Today we moved islands! We flew from Oahu to the big island of Hawaii. We had a relatively early morning flight so that we wouldn’t lose too much of the day to travel. We got through the airport, did their health screening process, got our rental car (a convertible Camaro…totally practical with luggage!), grabbed lunch, and headed over to our condo to change to go for a mid-afternoon and night two-tank dive.

We dove at Garden Eel Cove.  Ironically, we didn’t see any garden eels there. It’s about a 60 foot dive with a nice reef. On our way to the dive site we had friends swim with our boat. First was a small pod of Hawaiian spinner dolphins. After they left us, we were joined by a bottlenose dolphin, who paced us all the way to the dive site. While we were diving, we were joined by 2 bottlenose dolphins…maybe our boat racer and a friend? Paul saw a white tip reef shark. We also saw a manta ray off in the distance, not good underwater picture material.

Our second dive was at the same site after sunset. This was a manta ray dive. They have made a “campfire” of a circle of rocks with lights in the center. Once it is dark, they light it up to attract plankton. This has been going on for a while, so the mantas know they have some free dinner here. Divers get taken down and placed in a circle around the campfire. Some other lights get set around the campfire. There are some snorkelers on the surface looking down who also have some floating lights facing down. So, lots of lights focused on the same area to draw in lots of plankton to, subsequently, draw in lots of manta rays. We just sit on the bottom and watch the rays. They were fascinating to watch. They are really big and they feed in a loop-de-loop swimming manner.