scubamickey
I'm a GIRL!
Quick trip report since it was a quick trip.
We arrived late Sunday-early Monday and headed for our hotel-The Gateway Waikiki. Took us forever to find it and finally got into the room around 1:15 AM. The hotel is definitely a 2 star. But the room was clean, didn't smell, and we were bug free. That's all I cared about at that hour of the morning. However, it certainly wasn't worth $100+ per night.
The next morning we headed out to Hickam to visit Island Divers and pick up a couple of tanks. We were already booked for Wed and Thurs with them and hubby decided to add another trip for himself for Tuesday. Gabe provided us with great info on the local conditions and tides and sent us in the general direction of some decent diving. We decided to dive at Hanauma Bay primarily because the parking was easy and safe. We didn't have time to break down our gear into a smaller bag and ended up hauling our stuff in the 2 travel duffels. So we screamed "steal me". Hanauma Bay was a good place to park were I felt safe to leave stuff in the trunk.
The dive was OK. Not much fish. Not much live coral. Lots of swimmers. But it was a nice shallow dive of about 35 feet where we good check bouyancy and gear configurations. Nice long swim out and back too since we caught a mild/moderate current and surge. That was my workout for the day
The next day I had to work. Hubby went out with Matt from IDH and had a blast he says. He was in DIR heaven with Matt and his student. He doesn't remember what reef they went to but he had a great time.
Wednesday I finally got to jump in the pool. We were supposed to go out to the YO257 but the current was ripping when we got there. Not a good situation given that we had some students on board. So we moved on to the Sea Tiger. Gabe was the DM and he was great. Gave us a great briefing and hints on where to go and waht to see then let us go off. This was a cool dive. My bottom timer had me max out at 102 ft. but it think it was off by 2 or 3 feet. We went inside in search of the toilet and realized that it was gone. I got a kick out of the Chinese characters on the helm, though. We found the toilet sitting outside the ship in the sand. There was an eel on the deck looking upset that it had uninvited visitors. Quite a few fish, mostly small, but we did see one that pretty big. Little bit of a swell.
The surface interval was fast and we were in the water again in about 35 minutes. Our second dive was Kewalo Pipe. A moderate current. so Bill and I drifted it while the rest of the folks did there training dive near the boat. We didn't see many fish. We shot the lift bag at about 30 minutes and started up. I definitely prefer doing minimum deco procedures over the PADI 3 min at 15 routine. We surfaced a little ways from the catamaran so we had to wait for a pick up. They were fast for which I am glad since I got cold on that dive. Overall Exellent morning. No rain!
Thursday we went out to Baby Barge (78ft). Ken was our DM on this trip. Bill and I were the first ones off the boat since we were on Nitrox and Ken had 4 AOW students to handle. We had the barge all to ourselves for abotu 10 minutes which was nice. We went inside the main compartment and as we were exiting, we were greeted by a huge turtle. Just sitting there in the entryway staring at us. It was no more than 5 feet away and stayed with us for a little while. It was beautiful. Then it went off when it realized that we had company. We drifted this dive as well since we had a good current. We ended up over the the remains of another wreck that was broken up. Some tires laying around it too. After about 35 minutes we decided we'd better shoot that bag and let them know where we were. By the time we surfaced the other divers were just getting on the boat so we had a longer wait on the surface. The surge made hard for me to get my fins off on the tag line but I managed to get on board with some dignity.
The second dive was on Fantasy Reef. I'd had enough of decent lines by now. I hate using them if it's not necessary. So Bill and I just did a freefall from the side of the boat not being used. Much more relaxing. I liked this reef a lot more. The swim through we went into had a huge--huge turtle sitting in it. It was a tight squeeze but worth it just to see the turtle with it's head sticking inside a hole. When I realized it was there I kept praying it didn't decide to back out! But thankfully, it didn't even budge. We drifted along this reef for awhile before we ascended and hitched a ride on our boat again. We had to wait a little longer this time since we ended up surfacing just after the other divers started to climb aboard. After a couple minutes the boat came to us and off we went. I got cold again on this dive. I think it was because of the lack of sun to warm me up during the surface interval along with the the 74-75 degree water.
I would dive with IDH again in a heart beat. They know how to take care of independent divers, as well as students and divers who need more one on one. Great dive briefings and great people.
We even made into the log on their website: http://www.oahuscubadiving.com/index.php?
Gabe is such a goof. For the record, we were not in cold water gear. In fact, I was wearing a 3/2 mm.
