Kona Hawaii Manta Dive 2005-05-12
We got up whenever, and drove around looking for breakfast. Both of us were a bit cranky, as far as choosing a place to eat, and we ended up going back to the awesome French bakery which was Sonia's first suggestion (poo!). Then we did some shopping, we went to a candy store and got some Hawaiian chocolate (Mmmmm, chocolate). Then we checked out a really cool rug store and went to Hilo Hatties to get some souveniers for people back home. Then we headed to the dive store and headed out to the dive site.
On our first dive we went down to about 100 feet. On the sandy bottom where colder water and plankton was welling up we saw a whole slew of Hawaiian Garden Eels (Gorgasia hawaiiensis). We also saw some really stupid diving behaviour. There was a couple who said they'd been diving for about three years. We watched as she gave her husband the out-of-air-signal. Then, we watched as he took the primary out of his mouth to hand it to her. She declined it and went on about her business. Later, we found out she was trying to ask him that if she ran out of air, would he share with her. I think he told her, "hell no." I think if either of us pulled that there'd be hell to pay. On our first dive we saw eels and I saw a pair of Longnosed Butterflyfish, one of which was the rare brown color variation. We saw sponges, and an orange-mouthed lizard fish, of which I would have had a really cool picture but someone came up behind me and stirred up a bunch of sand ruining my picture. The second dive was awesome. I wasn't able to count, but you couldn't look any direction and see less than two mantas. The eels were threading their way in and out of our legs as we kneeled on the bottom and fed the mantas. I didn't point that out to Sonia. Then we did about a 20 minute tour of the reef at night. The fishies were pissed that we were waking them up. It was a totally different world at night.
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