I have not been diving since I had my Lisfranc fracture in 2017. Today I finally got back underwater! We did 2 dives off of Waikiki. 

The first dive was at Kewalo Block. This was about 65 feet. We saw lots of common fish, but had some really nice finds. The first was a red stripe pipefish. This thing was tiny and it was hiding, so it was hard for me to get my light on it, so forgive the picture color. The other absolutely HUGE find was an even tinier fish. It was a yellow frogfish the size of my thumbnail. These fish are incredibly hard to find. We have literally only (knowingly) seen one before ever. Made. My. Day. 

Now I am quite familiar with Caribbean fish, and some are exactly the same in the Pacific. Others are clearly in the same family but have different markings. Then there was this one fish that took me all night to identify…but I got it done!

The second dive was nearby at Kewalo Pipe. This was a shallow dive at 50 feet, but it was great! Why? Turtles!! I am a sucker for sea turtles and there were 4, 2 of which were very large. There also was a whitetip reef shark (we have all our fingers) and some morays. Lots of types of butterflyfish (including at least one more that I didn’t get a good picture of) and one of my favorites: pufferfish.

Here come the turtle pics…all Hawaiian green sea turtles.

Overall, nice dives. Decent fish life on the reef. Parts of the coral itself didn’t look too happy, but other parts looked healthy. We will be diving tomorrow on the big island of Hawaii, so that should be a nice comparison.

After we cleaned up our gear, we had lunch on the beach and walked down to the main part of Waikiki Beach. Boy, its crowded down there! I like our more peaceful end! We walked around the shopping district and came back to the condo to start packing up to fly out to the big island in the morning. Dinner on the beach again, this time at sunset.