Capturing the Moment

At the surface read to dive Today I had the rare opportunity to make a dive in a submarine here in Oahu. Atlantis submarines offer a chance to join the exclusive 100foot club without being trained in scuba diving. I was invited to go for a ride along to check out the operation. I have seen this kind of submarine in action over in Maui. While I was scuba diving on the wreck of the Carthaginian this company's sub came and check out the same wreck. I could see the tourists inside snapping photos. Now I had the opportunity to see how the other side feels. It is pretty amazing. Plane wreck seen from the sub YO-257 wreck  The pilot, sitting up in front, does all the maneuvering by sight. He has a giant bubble windshield, and a co-pilot at the rear giving him distances. The narrator for the trip sits up front spouting off information about the underwater area and the fish. The sub deftly moves between quite a few wrecks strewn about the bottom. Old shells of airplanes, a Kore...

The ghostly visage of the tallship Carthaginian Heidi, Mary and I planned an adventure almost too big for one car, to kayak out from the shore with all of our scuba and camera gear and dive the wreck of the Carthaginian. The Carthaginian is an old tall ship that I've written about a couple of times on this blog. Feel free to search for the other post/dives done here using the search feature on the website. Located about 90ft down on a sandy bottom this ship is mostly visited by tourists remaining dry aboard the local submarine which zooms around the wreck and nearby waters. I expected to see the sub at some point on this dive and it showed up out of the blue right when we descended to deck level on the wreck.     While the submarine is quite loud with its electronic propellers it still took Heidi a while to figure out it was right behind her. She was much too determined to find the elusive frogfish rumored to be hiding out on the wreck to look for a huge underwater s...