Starting off the day, We made our way back to NELHA. At the building, we got to learn more about their systems to cooling the building. Our guide, whose name was also Nelson, explained to us that the building uses cold deep sea water to produce up to 70 gallons of water a day. To do this, the building has a cooling system in which hot air is pushed out of pipes at the top of the building by cold air where the deep sea water is. This system acts as an air conditioning system, keeping the facility at what seemed like a cool 70 degrees.
After the building, we went to two other places on the NELHA property. The first stop was an aquaculture farm. At the aquaculture farm, there were kampuchea and grouper mainly. The grouper were around 300 pounds and were just about to be shipped to aquariums. Our new guide explained to us that groupers release 3,000,000 eggs and produce 10% of that in larvae. The species then has a large amount of die off in the larval stage, producing a very small amount of fish.
Next, we went to an abalone farm. Abalone are essentially a marine snail that has no brain. The farm produces millions of abalone that are shipped to local shops and around the Hawaiian islands.
After getting home and taking a 5 hour break, we made our way to the boas so we could load up for the black water dive. Before the boat ride stresses were high because we were going to be diving in pitch black water. That all changed when we dove into the abyss. We saw siphonophores, squid, jellyfish, and many other marine animals during our stent in the water. My personal favorite were the squid because a whole school swam around us for 5 minutes of the dive. One squid got stranded away from the pack and swam directly into my chest.
Overall, black water dives are a great experience and while it sucks that you can’t bring cameras, it is amazing to see what lives at the bottom of the ocean.
