind one bit.
Sunday morning I got up and drove the one hour to the West coast where I had made arrangements for a boat dive with Ocean Concepts. I had been told that they do reef dives on Sun....and wreck dives on Sat.....but when I got there the locations were still up in the air because of conditions.
We started with an in house safety briefing that had to be written by lawyers. But I can live with it. They got down to such detail as to where you sit on the boat, who your buddy will be and much much more. No biggie.
We get to the boat and our gear that had been taken up earlier was in our "positions" ready to be assembled if we wanted to do it ourselves....or assembled if we wanted to let them do it. I do my own, and they were good about that. I have had dive ops get pushy about them doing it. Then we got another safety briefing. Then we got a site briefing and another safety briefing at each site.
We take off from the dock and it was decided we were going to do two reef dives. One place we went to was called Keau....and the other called...Land of Oz.
Without a doubt Oz was the best location of the two. We saw a turtle there that must have been the great grand daddy of them all in that area. He was monstrous in size. And, we saw numrous 50 gallon barrel top size ones too.
I found a humongous eel that must have been as thick as my calf and about 4 or 5 ft long.
The rock formations of Oz were really great too. And, there were lots of swim throughs. Vis wasnt too bad and I would guess at about 85 ft or so.
On our surface interval moving between sites.....and heading back to the dock too... each time we got within 50 yards of two to three whales surfacing, blowing and just splashing around. They did the big tail flop and all.
The food on this boat was totally unreal. They had two of those long composite sandwiches dellys make and cut up into smaller sandwiches.....they had fresh fruit...and they had all kinds of juice. You could get fat diving with these people.
If you are either active or retired military....the price drops significantly from a little over $100 for two bottles of air....to $65 for two bottles of air. If you want nitrox...it is $10 per bottle more....$85.
I hope work and my back will allow me to go out again this Sunday and if we have to do Oz again I wouldnt mind one bit.
