With the arrival oif spring we have noticed many changes.  One of the most noticable is that our winter guests, the Humpback whales, have all but gone for the summer. There are just a few stragglers left but the majority have headed for their feeding grounds in Alaska.  On a positive note we have seen increased numbers of some of the other creatures we have an opportunity to interact with year round.  We are definitly seeing more Mantas on our Manta point charters which are Mondays at 9:00AM and our Thursday Evening Twilight/ night dive at 3:30 PM.  It seems that it is mating season and we have seen multiple animals on our trips in recent weeks, our divers have also observed several Manta mating trains this spring.   On our Moku Ho' Oniki Rock trips to Molokai we have been seen more Hammerhead sharks  than in previous weeks, I don't know that we can attribute the increase in activity to mating season but we sure do like to see the sharks.We continue to enjoy great diving conditions on the Island of Lanai this spring and to help us enjoy that to the best of our ability we have started a new charter offering of a Lanai drift charter.  Our Lanai drift charter allows us to do dive sites that are not already established with a mooring, so if you have already done Lanai and been to several of the established dive sites this is an oppertunity to see other area's in a different way. So if you are heading out this way check us out we have a lot going on.

Lanai Scuba Diving

I went on a trip off island for a week so I didn't run the Molokai charter as usual but Mike filled in for me as Captain and his brother John and sister in law Gwen handled the guiding duties on that charter.  They told me that there was once again plenty of Hammerhead shark action on the dives. Beside our regularly scheduled Tuesdays, we have been running some additional charters to Moku HO'Oniki Rock on other days in response to  customer request, at the moment most of those tend to be on Saturday or Sunday. I guess what I hope you will all get from that last statement is that for not only this specific charter but all of our charters there is a curtain amount of flexablity if you contact us in advance we can usually accomodate your needs if we can generate enough interest in that charter.

We also had some setbacks in recent weeks, we had to postpone one charter to Moku Ho'Oniki Rock due to what was at the time Tropical Storm Filicia.  I think it is important to pass along that a Tropicl storm in the vacinity of Hawaii is not always a bad thing.  It can have a calming effect on the trade winds here in the days leading up to and following the Storm.  Additionally it often will increase the level of marine life activity due to pressure changes and the introduction of food into the ocean from rain runoff. Many time we have seen some of our most spectaular diving before, during  and after the passing of a Tropical storm near the Hawaiian Island chain.

Yesterday was my first Moku Ho'Oniki run since my return and we had a great trip. I had Mike , Rebecca and Shannon working as the crew.  We had great weather thanks in part to another Tropical Depression , that  knocked down the trades to a to comfortable NNE @ 10 knot wind. We did have some swell  around 6-9 feet but that doesn't have much of an effect on our diving operations at that site. On the first dive one of the dive teams saw 5-7 Hammerheads, the other saw two grey reef sharks.  On the second both dive both of the dive teams said that they saw somewhere in the vacinity of 25 to 35 Hammerheads as well as a large school of small bait fish. We don't believe that the bait fish were the cause for the larger number of sharks on the second dive but they were sure cool to see.  I will say that we do seem to have better luck on the second dive for the Hammerheads. I usually tell people that It takes a while for the word to get around the shark community that the divers are there.     

We went to Moku Ho'Oniki Rock on our weakly charter to see the Scalloped Hammerhead Sharks. The weather forecast for the dive site was for east winds 20 to 25 knots with seas of up to 11 feet. What we found when we got there was substantially nicer weather we had maybe 15 knots of wind with 6 foot sea's which made for some nice diving. We had great shark encounters on both of the dives, with numbers of sharks ranging from 10 to 20. John was able to get some great HD video and his brother Mike secured some nice still photography for our divers because some of the shark's came in nice and close to get a good. We had a great group of Diver's for the trip everyone seemed to have a lot in common so there were many stories to be exchanged, we even had some of our friends from Australia on the trip that made for great entertainment.

Scuba Diving Molokai, Hawaii