Favorite Dive Spot: Koloa Landing

November 6th, 2016

You know us, so you know we were looking for a great place to dive on Kauai! As it turns out, the weather in the Hawaiian winter season stirs up the seas, and creates powerful currents and undertow all along the costs of the islands. For this reason, many of the worthy summer diving sites on Kauai are inaccessible during the winter months. After checking around, we concluded that Koloa landing was the safest and best dive spot for us (and just about the only easily accessible one). For anyone interested, we rented tubes and weights for cheap from Fathom Five Divers; we had to remember to ask them to switch to DIN since we were using our own European equipment.

After our first dive at Koloa landing, we were hooked! We did the rest of our dives there, swimming left, then right, then further right to the buoys, and even 1.5km out from the beach point to the lava tubes at 12m down! Great sea life, some larger coral, cool topography, and lots of turtles!

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Bonus with the location: Spouting Horn and its craft market is right down the road!

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Plus, you can spend your surface time at the nice beach in front of the Sheraton resort, in the sun and 80s degree weather.

This turtle had major hide-and-seek skills… it was not-so-successfully trying to hide from the flopping newbie divers (taking PADI courses from the local dive shops) above.

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Big coral pieces all over:

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Spotted this little guy hiding in the middle of that huge piece of coral when I passed over.

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Morish Idol, I love these guys:

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Found a HUGE lobster carapace drifting along the sea floor among the rocks. It even turned out that it was lobster hunting season while we were there!

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(~10m down)

If a passing fish or your swimming hands manage to disturb the water next to these spiral fan guys sticking out of the coral, then you’ll get a surprise! Flustered, they quickly suck back into their tubes embedded into the coral, protecting their delicate fans specialized to catch plankton and other micro sea life drifting by.

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Very beautiful, but shy, blue and yellow spotted boxfish:

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Weird-o spiky sea cucumber:

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Mini puffer fish!!

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Giant mountain coral!

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(Amber)

The sleeper…

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I…am…camouflaged…

Even simply breathing for an eel can be intimidating!

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Eel video clip (11sec, 22MB) click the blue link:

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This guy was super curiousdscn7772

The friendly turtle who understands sign language (from the cover photo) resting adorably in the sand 🙂

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Thank you Koloa Landing for some great dives!

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