| Operator | Site | Dive | Depth | Bottom Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jack's Diving Locker | Pipe Dreams | 32 | 91.0 | 49 minutes |
| Eel Cove | 33 | 53.0 | 61 minutes |
Highlights: Back in a more pleasant dive environment, and the Javanese
Lowlights: How can you not see ANY eels at a site called eel cove?
The Dive
Josh and I went out on this, my thirty-something dive, back again with Jack’s Diving Locker, my favorite charter I’ve used over the past few years. As always, the boat was amazingly clean and nice, the crew was laid back and fun, and the location, well, I came back to Kona for a reason, ya?
The first site we dove was called Pipe Dreams. As you can see by the album cover, it’s an area where the energy lab placed some large pipes to do research, and in this case, one giant pipe that they laid just to see how well pipe held up in the environment. This pipe is the only remaining segment from that experiment, and is, as always, teeming with life. The neatest part is that insite, a giant Javanese Eel was hanging out.. and I do mean giant. Probably two to three feet in diameter. It spooked and swam away, just as I was going to take a picture, but it was an amazing sight.
Also spectacular on the first dive was my first octopus sighting. I didn’t get a good look, as it had wedged itself under a rock, but the blinking eye and the one look at the suckers on its tentacles were enough to make me smile in memory. Other than that, what this dive gave me was a remembrance of why I loved Kona so much, the color, and life well exceed the other dive vacations I’ve taken.
The second dive, at “Eel Cove” was quite the disappointment. Our DM Shep mentioned that the last time he dove the site, he saw no less than eight different species of eel, and that I might get to once again see a dragon eel (which I’ve seen now twice, and are quite beautiful). The grand total at the end of the dive for eel sightings were a whopping zero.
That’s right, no eels in eel cove, at least for us. I did get a great shot of a pair of lizardfish, had fun getting swarmed a few times by schools of raccoon butterflyfish hoping that I scare away the parent fish on guard over their egg nests, and got to see a couple of beautiful cornetfish and trumpetfish. So in honesty, a good dive, only disappointing in the expectation of numerous eel.