One of the world’s most geographically isolated places, Hawaii’s volcanic seascape is a haven for marine life ranging from mating humpback whales to night dive manta rays to endemic fish species. Tim Rock explains Hawaii’s unique appeal.
Molokini Crater, Hawaii © David Fleetham. Used with permission.
Diving Hawaii – Dive Happy Episode 23 Show Notes
- Kickstarter Campaign for 50 Best Dives In Hawaii – Tim and David Fleetham’s book
- David Fleetham’s website – DavidFleetham.com
- Tim’s website – DoubleBlue.com
- Manta Pacific Research Foundation
Dive Happy Podcast Newsletter
Join the free Dive Happy podcast newsletter. Get the next podcast episode sent to you direct:
Diving Hawaii – Dive Happy Episode 23 Transcript
[0:00:34.9] CM: Hello, welcome to Dive Happy, the podcast about finding the best scuba diving in Asia. I’m y our host Chris Mitchell and on this episode I’m joined by Tim Rock, coauthor of the 50 Best Dives in Hawaii.
Tim, welcome back.
[0:00:20.1] TR: Hi Chris, how are you, great to be back.
[0:00:22.2] CM: Thanks, Tim. Now, you point out in your book that Hawaii is further from the continent than any other island group on the planet. When you look at the map, you realise Hawaii really is in the middle of nowhere. It’s thousands of miles, not just from the USA but from Japan and Papua New Guinea. What has this geographical isolation meant for the marine life in the waters around Hawaii?
[0:00:51.6] TR: Yeah, that’s really true, it’s pretty much out there. I think if you drift away in a boat from Hawaii, you better have plenty of water and extra fish.
[0:01:05.4] CM: Yeah, when you centre the Google Map on Hawaii, it’s just like wow, there is nothing but blue around it for thousands of miles in every direction.
[0:01:14.5] TR: Yeah, that’s actually what the attraction is. It starts with the biggest of the ocean’s creatures and goes down to some of the tiniest ones. The things that have managed to make it there and survive have kind of adapted and so that’s why it has such amazing endemic life, there’s not only fish but some of the invertebrate life, the little crabs and the shrimp that we like to take pictures of have evolved into their own little species and there’s a lot of off shoots of different fish that we don’t see elsewhere, especially like some of the butterfly fish and some of those oval shaped kind of fish.
They’ve somehow drifted in from Japan. I think it’s when the currents change like that, it’s like a hundred-year event. Maybe every year, every hundred years there would be a chance of something making its way all the way to Hawaii and then of course, it would have to adapt to the waters there and stick and hold its own. Over thousands and thousands of years, Hawaii has developed its own reef life, its own sea life. It even has some endemic corals there.
Has become really pretty special and then because it is situated out in the middle of nowhere and it’s mostly volcanic, it kind of sits on top of a shelf and as those shelves cascade down, they attract different kinds of marine life which in turn attracts a lot of variety and marine mammals that like to eat some of that marine life. You get all kinds of whales, dolphins, porpoises, big fish like oceanic sharks, they’ve seen great whites there.
They have the oceanic White Tip in some of the areas especially around their fishing fads. And then, there’s a regular humpback whale season, it’s really — when we started doing the book. I’ve been there quite a few times and I knew it had a lot to offer but by the time we finished with the book, my coauthor David Fleetham who has been there probably 35 years now, really educated me and why he likes living there. I can really see why he’s done National Geographic stories about Hawaii for the magazine and is well worthy of such a thing.
[0:03:55.4] CM: Yeah, as I was saying to you before we started recording, the book really captures the sense of Hawaii being this unique place and particularly obviously, I mean, it’s maybe most famous to people like myself who don’t know much about it before reading the book, it’s where Jurassic Park was filmed and obviously we always see Hawaii featured in movies, t he huge volcanic dramatic sweeping landscapes. Are those kind of landscapes, are they mirrored underwater?
[0:04:24.9] TR: They are, those big volcanic fingers, they go down underneath as well as some of the areas that you see up in the lava fields, maybe after cone or something like that, there are a big, what they call lava tubes that have made these really beautiful deep caves that people can go back into and that’s where they find a lot of the unique invertebrate life, is back in the caves.
