I've been meaning to do this dive for a long time - ever since the dive where Tim and I played like bait on the anchor line of my kayak at 100' while being dragged out to sea. But that's a different story. David and I had finished a lengthy but dissapointing dive at Oalwalu and decided to head north. Mala looked wiped out but airport seemed OK. We agreed to try to find the legendary "third reef" off airport beach. Legend has it that it is out there at about 95'. Every time we've tried to find it we get stuck playing with the lion fish on the second reef or some such nonsense. This time would be different. We did a surface swim to the start of the second reef, then dropped down to find a significant N-S current. OK we crabbed a bit to the north and travelled beyond the halmeda to the unknown. After about 15 minuted of aggressive swimming we were getting close - down to 85 feet or so but bottom time was dissappearing fast. We pressed on finding nothing but sand and halmeda until we HAD to turn around. 93' - and no reef. The vis was pretty good out that far so if there was a reef we'd have seen it. Oh well. I had to swim back well above the bottom and I still went into deco (cobra). David's oceanic didn't run out of rec BT even though he followed the bottom pretty much the whole way in. At about 65' on the way back we ran into a herd of blue-spot urchins. I got a few pix but had to hurry as air and BT were low. This was a real treat. I'll post pix later. We did an extra few minutes in the safety stop as this was not a typical profile - 93' / 45 minutes on air. I had my workout today. I'd say myth busted.
BTW we did this on 63's.
Mark
BTW we did this on 63's.
Mark
