Diamond Head and Scuba Diving

Diamond Head Crater was our objective the next day, having been recommended by several people we'd met the night before.We decided to set out and do the trek. It was a short 10 minute bus ride out to Diamond Head National Park. You have to walk through a tunnel to get
to the trail head. When we got to the peak, I realised that the tunnel we initially walked through was burrowed under the crater rim. It's a 1.6 miles round trip hike, with a gain of 760 feet. Fairly easy trail, with hand rails along the way, and a total of 273 steps, another dimly lighted tunnel to get to the top. well worth the effort as the views from the peak were totally awesome! You get to see Waikiki Beach, the mountains on the other end of the island, and the famous snorkeling beach Hanauma Bay on the other side. This is all against a backdrop of blue skies and the ever present puffy white clouds in Hawaii. The cool breeze was also very welcome to cool off after the hike. Trip down was easier than going up and we rewarded ourselved with a shave ice to cool off when we got down. Shower and lunch later we enjoyed some retail therapy for the afternoon.

Diving today off the west side of Oahu, Waianeau, near Pokai Bay. We were picked up in a very fancy leather seat Mercedes bus. The ride out was long, as there were road blocks and traffic jams due to APEC 2011. However the boat ride out was only 20 minutes to the dive site which was pretty good. Despite the warm temperature of the waters, we were provided with 5mm semi-dry wetsuits to keep us toasty warm. The first dive was the Maki Wreck. It was sunk about 32 years ago at a dept of about 30m. Both of us had some trouble equalising our ears, so spent some time trying to get to the bottom. We eventually managed to clear our ears and get down to the wreck. Visibility was fantastic, up to 20m. There is so much sea life growing on it! I saw a yellow spotted eel peaking out from the rails, which it had obviously made as its home. There was another eel hiding on the side of the deck railing, we think it was probably on its way to find a new hole when we scared it into hiding from us. We saw lots of fishes, quite a few that we recognised, such as surgeon fish, tangs, angel fish, gobys etc...
The second dive was at the Makana Caverns, remnants of old lava tubes. It was a shallower dive of about 10-15m. Visibility was still pretty good at about 6-10m. There were a couple of swim throughs, and on one of it we saw a white tip reef shark just chilling on the bottom. The underside of the rocks had lots and lots of yellow sponge growing on it. As we were coming out of the swim through a young turtle was heading in, headed straight for us! Totally unconcerned or curious, not sure which. It came close to face to face with Jesse!
We also encountered a large octopus which our dive master managed to scare from its hiding place - it first tried to camouflage against the background first, then when it realised that didn't work it tried scooting under an outcrop only to be pecked at by a big tang that called it home.  The poor thing then swam off looking for another place to hide from us all.  Was amazing to see!
There was another larger turtle eating the seaweed and algae off the side of the lava rocks, again totally focused on its meal so we were able to swim past it and observe it clearly.
Both dives were awesome experiences and we were sad to hop out of the water at the end!

We headed back to Waikiki again that afternoon - and picked up a few things before heading out for a nice steak at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse - expensive prices really, but the filet mignon's we had were so tender and delicious that it was worth it!
We headed back to the hotel early after that as we knew we had a big day the next day.