My wife and I did a guided two tank dive on Kauai today at Koloa landing with Nick of Explore Kauai Scuba and it was fantastic. The visibility was probably only average due to some surge stirring things up a bit, but that's the luck of the draw.
We were initially trying to decide if we wanted to just rent tanks/gear and do some dives ourselves or use a guide. We are new divers and with the pacific being a bit different animal than the gulf or caribbean decided a guide would be a good idea.
It was a great decision and well worth it to hire Nick to guide us! He was not in a rush to get the dives over with and go on with his day, he talked to us about the site, what creatures to expect, brought a wet board to id critters as he spotted them and really helped maximize what we got from our dives. While under water there was no rushing us about either, we got some nice long dives (for me - air hog) out of both tanks. During the surface interval we talked some more, he provided some fresh fruit, water, and snacks.
Had we opted to simply rent gear and do the dives, we definitely wouldn't have had nearly the experience.
A list of what we saw (mostly thanks to Nick finding them and pointing it out), I'm sure I'll forget some:
- 3 scorpionfish
- 2 frogfish
- lionfish
- several trumpetfish
- 4 dragon moray (1 juvenile)
- 2 whitemouth moray? (I think)
- 1 yellow margin moray
- lots of turtles sleeping, eating, cleaning station
- the usual suspects of reef fish (too many to list...)
I'm forgetting a few that I'll have to try and ID from my pictures.
At the end, he pointed us toward a great restaurant for lunch to round off a great morning spent on Kauai. If you are a newer to moderately new diver (or even experienced if you aren't as critter knowledgeable) I highly recommend diving with Nick, (they have a boat too for offshore diving), our logbooks are pretty thin, but these were probably our best dives!
[url=https://flic.kr/p/GUwGSf]
[/URL]
Images taken with TG-3/TG-4 and new UWL-04 wal.
We were initially trying to decide if we wanted to just rent tanks/gear and do some dives ourselves or use a guide. We are new divers and with the pacific being a bit different animal than the gulf or caribbean decided a guide would be a good idea.
It was a great decision and well worth it to hire Nick to guide us! He was not in a rush to get the dives over with and go on with his day, he talked to us about the site, what creatures to expect, brought a wet board to id critters as he spotted them and really helped maximize what we got from our dives. While under water there was no rushing us about either, we got some nice long dives (for me - air hog) out of both tanks. During the surface interval we talked some more, he provided some fresh fruit, water, and snacks.
Had we opted to simply rent gear and do the dives, we definitely wouldn't have had nearly the experience.
A list of what we saw (mostly thanks to Nick finding them and pointing it out), I'm sure I'll forget some:
- 3 scorpionfish
- 2 frogfish
- lionfish
- several trumpetfish
- 4 dragon moray (1 juvenile)
- 2 whitemouth moray? (I think)
- 1 yellow margin moray
- lots of turtles sleeping, eating, cleaning station
- the usual suspects of reef fish (too many to list...)
I'm forgetting a few that I'll have to try and ID from my pictures.
At the end, he pointed us toward a great restaurant for lunch to round off a great morning spent on Kauai. If you are a newer to moderately new diver (or even experienced if you aren't as critter knowledgeable) I highly recommend diving with Nick, (they have a boat too for offshore diving), our logbooks are pretty thin, but these were probably our best dives!
[url=https://flic.kr/p/GUwGSf]
[/URL]Images taken with TG-3/TG-4 and new UWL-04 wal.
It was great meeting and diving with you two. Your words are very kind! Thank you for letting me share our beautiful ocean with you!
