Tuesday, February 4: Another 8am departure, with another delicious breakfast at Jake's. This time we started out at an alternate mooring site at "Golden Arches" and went down to 40 feet. We only had a few drills to complete, so we got to spend some time exploring and looking at the marine life. It was starting to feel like diving! After lunch we went to "Kiewi Point" for our final dive before certification. We finished out underwater compass navigation and 'hover' drills quickly, then spent the rest of the dive exploring, seeing many interesting fish, diving as deep as 60 feet, which is the limit for a PADI Open Water certification. After the dive one of the instructors introduced us to the other diver's as "the worlds newest divers". Yay! We're certified!

Back on shore we got all of our paperwork filled out and received our temporary certification cards. Then we went downstairs and Rick went over to Jake's for a drink while Randy spent some time looking over the dive gear that they had for sale at Jack's. Randy was especially eyeing a high-tech wrist mounted dive computer with a wireless tank pressure gauge. A new hobby with cool new gadgets!

After a nap back in the room, we headed over to Jack's and picked out new snorkels, fins, regulators and dive computers. It's a good set of gear for the diving I'm sure we'll be doing over the coming years. Afterwards we walked around looking for somewhere to eat, finally ending up at Huggo's, where we got a table right along the water. The food was very good, which explains why the place is always so busy.

Wednesday, February 5: Our plan was to rent some tanks and BC's and go for an easy shore dive to try out our new skills and new gear. While we were figuring out where to dive, the staff at Jack's pointed out that one of their instructors was about to head to the dock to do an introductory dive and he could carry our gear over in the company van. What luck! We zipped over to the hotel to change, and when we got back we found that they had substituted much nicer 'demo' gear for us to use, all at no charge! We really appreciated that. Randy rented a small underwater digital camera to check out (until he gets a proper housing for our Coolpix 5000!). We headed to the dock with Jon, the dive instructor, and Jim, who was vacationing from Tacoma, near Seattle. We all went in the water and we headed out past the breakwater to wait for Jon and Jim. We descended down and proceeded to spend about 50 minutes scouting around the reef, down to about 40 feet. The new dive computers worked really well, activating automatically when we hit the water, then reading out depth, remaining air time and bottom time. They even have a 'reminder' beep if you breath too quickly, which helped Randy extend his air several times. Have to concentrate on slow steady breathing!

Afterwards we grabbed a quick sandwich and then headed North, following the coast all the way to Pololu Beach. Along the way we went from fairly dry conditions, to rain forest like lush green jungles. At the end of the road is a narrow rugged trail down the side of the mountain to a black sand beach, dropping around 1000 feet in a very short distance. The beach was really beautiful, with lots of fine black sand (gray when it's dry, actually). After climbing back up the hill we hopped back in the car and headed back to Kona. Back in town we walked down to a Thai restaurant and had dinner, then back to the room to get to sleep, we have an early morning tomorrow!