bassplayer
Contributor
En route to Palau and decided to stop over in Oahu for a few days to break up the travel and enjoy a visit.
I didn't make the best choices but it was still a nice stopover.
booked diving first. after a fair bit of googling, decided to go with Island Divers for 2 mornings (Friday is a 3 tanker which sounded good). they dive out of Hawaii Kai, which turns out to have virually zero lodging available. seems to be more of a nice suburban area.
Best I could manage was to stay in Waikiki which is a 30$ uber each way. usually i do well with booking dives first then finding suitable lodging but it didn't really work out for me this time. For these particular 2 days i don't think the Hawaii Kai location opened up any better dive sites to us but i expect sometimes it does.
couple of notes regarding nitrox at island divers:
- i appreciated that they had DIN capable provalves on the nitrox tanks
- the nitrox surcharge was only worth it for 1 of the 5 dives i did; the first wreck dive i was allowed to dive to NDL, the rest were all cut short and would have been fine on air.
the first day of diving was pretty good; I was the only fun diver on the large boat. there was also an instructor, a woman doing advanced adventure, and another member of staff diving. They let me dive my tank until i hit NDL on the first wreck dive (new barge), and on the second dive which was a drift we had a fun encounter with a monk seal and some large turtles which was cool, but the dive leader signalled us to begin the ascent at 37 minutes, which turned out to be foreshadowing of the next day. boat was large and comfortable, waters were pretty choppy. Dive leader took some great pics and shared them with the group which was a nice thing also.
second day could have been great; there were several other divers who seemed pretty advanced, the sea was calmer. however, the bottom times for the 3 dives were: 28 minutes, 22 minutes, 24 minutes. (by bottom time i mean, when did the DM tell us to ascend, not counting ascent and safety stop)
I really don't understand how this is considered ok for a 200$ plus nitrox surcharge day, not good value for money. As far as i could tell, the limiting factor was one particular diver out of the group; since we had 2 members of shop staff in the water and only 5 customers i was wishing they could've managed things a bit better for the rest of us. My experience has been that a quality dive operation will put more effort into ensuring decent dive times e.g. letting the one diver who runs out of gas get back on the boat when they want to without ending the whole group's dive.
I did enjoy seeing the YO-257, it's a nice dive site and I would visit it again to see more.
I didn't make the best choices but it was still a nice stopover.
booked diving first. after a fair bit of googling, decided to go with Island Divers for 2 mornings (Friday is a 3 tanker which sounded good). they dive out of Hawaii Kai, which turns out to have virually zero lodging available. seems to be more of a nice suburban area.
Best I could manage was to stay in Waikiki which is a 30$ uber each way. usually i do well with booking dives first then finding suitable lodging but it didn't really work out for me this time. For these particular 2 days i don't think the Hawaii Kai location opened up any better dive sites to us but i expect sometimes it does.
couple of notes regarding nitrox at island divers:
- i appreciated that they had DIN capable provalves on the nitrox tanks
- the nitrox surcharge was only worth it for 1 of the 5 dives i did; the first wreck dive i was allowed to dive to NDL, the rest were all cut short and would have been fine on air.
the first day of diving was pretty good; I was the only fun diver on the large boat. there was also an instructor, a woman doing advanced adventure, and another member of staff diving. They let me dive my tank until i hit NDL on the first wreck dive (new barge), and on the second dive which was a drift we had a fun encounter with a monk seal and some large turtles which was cool, but the dive leader signalled us to begin the ascent at 37 minutes, which turned out to be foreshadowing of the next day. boat was large and comfortable, waters were pretty choppy. Dive leader took some great pics and shared them with the group which was a nice thing also.
second day could have been great; there were several other divers who seemed pretty advanced, the sea was calmer. however, the bottom times for the 3 dives were: 28 minutes, 22 minutes, 24 minutes. (by bottom time i mean, when did the DM tell us to ascend, not counting ascent and safety stop)
I really don't understand how this is considered ok for a 200$ plus nitrox surcharge day, not good value for money. As far as i could tell, the limiting factor was one particular diver out of the group; since we had 2 members of shop staff in the water and only 5 customers i was wishing they could've managed things a bit better for the rest of us. My experience has been that a quality dive operation will put more effort into ensuring decent dive times e.g. letting the one diver who runs out of gas get back on the boat when they want to without ending the whole group's dive.
I did enjoy seeing the YO-257, it's a nice dive site and I would visit it again to see more.