Inside the lava tubes, a lot of really beautiful and crusting type of corals like the yellow [inaudible] corals are in there. At night, it’s just spectacular that even during the day, you can see quite a bit because with a good torch, you can search around in there, maybe you’ll find white tip and a sleeping turtle and then crab that’s only seen in Hawaiian waters and then a beautiful coral covered roof of the cave or something.
That’s a lot what divers look for, it’s not really like thick with corals like Indonesia or Philippines or something like that. But it’s a completely different type of thing where the terrain you know, continues down into the sea and then the ocean has taken its brush to it.
[0:05:44.8] CM: Very poetic way of putting it. There’s a couple of dive sites that you bring up in the book which have very evocative names, one is Skull Cave which has holes that look like the two eye sockets in a skull, another one’s called the Lava Dome and the one that really impressed me, the photo which must have been a drone shot is that the Molokini Marine Reserve which looks like a crater in the middle of the sea.
[0:06:14.3] TR: Yeah, that’s like the most popular place and usually, what they try to do when they make the dive there, is dive the outside of the crater because that’s kind of – it’s more exposed to the open ocean and so you tend to do like a drift and take your chances of maybe running into a whale or if you’re lucky, one of the rare monk seals that still stay within the inhabited islands, there’s a lot of monk seals up in the marine preserve.
About half of the state of Hawaii or even more so actually, all of the western part of the state is a huge marine preserve, that were set aside by the Bush administration and then even more by the Obama administration. That area is only opened to biologist and park rangers and that sort of things. There is some rare creatures up there like the Hawaiian monk seal but they sneak in to the islands and if you go around the crater, you can have a chance to see one of those, I have a chance to see a lot of different ocean sharks.
Manta rays are very common there and so they try to do kind of a wild dive on the outside and then you go back in with the protected area of the crater and everybody sits around and does their off-gassing a little bit and then eats a sandwich or two and then you hop in for a little more mellow dive inside the crater for the second dive.
[0:07:48.6] CM: You say that place is really popular, is it easy to get there? Leave in the morning and come back for lunch?
[0:07:54.7] TR: Yeah, if you live in Maui, especially, it’s not a bad trip. A lot of diver shops just specialize in going there. It’s really not that hard if you’re over in Maui to find a trip over to the crater and everybody pretty much seeks that one out. It’s kind of like going to Blue Corner in Palau or something like that. It’s the popular one out of Maui.
That’s what I found out when I was doing the book with David, I was — most of my diving experience has been around Kona and Oahu. The Maui sites really impressed me and also some of the really nice ones off Kawaii. But, diving out at that crater is kind of out of this world I think and it’s remained that way even though it’s become very popular. Just one of those kind of special places, again, like Blue Corner in Palau.
[0:08:48.7] CM: Yeah, that’s awesome, that’s exactly what I was about to ask you is that because it’s become so popular, does it still deserve its reputation but obviously it does, which is fantastic because it’s one of the most dramatic looking dive sites from the top side that I think I’ve seen anywhere.
[0:09:04.1] TR: Yeah, David has a couple of aerial shots, he’s quite the drone master and he’s got some sharks looking straight down on the crater and you can just see that at one time, it was just a massive volcano that is slowly sunken into the sea. But that’s been good for the area , it’s attracted a lot of marine life and it continues to do so.
[0:09:29.5] CM: The other thing that’s really popular in Hawaii that comes up again and again in dive magazines is the manta ray night dive which is at Kona as well, I think?
[0:09:40.4] TR: Yeah, that’s off of Kona. It’s another one of those things, it’s pretty popular with all the dive shops now and it’s offered to snorkelers and it’s offered to divers and even the liveaboards like if you go on the Kona Aggressor, what they will try to do is either kind of stop or end the trip there. After all the divers have left, they’ll turn their lights back on and you can go out as a liveaboard person and kind of have all the manta rays to yourself but it’s like a- it really is like a dive that just don’t do anywhere else. It’s more like going to a rock concert I’d say than it is to a scuba dive.
There’s a dive site, well, it is at a dive site actually that’s called garden eels if I remember right here in the – try to look that up. Garden Eels that usually, if you go out with somebody like the famous guy for this mantis site is a guy named Keller Laros and Keller has become an expert on these mantas and actually started a foundation. But he’s just an absolutely entertaining and wonderful guy who yeah, the Manta Pacific Research Foundation is the name of this foundation.
