The Polynesian adventure

WELCOME TO THE OHANA

Kona Honu Divers

In Hawaiian, ohana means family, and from the moment you board one of Kona Honu’s boats, you become part of owners Glenn and Maggie Anderson’s family.

It’s a happy family. One thing about the dive experience on Kona Honu’s expansive 46-foot boat is that the divemasters and captains love the dive life and truly enjoy sharing the blue wonderlands off Kona. They take care of your gear, swap out your tanks and play cool music between dives.

I was recently with Kona Honu for what they’ve embraced as their signature dive experience: the Manta Ray Night Dive. Although other shops also visit this site, I can see why Kona Honu incorporates it, too:There’s nothing like it in the world.

Slide show   A Mermaid’s Playground The underwater world presented by Sport Diver Magazine. more photos

Several nights a week, just south of the airport at a site called Garden Eel Cove, the Kona Honu dive boat heads out of Honokohau Harbor just as the sun is slipping over the horizon and setting off the daily light show understatedly called “sunset.”

The divemaster sets powerful lights on the seafloor, pointing straight to the surface. Almost as soon as the lights are turned on, clouds of plankton begin swirling in the beams. For mantas, this is akin to ringing a dinner bell, pulling the winged giants to the feast.

Divers form a circle around the main light and soon the beams from their own dive lights fill with manta appetizers. When the mantas make their appearance, they almost seem to materialize from the dark water itself into the very definition of elegance. I’ve been in the water here with as many as 10 mantas, with wingspans from six to 12 feet, watching in awe until dwindling air forced me from the water. The mantas tumble, twirl and loop-the-loop through the mass of plankton, passing so close that you can see every detail of their skin, and even right into their open mouths. Being in the water with these majestic animals reminds me just how lucky I am to be a diver, and how lucky I am to be in one of the world’s ultimate ohanas.

SILENCE OF THE TINKERS

Konaquatica Dive Center

Rebreathers and TecRec Trimix certifications are welcome when you come to Konaquatica. They’re developing a reputation as the place for technical divers in Kona (although they take plenty of nontechnical divers to some of Kona’s top dive sites). If there’s anywhere in the world that the stealth and bottom-time advantage of a rebreather becomes obvious, it’s Kona. The only thing better than seeing big animals is not sending them running with your bubbles.

Although I haven’t dived it with a rebreather (yet!), I’d love to take one to the long-distance southern site called Au Au Crater. (One of the advantages of small, fast boats like Konaqatica’s is that you can get to this site and still have plenty of time to really explore it without bumping elbows with other divers.) I’d like to explore this dramatic site sans bubbles so I can mingle more closely with the spotted eagle rays I’ve seen there; and the hammerheads that show up for me at Au Au always seem to be able to feel the pressure wave from my bubbles and head for the blue. I’d also like to get a chance to photograph, at close quarters, a Tinker’s butterflyfish, a species that likes to hang in advanced-diver depths but is seen as shallow as 100 feet here.

Au Au Crater seems like an oceanic aquarium, harboring much of the wild variety of marine life found off Kona: dwarf eels, frogfish, piles of lobsters, snowflake morays, millet-seed, ornate and raccoon butterflyfish and, the patron saint of underwater Hawaii, the honu, or green sea turtle. The turtles in particular like to hang out on the lip of this massive underwater crater, almost as if they’ve stopped to check out the expansive view.

Although it requires a longer boat ride than most Kona sites, it’s worth the extra effort to get there. And a nimble dive operation like Konaquatica is just the shop to make dives like this happen.

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