Time is running out..

First and foremost, Happy birthday to my lovely boyfriend. Hawaii has not wanted to treat me right in regards to his birthday - every attempt I made at doing something nice was shot down by the fact that I am in Hawaii and my bank does not like that. Funny..everything else I have bought seemed to work fine, just nothing for his birthday. Not fair, but enough complaining. Hope you have an amazing birthday Gianluca and I cannot wait to see you. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!

Saturday night I had I think my last dive with the mantas and guess what - no Mantas. Well, not exactly, there were fly-by's, maybe one or two. One would think I would be quite bummed about the no mantas, but not at all. I actually got to practice using the real intense video system - as in the baby of the entire company. Some time with that thing and the smile is still on my face. Martina took a picture of me with the equipment, which is hard to tell, but try to check out the craziness. I mean with the lights extended, the thing is a monster.



Our dive ended up being 52 minutes and it really was incredible to just swim around the darkness with ridiculously bright lights of the video camera illuminating everything in front of me. I saw an eel (that wasn't Frank - the resident eel of the dive site) and some pretty cool fish. The ocean really does take on a whole new personality at night, and I strongly advice all to check it out..just bring your lights so you actually see some stuff. Oh, and another beautiful sunset while gearing up to get in.



Yesterday was..are you ready for this?...a day off. It was fantastic. We actually got to take the car out (we=the interns) and I drove up to Kua Beach, the beautiful beach I went to first here on the big island. Water was just as pretty, Sun was just as hot, Snorkeling was great. There were a TON of people though. Certainly didn't ruin my day off - don't think anything could.







I found this little baby eel while I was free diving and it was super cute. Seriously. Kate, you would even like this eel. It took my about 6 different free dives to get this shot. And then right after, my ring fell off my finger on the ocean bottom. Not only do I love the ring (not to mention it is new), but I did not want to add any type of substance to the ocean that should not be there, so it took me about another additional 5 or 6 long dives down in order to get. I was a bit dizzy after all that free diving. Too much. But moral of the story, some eels are cute.



Today we had an early morning to finished up the advanced training - deep dive and navigation dive. I got to bring my camera on both so I was way more than happy. The first dive we did was at Crescent Beach, which I have dove before, but now I could go even deeper! It's especially cool at this site because at that depth you can see the eagle ray cleaning station, so while we were diving, we did see one spotted eagle ray. Hard to see, but check out the silhouette of the eagle ray in the back of the picture.



some more pictures from both the dives. The second one was at Eel Cove (not to be confused with Garden eel cove, where the north manta dive site is), and it really was filled with eels. One I got to close too and came after to me. Another was the most ginormous thing I could ever imagine, and quite rare to spot not only that big, but also in the day - the zebra eel. You'll know exactly which one I'm talking about when you see the picture. It really was huge.







































































It must be said folks, this could very well be the last blog of my time here in Hawaii. Perhaps as I end this I should ask I question...have I mentioned they asked me to come back?


Aloha (for now)