It’s a very popular thing to go out with Keller and get the briefing because I mean, he knows everything about manta rays and he also is one of those gifted kind of people who can remember everyone’s name. While he’s talking, you know, even if he’s just met you the first time, he’ll be like yeah, you know, “Tim, you’ve seen manta rays before, haven’t you?” We go “Yeah,” and then he go, “How about you John?” “I never seen one.”
You know, puts the whole group at ease, it’s really a wonderful briefing and what you usually do is you dive the Garden Eel site first which is a really nice site, there’s a lot of black sand and obviously garden eels and a huge school of yellow snapper and lots of kind of where things like little knife fish. You do that as a dive and then you come back up and you wait for the sun to go down and that’s kind of where the rock concert feel comes in, you know? Other boats start to arrive and people will be out on the back deck playing ukuleles and singing songs and all these people are talking and you know, really excited at the prospect of doing this.
Then the divers go down and they’ll put down lights in a couple of places, really strong lights that’s really strong beams. And then they go around and they put on everybody’s tank, they’ll try to put a different colored little light stick so you can stick with your group because once you’re underwater and all this action starts happening, it’s pretty easy to lose your group, so you try to stick with all the guys that have the green light sticks on the back of their tanks or all around the light stick.
That just adds to it and meanwhile, there is a whole bunch of people holding like a couple of big circles up top on snorkel and they’re waiting for the mantas to come and as it gets darker and darker, the lights get stronger and stronger and they start attracting plankton. When you’re doing this with each group, with a lot of light sticks on their tanks, when you enter the water, everyone sits around the lights and sometimes there’s three or four sets of these big powerful lights pointing straight up from the sea floor up into the surface and all the group start gathering around the lights, that’s also part of this whole scene. Which kind of also makes it feel like a rock show or something.
And then up top of those lights, there’s people holding basically kind of like big hula hoops and they’re floating and they’re looking down to see the mantas, so they’re looking down into the lights and they all have some sort of identifying lights on too. There’s lights everywhere, there are big powerful lights and there’s you know, lights come in off all the divers and then all the bubbles are going up through the water and the water column and then just out of the blue, out of nowhere, all of a sudden a manta ray will just swoop in, here’s this huge thing just not really paying any attention to the divers or the snorkelers, just going crazy eating and they come with their mouths wide open and they’re just flying.
It can be anywhere from like two to 20 of them, it’s just amazing really. It goes on well beyond your air tank, even though it’s only at about 40 feet of water. It’s exciting and this brings out lots of other things too, you’ll see a lot of conga eels swimming around, you know, sometimes even between your legs and they take the opportunity to go hunt, there will be some poor little fish sleeping and you’ll just sneak up on the fish and gobble it down so you can get a little bit of predatory action when you get tired of watching manta rays too.
But the whole thing is really exciting and you know, the mantas are pretty used to divers at this point. They swoop by and come extremely close and it’s really hard to think of any other thing in the marine world that can equal this, it’s own little spectacle that just really can’t be matched.
[0:15:19.7] CM: Wow, with the – it’s almost kind of guaranteed you’re going to see a manta as well, right? It’s a really frequent – they turn up very frequently to that spot.
[0:15:29.2] TR: Yeah, the eel gardens actually has a manta cleaning station so if you dive it in the morning, it’s a better chance to see a manta or two in the daylight and then the kind of late afternoon dive, they don’t seem to be around, I don’t know if they go out to sea here, take a nap before they do this. Not sure really what they’re up to but I haven’t seen them very much in the afternoon although you might see one zip by.
When the thing starts, of course, there’s usually at least one that shows up and quite a few others. There is a swell that goes in there sometimes, there’s been – I think it’s southern storm then every once in a while, the southern swell can affect it. That’s when it’s not the best time to do it because it can get kind of rough in that bay and people are kind of swaying back and forth. But that’s not usually the norm and so usually when it’s calm and protected in the bay, the manta show up I’d say go do it.
[0:16:35.0] CM: Yeah.
[0:16:35.1] TR: There’s something else you can do at night that Kona is kind of famous for although it’s starting to catch on in other places around the world but Kona was the first people to start the black water diving. Some of the dive shops have that really well perfected and that’s where you go out off to continental shelf, maybe a mile. You go out quite aways, the city lights start looking small and drop down lights and you try to shoot little mackerel creatures and usually, that’s what’s attracted but every once in a while, something big will come in like a marlin and stand water might even got run into by a whale shark once.
[0:17:16.4] CM: Wow.
