Capturing the Moment

  Art in nature - the wrapped up arms and spines of a crown-of-thorns sea star. I love spending time underwater. Especially in a place like Maui, Hawaii. I have logged hundreds of scuba dives here, all around the island. This dive took me back to one of the places where I have dove before, a place called 5 Graves or 5 Caves. Snorkel boats come here often, looking for sea turtles. But the snorkeling miss a world of small and unusual creatures living in the cracks and crevices and caves down below. That is why I geared up for scuba diving and went out for a hour-long underwater search for charismatic micro-fauna. The entrance for this dive is down a gravelly path, past a small graveyard on an tradition coastal access trail. It would be very easy to drive right by if you didn't know what you were looking for. The entrance into the water is a small, rocky cove, that can be quite tricky, especially if you have heavy scuba gear and a large camera. The waves surge into the bay, sending th...

  It has been a long time since I dove Ulua Beach. For some reason it didn't impress me much early in my Maui diving career and I just always went to other places over it after that. But with time for one dive left before heading back to Vermont, Heidi and I decided to give it a try. And I'm so glad we did.    The set-up for shore diving here is some of the best in Maui. There are multiple showers, a bathroom, and even a couple of benches with tank holding spots near the car drop-off spot. You can drop everything off there and then head back a few hundred feet for parking. The walk down to the beach is very easy, and just like that you are wading out into the calm waters over a very sandy bottom.    This is a pretty shallow dive, following the rocky outcropping to the right of Ulua Beach. The coral is thriving here and forms a very dense reef. We were hoping to find frogfish and harlequin shrimp, but despite our best search, we came up empty. Yet the dive still ...

  If you are looking for a wonderful scuba dive, that you can do from shore on Maui, then look no further than the old Mala Pier. The colors underwater are out of this world, and the turtles and sharks are usually in plentiful supply. I've snorkeled here and dove here many times, and it never gets old. In fact, it is one of the 'must-see' places I take people to when they visit me here in Maui. Today I left the wide angle camera at home. I've taken lots of turtle and shark pictures here before. I was on the hunt for some of the more secretive animals. I was on a treasure hunt for things like nudibranchs, eels, frogfish, and whatever else I could find hiding amongst the corals and wreckage. Using a special macro lens on my Canon 5d, I was able to get in close, add flash, and bring out the true color of all of the marine life. Take a look at some of these photos below and see if you agree with me that this might just be the 'Most Colorful Dive on Maui!" A gloomy ...

  Today was a great day to go scuba diving in south Maui. We grabbed some tanks from Maui Dreams Dive Shop and drove down to Makena Landing. We were on the lookout for nudibranchs as usual, but also just eager to enjoy the pristine conditions. The visibility underwater was the best we've had in months, and we ended up with some pretty cool critter finds. Check out the pics below! We even got the Hawaiian state fish. This really is a can't miss shore dive when you are on Maui.

Stuck in the Sand: Sodwana Bay      It is slow season for diving in Sodwana right now so we scored a great deal for accommodations at Triton Dive Lodge . The attached dive shop gained fame for being the ones to find the once thought extinct Coelecanthe. They found it 113meters (that’s nearly 350ft!) down in caves at a site named Jesse’s Canyon. While we did not plan to do extreme tech diving here to those depths, we did come to see the beautiful coral reefs at recreational diving depths. I dove here once before about 6 years ago and saw dolphins, a whale shark, nudibranchs, and all sorts of fish among the reef. So I was eager to come back. But first we had to get there. Deep sandy roads in Sodwana     We saw the Triton Dive Lodge sign, but looked for any other way to get there. Our little Ford Fiesta would not like the deep sand of the road past the sign. But after a few failed attempts at finding another route including accidentally drivin...