dive! tutukaka

One of the favorable side effects of sleeping in a car (there aren’t many…) is you’re already awake to see the sunrise. Upon waking (for the third or fourth time) we discovered that our ‘campsite’ was a gorgeous section of surf beach, under a pastel sky.

The dive trip had an 8 o’clock start, so we headed in the direction of the Dive! Tutukaka dive center when we woke up, with Ann quizzing me on dive theory on the way since it had been two years I dove, in Honduras. We had a nice ~1 hour trip out to the Poor Knights Islands from the Tutukaka Coast, then jumped in the ‘warm’ water which didn’t quite compare to what I was used to from the Caribbean or what Ann was used to from the Red Sea! We had two nice dives, with lunch and hot soup in between. We saw tons of morays, some stingrays, toadfish, colorful nudibranchs, and lots of wrasses and angelfish. My favorite part of the dives was when we went up inside an underwater cave on our second one, and poked our heads up into a 2m-wide air bubble – and took out our regulators, breathing without assistance 8m below the surface of the water!! The air was kind of stagnant, so we only took a breath or two, but it was still a cool experience.

On our way back, the guide took the boat into the largest sea cave in the world, and one of the instructors jumped out with a snorkel and underwater camera to take pictures of some sharks poachers had killed and ditched in the cave, so they could be reported to DOC.

After the dive, we checked into a holiday park, showered and changed, and Ann took me out to a really nice dinner at a restaurant on the harbor near the dive center.