Hawaii

Yesterday was originally going to be our last day diving on this trip, but after getting skunked at Molokini Crater earlier in the week, Charmaine scheduled us to hit the crater this morning. We were pretty excited for that after seeing how amazing the visibility was out there yesterday. We checked in at the shop and walked our stuff down to the dock where Captain Levi was directing traffic. The boat going to Molokini was packed full and the boat going to Lanai for a drift dive was half empty. Levi suggested we would have a better time doing the Lanai drift than going to Molokini again. The crater is very popular and crowded for a reason. But he said the Lanai drift dive is special. We looked around and saw the old dude that puked all over the place was on the boat to Molokini and saw how much room there was on the Lanai boat and saw that the dive crew going to Lanai were all people we already liked (and Captain Dave was going to be diving with one of the groups today), so we had Captain Levi call the shop and switch us over. We’ll always be glad we made that switch. At the time there was a bit of joking about us being the good luck charm that got the manta, the dolphins, and the whale the day before. We even suggested Mitch switch boats as a joke… he had to work the Molokini charter because they needed as many crew as they could get with a boat that full. ...

Getting skunked a second day in a row was upsetting. Worse, the dive we had originally scheduled for today is the dive we wound up doing yesterday – Mala Pier. I wouldn’t be too sad about diving there again, especially since it was our best dive of the trip, but Charmaine went in to the dive shop and changed some things around so we could go to Molokini today. It’s not the world-famous Molokini Crater, but it’s still Molokini. We signed ourselves up to do two drift dives at Molokini. The dive shop requires every diver have a flashlight and safety sausage, so I got to buy a safety sausage. Charmaine already had one (and a dive knife). ...

Remember that time we almost dove Second Cathedral on Lana’i? People are starting to wonder if we are bad luck. Once again, we braved the rough water and parked our boat at our desired dive site, only to be turned away and have to dive somewhere else. This time it was the Molokini crater. We arrived after a fairly easy crossing, to find only 2 boats there. That’s very unusual. It’s the most visited spot in all of Hawaii, getting more visitors per year than the USS Arizona. The two boats were pulling their divers back and heading out. The forecast had changed and they now expected the wind to really pick up soon, so everyone was getting out of there before it got ugly. We decided to dive some spots closer to Lahaina. The first site was called Jabberwocky. ...

The rain has been pounding and the wind has been howling since we landed on Maui, but that doesn’t have a huge effect on conditions below the surface. We were all set to dive Second Cathedral on the south side of Lanai today. We braved the rough crossing in this weather, tied off, and dropped the first group of divers. Then we realized the boat was drifting. The mooring ball had severed its rope and we were no longer tied to anything. We tried recalling the first group of divers, but they didn’t hear us, probably because we had drifted too far from where we dropped them before attempting to recall them. So we waited while they completed their dive. We didn’t get to see the cathedral. ...