Description: We met at the Kihie boat launch at 6:30am and got on Ed Robinson's Sea Diver II for the cruise over to Molokai. It took about two hours to get over there -- we stopped halfway (just off Lahaina) and had coffee and donuts (just so we could say we had breakfast in Lahaina). The trip out was fairly rough -- even though this was the first day in weeks calm enough to make it out there, we all still got a little wet.
First, we did a drift dive on Kanaka, a small island just off the coast of Molokai. We circled the island, going down to about 85 feet. It's a spot where hammerheads are seen frequently, but I just saw one shark of in the distance -- I'm guessing it was a reef shark. There were so many fish of all colors and shapes. It's hard to even remember all of them, but the dive master was constantly doing the twisted finger "rare" signal. The current wasn't so bad at the start, but near the end it was really ripping, and we ended up surfacing far from the boat. That's OK -- they came over and picked us up.
We were hanging out on our surface interval, eating pineapple and Chex Mix, and five dolphins surfaced around the boat to play. After a while, we started the engines and cruised around slowly, so the dolphins could jump in our bow wave. They did for a while and did some more playful stuff -- we probably had them with us for over an hour. The disappeared for a while, but returned right before our second dive. Sadly, they disappeared again while we were getting in the water, so we couldn't play with them
The second dive was on Mokuho'oniki, an even smaller island off Kanaka. We dove on the "pinnacle," a circular reef that comes up from 70 feet to around 30 feet. We descended to the base and did circles around, gradually coming up. This dive didn't have the schools of fish that we saw in the first one, but the visibility was more than 100 feet. There was tons of cool stuff on the reef -- a lot of big eels, some cool snails, and lots of other stuff I don't remember.
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