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 ...

  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.

  In a previous post I talked about the 'Big 3' scuba dives in Maui. These three are Molokini Crater , Cathedrals , and Mokuhooniki Rock for hammerheads. I got the chance recently to revisit one of the Big 3, Molokini for some good old fashioned exploration of the deep time. The crater rises strait up from the submerged slope of Haleakala Volcano 300 ft down. This easy access to depth, along with some of the clearest water in Hawaii provides a rare opportunity here in Maui where shallow shore dives are more the norm. Early morning dive at Molokini   My buddies Jack and Lucy from Maui Dive Shop joined me on their day off to do some fun diving of their own. Our first dive was on Reef's End. This is one point of the halfmoon shaped crater which gradually slopes down to the abyss. Schools of pyramid butterflyfish and garden eels greeted us about 60 ft down, then a school of grey reef sharks found us around 120 ft down. The sharks stayed a little too deep to get good pi...