Diving with Ed Robinson

 Ever since I started exploring the underwater coastline of Maui I have been searching for people who have shared my passion and that have local knowledge of the lesser explored Maui reefs. We have amazing shore diving opportunities but much fewer deep diving sites that can be reached easily from shore. So I have been asking around the dive shops and with fellow divers about who visits some of the more advanced, deeper sites and everyone has referred me to one place, Ed Robinson's Diving Adventures. So I finally made it in time to check out their shop (it closes at 2pm) and talk with one of the Dive Masters and with Ed's wife. They could really see my passion for diving and they invited me and Heidi out on one of their Adventure X dive trips which Ed still comes out on and leads.
   There have been a few fish that have eluded us so far mainly because they are found in deeper water. Things like bicolor anthias and long nose hawkfish are found at sites a little farther from shore and in a little deeper water. They were both high on my list and when dive site ideas were being thrown around on the boat, it is up to us where to go on these Adventure X trips, I mentioned the long nose hawkfish. See we headed off to a place called Hawaiian Reef which is an 85ft deep pinnacle on the way out to Molokini. And wouldn't you know it, we found a longnose hawkfish about 5 minutes after hitting the bottom! He was alot smaller than I expected.

 After exploring Hawaiian Reef and Magic Rock we went to a slightly shallower site with big schools of Ta'ape, or blue stripe snappers, and soldierfish. It was here that we saw a green and a white leaf scorpion fish and one of my favorite nudibranchs, a gold laced nudibranch trudging across the sandy bottom.

Leaf Scorpionfish

At the end of our dive we were hanging out at 15ft doing a 3 minute safety stop to off-gas some of the nitrogen built up when out of the blue a pod of spinner dolphins emerged! Just when I thought the day couldn't get any better!

Just talking to Ed and the other guides I could tell they had the same explorer mentality that drives me to search out new places and adventures. They have stories of exploring airplane wrecks in almost 200ft of water and finding isolated rocks far off from their already isolated deep dive sites. Suzie, Ed's wife also told me how she would grab on to a line and have Ed pull her behind his boat looking for new and interesting sites down the wild south coast of Maui. All in all my kind of people.