Our Kauai Adventure- Day 7

Friday morning was our day for Scuba diving! We got up early to be at Tunnels Beach (on the North Shore) by 8pm.  Our guide was a super nice Frenchman who had done at least 6,000 dives. Sounded great to me.  I was SUPER nervous because it had been about 5 years since I last went diving.  Tunnels was a shore dive, so he gave us a quick refresher course on the gear, dressed up in our gear, inflated our BCDs (vest), and paddled out to the tube with the dive flag in it.  As soon as he put the flag up and gave us all the okay sign, we started dropping down to the bottom holding onto the drop rope.  Before I even hit bottom, I started hyperventilating and made a signal that I couldn't breathe and "I'm out of here".  He tried to get me to relax and stay under, but it wasn't happening.  Anyhow, he left Steven and the other guy hanging out on the bottom while he met me at the top and convinced me to give it one more shot. I did, and was glad for it. We went along the bottom and saw several sleeping sea turtles and swam thru the tunnels in the reef. It was super cool to look up and see the sun peeping thru the "tunnels" in the reef. It was truly an amazing experience (once I realized that I was not going to die)! We did two dives with one tank each.  While on our second dive, we saw a gigantic stingray sleeping on the bottom (probably the biggest one I had ever seen). His body was at least the size of our 8 yo, Hunter. We also got about 2-3 feet away from a white reef shark.  He was about 4 feet long. Finally he took us to the "turtle cleaning station".  This was a really cool place!  The turtles would come to the certain area of the reef and let tons of little fish come clean off their shells, then they would swim off. It was like they were going thru the car wash!  We would later snorkel out the this cleaning station and Steven got some absolutely amazing pictures.

So amazing! He hung out there for quite a while, so they began to get used to him and would get closer.  You can't touch them because it ruins the oils on their shell and would allow bacteria to start growing on them.  We also saw this awesome stingray just swimming below us. I was glad he kept his distance from us.

Later in the day, we found ourselves hiking down the Ho'opi'i Falls.  This hike was like walking on a paved sidewalk for us. After the hikes we had already experienced, this was awesome!  There are two sets of falls on this trail. The picture below is the second (or lowest) one.

We just walked down to see it.

This is a picture of the upper waterfall. We just loved hearing the sounds and....

Jumping in!!!

Pretty fun times! There is a saying, that if you see the locals doing it, then it is safe. So, after seeing some of the "locals" jumping on, we went for it. Funny story, when we were waiting for our departing plane back to Honolulu, we saw the family of "locals" waiting for their plane.  At least we all didn't die!

We took a different, more adventurous trail on the way back up to the jeep. These vines were huge and pretty neat to walk amongst.  We made our way along the rivers edge the rest of the way back. Pretty amazing day I would say (and for the record, yes Steven, I will go scuba diving with you again, despite almost dying).