Had a real fun scuba certification class this last week....

I've started teaching the full Open Water certification course again after stepping back from doing it for quite some time. We've been doing referral certifications, where we only do the diving end of the course, for the last couple of years. Anyways, this last week I was with students for a few days doing a course and finishing up another one. We had a couple of excellent things happen in the water.

On last Sunday we were doing the confined water work. I had only one student, and he was pretty comfortable in the water and had actually been certified in the 60s but hadn't dove in a few decades, we decided to try the confined water skills off the beach. All went quickly and well and we had air to burn, so we decided to do an intro dive with the rest of the tank.... It was a very cool 25 foot dive!!! A decent sized school of akule (I think that's what they're called) had moved into Kailua bay and we got to sit in the middle of it for about 10 minutes. This is so very fun to do - sitting there with a few thousand 10inch silver fish moving in unison around you just beyond arm's reach. It was a real treat for both of us.

On Monday I was with that student and finishing up with another from earlier. We were out off in the sand and had visitors during the skills session... 50-60 dolphins swam an arc around us, the majority of them passed maybe 15-25 feet from us. We had 3-4 good visits during the course of the dive. It was some of the best dolphin action I've ever had underwater on scuba... I'm thinking the final day of diving for the one student who saw the akule school and the dolphins would be quite the anti-climax, he had a great time that day too though (although nothing super special showed up that day).

Here's a Scrambled Egg Nudibranch from a dive a while back.

Aloha,

Steve