By serendipity or fate, Sky, Jake, and I found ourselves riding out to the magnificent Molokini Crater off the island of Maui on a private charter. We were going to dive the back wall of the crater, a dive Sky and I had wanted to do for the past 2 years. Our captain confirmed our enthusiasm when he told us Molokini is unrivaled in terms of visibility and biodiversity. Our excitement grew as the sun rose, warming the boat deck, as we drew closer to the remnant of a volcanic crater.
We pulled up to the outer rim and descended 60 feet into the beautiful and mysterious deep blue. The hauntingly beautiful whale songs permeating the water immediately overtook us. It was as if there were 20 whales and they were 10 feet from us, but, looking out into the deep, I could not see them. I was wearing less weight than I normally do and so I had to swim down, rather than sinking, but at the bottom I was perfectly neutral. It was a very freeing sensation. From the bottom I could look up to the surface where Jake and Sky were descending and see them as clear as if we were not submerged. We followed our divemaster to the edge of the crater, enjoying the 150 feet of visibility and fields of coral. On that short swim we saw a white tipped reef shark, probably 10 or more eels, two octopuses, and clouds of colorful tropical fish. It was incredible! At the edge we caught a current which swept us out around the back of Molokini to about 97 feet. It truly felt like flying as we soared over 350 feet of water along a submarine wall full of life. On our drift, we witnessed an interesting symbiotic relationship between an eel and two bluefin trevally. At first it looked as if the fish were chasing the eel or vice versa, but on closer examination and some expertise from our divemaster we discovered they were hunting together. We surfaced from that dive absolutely stoked with huge grins on our mask -impressioned faces!
After some chatting we decided on Pu'u Olai, aka Red Hill, for our second dive. It was shallower so we could maximize our bottom time and our captain and divemaster told us it is a quintessential Maui dive. We descended to around 40 feet and spent 50 minutes going to all the hangout spots of Maui’s best marine life. We saw Hawaiian lionfish, honu, chirping domino damselfish, a tiny goby that only lives on wire coral, parrotfish, squirrelfish, trumpet fish, moorish idols, goatfish, frogfish, unicornfish, and many trigger and wrasse species. We then ended our dive with a magnificent swim-through that was home to a huge school of squirrelfish and a 7-foot white-tipped shark. It was a thrill to be surrounded by fish and to be checked out by a relatively big shark. He swam circles around us and got close enough we could see he had a hook and line dangling from his mouth, an encounter he must have had with a fisherman (or a fisherman’s catch!).
Both dives were amazing and I would probably venture to say they were the best dives I have ever done. I say that because I feel this was the way diving is meant to be, a personal experience. We had the boat to ourselves, we got to choose our dives with help from the experts, our captain and divemaster were funny, friendly, and knowledgeable guides, and we had two gorgeous dives with fantastic visibility and new and interesting marine life.
