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Swimming at night

On Wednesday, our first full day, we drove across the island to Kona to dive with Manta Rays. At night. It was very cool and not as scary as some would think. We booked the tour through C Big Island Tours.
There were about 14 people on the boat we took out as the sun was setting. The captain didn't take us
far, Maybe a mile. The place we stopped already had about a dozen boats with people in the water. I could see the lights under the water. The captain explained what we would be doing and
then he and "Buddha" handed out the masks and we got in the water.
I'm not sure how deep the water was I figured about 30 feet. We were hanging onto a surfboard with a PVC grab rail all around it. Buddha was dragging us around the water. When the lights went on there were fish, lots of fish swimming up and eating the plankton attracted to the lights.
We did not have to wait long till a Manta Ray made an appearance.
They came up at us from out of the depths. The first thing you could see was the opening of their mouth.
The fish tended to move out of the way and it came up toward the lights. The manta rays would swim straight up at us and then at the last minute do a back flip scooping up the plankton that had been attracted to the light on our float. It was very cool and the manta ray would do the flips several times before diving back into the depths.




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