Plantation Course and Diving

A little downtime after a morning of diving is allowing me to download recent pictures. Monday we played the Plantation Course at Kapalua and there is probably not a course on earth with more beautiful views. It is a very tough course with lots of blind shots so it was nice to be playing vacation golf with a few mulligans and given putts. The photos of the course are ok on the blog but really do not do justice to the magnitude of the landscape.

This morning we arrive at the boat dock at 6AM for two dives. The highlight was seeing whales as we boated back from the dive site. We saw a mother and three babies circling our boat. The mother was within 10 feet of our dive boat. Some of the divers actually put their masks on and looked at the whales under water. Hawaii has the benefit of having some of the very best whale protection laws in the world. They must observe a "100 yard minimum" law, which states that whales within 100 yards cannot be approached by any means, including by boat, kayak, sailboard or even by swimming. Being wild animals, whales can approach us as they wish. Fortunately for us the babies were curious about the dive boat and swam right under us. We were able to see the three baby whales, the mother and the escort whale. Very very memorable. We did not see any whales while we dove but it is an eerie sound to hear them underwater.

The diving was not great. We saw lots of fish but the colors here are much more muted than what we are used to in the Virgin Islands. The water temperature is around 74 which is close to 10 degrees cooler than the BVI too. We did see some interesting frog fish but they camouflages themselves so well it is hard to see them in the pictures. It is located right in the center of the picture that just looks like the bottom of the ocean.