Dive April 4 2002

Maui Hawaii

We spent our second week in Hawaii on the Island of Maui. Several friends had reccomended Ed Robinson's Diving Adventures so I booked a two tank dive through them. The boat was captained by Mark Luffgen, my dive master was Billy Finch and the other dive master was Fish. We headed out on Seadiver II along the coast checking the viz as we went and then headed off to the Molokini crater. The dive was amazing, the visibility was 100 feet plus. The hard coral bed was huge, with tons of reef fish. We saw a Moray Eel and an octopus. One of the problems a begining diver faces is sucking too much air, or using up your air too fast. You start out with 3000 PSI in your tank, you head back at mid point of 1500 and should typically begin you ascent and safety stop somewhere between 700 and 500 PSI. The faster you use your air, the shorter your dive. Depth has an obvious affect as the volume of air decreases with depth, or in otherwords deeper dives mean you use your air faster. As you can see on all my previous dives, I use my air pretty quickly, the Molokini dive was no exception. In fact swimming back to the anchor line for our ascent, I was already down to 500 PSI, so Billy had me breathe off his secondary, I got a mouthful of water when I forgot to blow first before sucking. Billy must have stayed down at least another 5-10 minutes and when he came up he still, even with my breathing some of his air, had 1000 PSI remaining! So on the second dive, I really concentrated on relaxing, not making a lot of movement, and breathing slowly and deeply, pausing between intake to let my body use the air in my lungs. By doing this I was (as you see) able to stay down 50 minutes, my longest dive yet! Anyway the second dive was closer to shore at a site called Red Hill. This is the most western point on East Maui before you turn the corner to make your way around towards Hana, so there is quite a bit of current. This also means that that there is an abundance of life, because current means floating food. We did a drift drive putting in at the west end of the dive and then getting picked up near the east end. Along the way we saw a tons of reef fish, a Crown of Thorns and hung out with some turtles for a while, which were getting their shells cleaned by some small purple fish. Near the end of the dive there is a swim through, or a cavern which is an under water tunnel where you can see the exit from the entrance. Both were great dives and the Ed Robinson's team lives up their reputation.

Molokini Crater, which is off the shore of Maui, we left from the Kehei boat luanch.

This is the view of West Maui from Molokini.

This is the edge of one of the crater. The shape is a half circle, the other half has been worn away by the ocean action.

This is us on the boat at Molokini.

The visibility was well over a 100 feet plus, this is looking over the side after the first dive.

This is the location of our second dive, Red Hill.