Dear John,
Great to learn that you will be coming over to HK. Feb is too cold to dive with wetsuit (and I have yet tried a dry one !). There will be hardly any diving boat going out in HK in this season.
Day trekking (or rather walking) is however a great activity here. HK is small, and small enough to have sea and land activities readily accessible. A good day of walking, followed with a big dinner and lots of drinks is the winter life here.
Seawiscope
Seawiscope,
I was in Hong Kong about two and a half years ago, and remember going over to the far side of Hong Kong island, on a great beach for walking with a park and all sorts of park areas. But the beaches were the best...simply beautiful. Here are a couple of photos of my extended family:
Everyone was saying how cold it was, wearing long sleeves, even shivering at 65 degrees F (18 degrees C). But I've been diving last winter in river water that was 39 degrees F (about e4 degrees C), and last weekend was diving in the Clackamas River at 63 degrees F in my wet suit bottoms (Farmer John style). I could hardly contain myself from jumping into the water, that was at least 18 degrees C in the photos. That is
WARM to me. I did walk barefoot in the water, but that is no match for actually getting wet. It was very difficult for this ol' guy to keep from jumping into the water. But all my family would have thought I was crazy. But a few years back I took some of our Asian engineers who came to Oregon for training up to Eagle Creek.
One of the engineers wanted to go swimming, so I told him how to get into cold water--gradually getting used to it, and we swam for ten or fifteen minutes in 4 degree C water (39-40 degrees F).
(I'm the guy on the right.)
By the way, getting back to the thread's theme, I have now put in three days of diving (five dives), and three of them were with the bi-focal mask I have. The other was with a silicone tri-view mask by Scubapro (the same one in my avatar). The tri-view SP mask was a bad experience; it fogged and I got internal reflections too. In contrast, my bi-focal mask worked very well, even climbing out of the water. I did have to be careful about my foot placement, but it went well. But maybe I need to get a Seawiscope to put onto my Dacor tri-view mask and try that too.
SeaRat