End Of Summer
For a year, I've been listening to friends and coworkers describe the wonderful world of scuba diving and for a year, I have contented myself with the fabulous snorkeling around here, but a few weeks ago, we finally (literally) took the plunge! The waters off Oahu are wonderful year 'round and there are lots of shipwrecks. In fact, several guide say that Oahu is the best of all the Hawaiian islands for scuba diving. Fortunately, the population supports many, many dive shops, so finding gear and opportunities to dive are abundant. Armed with no knowledge and a lot of desire, we took the fast-track scuba certification course at Oahu Dive Center here in Kailua! ODC has really nice folks and has been good to us whenever we have guests to rent snorkeling gear.
It wasn't without some degree of frustration... the first dive we made was with ill-fitting gear that nearly drown us - but the rest of the experiences were great! This picture is from one of our certification dives... (that's me on the left and DeAnna in the middle). But the truth is that we were diving before we were certified!
Thanks to our friends (who are no longer on the island), we were able to rent gear and go diving at Shark's Cove out in the deep water! Bo and Heidi are experienced divers and carefully shepherded us along cliffs and through caves at about 40 feet deep (That's Bo between DeAnna and I). It was fascinating!
We also dived (dove?) off a few boats to some reefs off of Waikiki and some formations on the north shore. It's hard to relate the experience because I don't have a camera that will go that deep, so I have been using the old film camera that I first got when I took those grainy snorkeling pictures a year ago! It's case is rated to 100 feet. So far, I've gotten some nifty pictures, but it still doesn't convey the experience of being 60 feet under water.
Most of these pictures have been taken by fellow divers with deep water enclosures. Here's a cool picture of me and a sea turtle taken by our dive instructor!Now, after diving with rented gear, it quickly became apparent that the quality of the gear makes a huge difference in the enjoyability of the diving experience. Bo and Heidi highly recommended getting our own gear, so we did some research and decided to look into a brand of gear that we liked when we rented: Oceanic.
Turns out that Oceanic gear is sold by the same dive shop that Bo and Heidi frequented, so with a recommendation from them, the owner put a package together that was absolutely fantastic! After ordering our gear and picking it up, we headed out to Shark's Cove to try it out. WOW! It was great!So now, we own our own scuba gear, including a dive computer. A dive computer calculates how much time you have left in your dive based on air pressure in your tank, depth and pressure. When your body goes deep in the water, the pressure forces Nitrogen into your blood and if you're not careful, the Nitrogen can cause injury.
The Dive computer helps keep track of safe diving levels and lets you know when it's time to go up. It also tracks your dive and downloads it on the computer so you have a record of your dive! This is a graphical display of one of the dives we took that went down to 60 feet!As Bo and Heidi departed Oahu, they left us with some additional equipment, including two air tanks, extra weights and a dive float. It was sad to see them go, but nice to be able to get a few more things we needed. Unfortunately, our favorite Dive shop, Oahu Dive Center is closing. We picked up one or two more things from them before they closed.
So our dive buddies have left and our favorite dive shop has closed, but the diving goes on! In the middle of sad news, we've been blessed and now have all we need to experience Hawaii from under the water for months to come and wherever we go, we'll be able to dive other exotic places anywhere in the world!
posted by Joe @ 9:18 PM
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