When we decided to come to Maui, the one thing my husband wanted to do was to scuba dive. We’re certified divers but I’d had a bad experience in the Florida Keys and I wasn’t sure I wanted to dive again. Boy, am I glad we did.
In his research, my husband came across Dive With Harmony and Harmony and Dillon and thought this might be the perfect dive shop with whom to dive. He emailed with Harmony, he spoke with her, and we spoke to her together. She reassured us that not only would I be fine, but I would remember why I wanted to dive in the first place.
We booked two morning dives and the twilight/night dive combo. All of the dives are “shore dives” so you are walking into the water at your own pace. None of the dives we did were deeper than 40 feet. They didn’t need to be! What we sat was AMAZING. The groups are also small. For our morning dives, it was me, my husband, and one other diver. Our little group of four was perfect! Unlike the big dive boats, Harmony keeps the groups small so you really get a guided tour.
We met Dillon and Nick at Airport Beach for our first of two morning dives. Nick was going to be our guide (and confidence coach) and “teacher about all things in the water that we would see.” We ran through a quick “refresher” of the basics since it had been a while. We also learned a few new hand signals since my last dive was in a cold lake in Northern Wisconsin…and there were no octopus, nudi, or sharks! And the whales…we knew we would hear their conversations!
We saw fish, turtles, eels, nudi, and tons of beautiful coral. And we heard the humpbacks! They were chatting with each other! After the Airport Beach dive, we went to Mala Pier for our second dive. After Nick explained why it is such a great place to dive, we headed in. The rocks are a fun challenge but OH is it worth it. Here we saw the “turtle cleaning station,” REEF SHARKS, more turtles, fish and more fish, eels (including Frank), nudi, and tons and tons of beautiful coral.
The next evening, we did both a twilight and night dive at Black Rock. For these dives, we dove with both Harmony and Nick. They had originally thought we’d dive Airport Beach but they decided that Black Rock conditions were perfect. What you see during these dives are not only different from each other, they are different from what you see on a day dive. Using a flashlight took a few minutes of practice, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly.
If you can only swing doing two dives, the twilight and night dives are the ones to do. If you have time to do more, I really recommend two morning dives, too. Harmony’s crew equipped us with everything. Excellent masks and fins. The BCDs were set up and ready to go (although we did run through setting them up and did a full safety check). We had our own dive skins so we used those instead of wetsuits. They were enough in the warm water.
It was a pleasure to Dive with Harmony and Nick. And, when we go back to Maui again sometime in the future, I’m 100% positive we will again!
Mahalo!