Dan O'Brien '20

Today was a great final day. The water was too choppy to dock the boat on our pier, so we had to take vans to another port nearby. The boat ride only ended up being about 30 seconds to our dive site. Trinity CavesThis was our first dive site of the morning. It...

Todays dives were crazy. I never thought I would get a chance to dive a shipwreck. On our first dive we swam through a ship called the Kittiwake. Once a ship in the US Navy, it was designed to rescue submarines and was in commission from 1946 to 1994. It actually picked up Buzz Aldrin after one...

Today was very relaxing. Our first dive was in a different spot over the same wall that we dove yesterday. Once again, it was beautiful. The water is a little bit darker 80 feet down. Everything seems saturated in a deep blue. On deep dives, the visibility can dramatically change. Most of the fish I saw were...

We had an awesome day today. This morning we went on our deep dive off the edge of a sea wall. Swimming next to this wall, we were in about 4000 feet of water. Our maximum depth for the dive was 100 feet. One of the most interesting parts of that dive was the topography of the...

We had a very busy day today. After breakfast we went out on our two dives. Both sites were very pretty. I didn't see too many things out of the ordinary. I did look out for the terminal parrotfish amongst the initial parrotfish, and I was able to find a few schools with their...

Today we went on our first dives. Ocean PointeThis was our first dive site, and it was about a 5 minute boat ride from the pier at the resort. The reef looked amazing. I noticed mostly colorful, soft corals. I did notice some heads that appeared to be bleached. Any coral that had...

We had an awesome first day on the island. Today we had our first snorkel off of the pier by the resort. One of the first things that I noticed about the reef was that it is different from what I am used to seeing in Hawaii. There are mostly small caribbean sea fans with some brain coral and star...

In the morning, we volunteered at Opae 'ula with the Hawaii State Parks to help clean up the Anchialine Pool On a beach right by the airport. First we did a short beach cleanup. Our main goal was to pick up the plastic that had washed up on the beach. Plastic doesn't decompose completely and is super harmful to...

At around 9:30 we left for another tour of the NELHA facilities. This time, we learned about their air conditioning system. In their, buildings, they create a convection current that pushes warm air into a gap in the roof, that then moves out of the building. Beneath the building, in the crawl space, they draw in cold, deep sea...