Category Archives: SCUBA & Snorkeling

Adventures under the water.

Tonga Chores, Visitors and Jinxes

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Eric spent the entire day yesterday doing boat chores. He changed the pre-filter on the water maker and cleaned the sea strainer, and changed the generator impellor. He also did some good stuff like secure the toaster oven and dish drainer so they don’t go flying when we get hit by a side wave, re-running wires so we could move some of the computer gear to better locations, general reorganizing, and cleaning.

Yesterday was the last day of SCUBA class for Christi. She took her final exam and did three dives in other parts of the harbor. The other dive sites had more life than the site on Tuesday, but were still mostly dead. There were lots more of both starfish and a couple of sea anenomoies. Christi passed the class with flying colors. After three days of being in the sun with her mask on, she has stylish mask tan lines. Continue reading →

SCUBA Diving in Vava’u

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Tuesday — Yesterday Christi started a SCUBA certification class. This is the perfect place. Warm, clear water. An instructor whose native tongue is English. With the favorable exchange rate, the price is good.

The first day of class was mostly lecture with a couple hours in shallow water practicing basic skills. The instructor chided her when he looked in her logbook and saw the dive in Suwarrow to 72 feet and the one in Niue through a cave to 102 feet.

While Christi was in class, Eric was the social butterfly. He stayed at the Aquarium Cafe for a while visiting with the other yachties, then pulled out a kayak and kayaked around the harbor visiting with various boats. Continue reading →

Chimney Dive and Niue Departure

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On Sunday we had Keith from the yacht club and his wife, Sue, over for lunch. We had a nice visit with them. They brought us a batch of pineapple muffins, which we were excited about. Muffins make good passage food.

After lunch we went SCUBA diving with Eric and Gisela at a spot Keith told us about. When he first told us about it, we knew we couldn’t go. It is a more advanced dive to 100 feet, through a cave, and totally out of our league. However, Eric and Gisela are certified rescue divers, so when they arrived in port, we asked them to go with us. They also have a nice underwater diver camera. The dive is called “the chimney”. There is a sheer cliff that drops from 30 to 100 feet. Inside the cliff is a vertical cave, which opens up at the bottom. As you go in the cave, you look up a narrow opening 70 feet tall. From the surface, the opening looks like nothing more than a crack in the surface. The mouth of the cave isn’t visible from the surface, but just outside the mouth of the cave is an old jeep that was washed into the water during Heta. Continue reading →

Snake Gully Dive in Niue

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Niue is a popular dive destination because of the incredible water clarity. The island is made of limestone, which is porous. Rain water simply seeps through the rock into the ocean, rather than forming streams and rivers. It is the water running through the limestone that has carved out all the amazing caves around the island. Since there are no rivers, there is no soil run off to cloud the ocean water. There are neat caves and gullies to explore. There also used to be a lot of beautiful coral, as well, but Cyclone Heta destroyed a lot of it.

Eric had signed up to go on two dives. They only allow certified divers, so they wouldn’t let Christi dive. The dive shop gave Eric a $20 discount for being a yacht club member, so the membership has already paid for itself. Continue reading →

Tour of Niue Caves and Pools

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We rented a car and went on a tour of the island. Our first stop was an early lunch at the ice cream store adjoining the yacht club. They also sell hamburgers, steak sandwiches, chicken paninis, ham paninis, and toasties. We suspect a toastie is a grilled cheese sandwich. We got chicken paninis, which had cream cheese and bell pepper and were quite good.

We headed north. Our first stop was the cave at Palahu. You walk down a scary and steep flight of stairs towards the water.
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At the bottom of the stairs is a large cave that you have to walk through to get to the water. The cave is well lit and you could see most of it from the mouth, but we still carefully checked the corners for the monsters from the movie “The Descent”. The cave has lots of neat stalactites and stalagmites formations. Continue reading →