We arrived late Sunday-early Monday and headed for our hotel-The Gateway Waikiki. Took us forever to find it and finally got into the room around 1:15 AM. The hotel is definitely a 2 star. But the room was clean, didn't smell, and we were bug free. That's all I cared about at that hour of the morning. However, it certainly wasn't worth $100+ per night.
The next morning we headed out to Hickam to visit Island Divers and pick up a couple of tanks. We were already booked for Wed and Thurs with them and hubby decided to add another trip for himself for Tuesday. Gabe provided us with great info on the local conditions and tides and sent us in the general direction of some decent diving. We decided to dive at Hanauma Bay primarily because the parking was easy and safe. We didn't have time to break down our gear into a smaller bag and ended up hauling our stuff in the 2 travel duffels. So we screamed "steal me". Hanauma Bay was a good place to park were I felt safe to leave stuff in the trunk.
The dive was OK. Not much fish. Not much live coral. Lots of swimmers. But it was a nice shallow dive of about 35 feet where we good check bouyancy and gear configurations. Nice long swim out and back too since we caught a mild/moderate current and surge. That was my workout for the day
The next day I had to work. Hubby went out with Matt from IDH and had a blast he says. He was in DIR heaven with Matt and his student. He doesn't remember what reef they went to but he had a great time.
Wednesday I finally got to jump in the pool. We were supposed to go out to the YO257 but the current was ripping when we got there. Not a good situation given that we had some students on board. So we moved on to the Sea Tiger. Gabe was the DM and he was great. Gave us a great briefing and hints on where to go and waht to see then let us go off. This was a cool dive. My bottom timer had me max out at 102 ft. but it think it was off by 2 or 3 feet. We went inside in search of the toilet and realized that it was gone. I got a kick out of the Chinese characters on the helm, though. We found the toilet sitting outside the ship in the sand. There was an eel on the deck looking upset that it had uninvited visitors. Quite a few fish, mostly small, but we did see one that pretty big. Little bit of a swell.
The surface interval was fast and we were in the water again in about 35 minutes. Our second dive was Kewalo Pipe. A moderate current. so Bill and I drifted it while the rest of the folks did there training dive near the boat. We didn't see many fish. We shot the lift bag at about 30 minutes and started up. I definitely prefer doing minimum deco procedures over the PADI 3 min at 15 routine. We surfaced a little ways from the catamaran so we had to wait for a pick up. They were fast for which I am glad since I got cold on that dive. Overall Exellent morning. No rain!
Thursday we went out to Baby Barge (78ft). Ken was our DM on this trip. Bill and I were the first ones off the boat since we were on Nitrox and Ken had 4 AOW students to handle. We had the barge all to ourselves for abotu 10 minutes which was nice. We went inside the main compartment and as we were exiting, we were greeted by a huge turtle. Just sitting there in the entryway staring at us. It was no more than 5 feet away and stayed with us for a little while. It was beautiful. Then it went off when it realized that we had company. We drifted this dive as well since we had a good current. We ended up over the the remains of another wreck that was broken up. Some tires laying around it too. After about 35 minutes we decided we'd better shoot that bag and let them know where we were. By the time we surfaced the other divers were just getting on the boat so we had a longer wait on the surface. The surge made hard for me to get my fins off on the tag line but I managed to get on board with some dignity
.The second dive was on Fantasy Reef. I'd had enough of decent lines by now. I hate using them if it's not necessary. So Bill and I just did a freefall from the side of the boat not being used. Much more relaxing. I liked this reef a lot more. The swim through we went into had a huge--huge turtle sitting in it. It was a tight squeeze but worth it just to see the turtle with it's head sticking inside a hole. When I realized it was there I kept praying it didn't decide to back out! But thankfully, it didn't even budge. We drifted along this reef for awhile before we ascended and hitched a ride on our boat again. We had to wait a little longer this time since we ended up surfacing just after the other divers started to climb aboard. After a couple minutes the boat came to us and off we went. I got cold again on this dive. I think it was because of the lack of sun to warm me up during the surface interval along with the the 74-75 degree water.
I would dive with IDH again in a heart beat. They know how to take care of independent divers, as well as students and divers who need more one on one. Great dive briefings and great people.
We even made into the log on their website: http://www.oahuscubadiving.com/index.php?
Gabe is such a goof. For the record, we were not in cold water gear. In fact, I was wearing a 3/2 mm.