[0:17:17.9] TR: Having one of those come out of the inky black, make for an exciting dive too.
[0:17:25.6] CM: You need to be very happy being in the dark and also with your buoyancy because you’re in the middle of – well [inaudible] the steps, aren’t you?
[0:17:35.3] TR: It’s a little bit of a rodeo experience, yeah. Because everything is pretty much inky black around you and you stay fairly busy trying to look for tiny creatures and then focus on them. It’s not easy photography at all but it can be very rewarding because you get some really bizarre young larval creatures.
[0:17:55.4] CM: From the tiny stuff you can see in black water diving, there’s a couple of other really big things that Hawaii is famous for, it’s like the humpback whales which have their own particular season in Hawaii, don’t they?
[0:18:07.5] TR: They do, it’s usually like starting, if they’re lucky, late November but usually starting at least in December and running through March to the early part of April. The humpbacks come in and this is when the females, they have their babies and soon as that happens then there’s a lot of interested males trying to fight over a female so you get these large groups and Hawaii is the place where I’ve seen photos of the largest groups of these animals.
Sometimes you’ll see a group of 20 to 30 males chasing one female. They fight each other for the right to mate with her so there’s all kinds of action going on, some they call the fighting and the jockeying for position and everything to impress the female. They call it a rowdy bunch and it’s all these males trying to knock off the other guy in order to be able to go mate with the female.
[0:19:11.4] CM: Wow. So you spend a lot —
[0:19:11.9] TR: Hawaii has the whales protected. So you can’t actually get in the water with the whales but a lot of the dive operations will use a hard hull, zodiac type of boat and is very easy to take a GoPro or a house camera with a wide angle lens and just put it over the side because the whales are curious animals and they will come up close to the boat sometimes and if you are lucky even a female with the baby might want to use a boat to hide under.
She would tired of all of these crazy attention that happens when all the males find her and sometimes she’ll just actually want to go and float under the boat, act like part of the boat. So you can reach over the side and put your camera on the water and click off a few shots and get some in water shots of the whales and then of course, humpbacks are known as the most spectacular most active whale. A lot of things that they do around the surface.
And so this is where you see these amazing shots of whales launching themselves almost completely out of the water. They are not really sure why. Sometimes they think it might just to look and see what is going on, sometimes it might be to get rid of parasites, a lot of times it is to attract the female or communicate somehow with other whales but there is this 40 ton creature all of a sudden, you know? You might see it disappear and 30 seconds later is aerial it is out of the water. It is truly one of nature’s most amazing events is when you see a whale breach.
[0:21:00.1] CM: I assume then that during humpback season, obviously yes, you can’t be in the water but I assume there is plenty of boats out there taking people out the see the whales and hoping they’re going to breach and basically whale spotting.
[0:21:13.0] TR: Yeah and whale watching is a big deal in Hawaii and there is a lot of really expert guys that do it. The bunch that I go with, there is a group out of Kona called Whales in the Wild and they have what is basically a Canadian commando boat from the Canadian Military but it’s got like I think three or four 200 horse power engines on the back and you actually have to strap yourself in with seatbelts on this thing and they might see a whale breaching.
You know it seems like a half mile away and they say, “Okay hold on,” and man this thing just takes off and they’re there by the second breach. The ride is as much fun as the whales but by using a boat like this, if you are a photographer it really helps because they can get you over to where the action might be taking place and you can get some really nice shots as a result.
[0:22:11.5] CM: Right, it’s kind of impressive that if you went to Hawaii in February or March or seemed to be there for the humpback season, you could then also obviously do the manta night dive and you could also have the chance to go out looking for sharks because that seems to be another really popular thing as well though. Bait dives that you talked about in the book.
[0:22:33.6] TR: Sorry, which ones Chris?
[0:22:34.7] CM: The shark bait dive I think that.
[0:22:37.1] TR: Oh yes, well that is done off of Oahu and it’s done about three miles out and deep water Galapagos sharks live off that area and there are crab traps set out there as I understand it and when the fisherman pull up these traps so the sharks would become accustomed to following them up and trying to get anything that might fall out of the traps. So a couple of dive operators up on the north shore have built big cages, big enough to hold a dozen or so people.
And they have a buoy that is three miles out, so they won’t bring any sharks in close to the people and you basically tie the boat up to that and they put the cage over next to the boat and you can slide into the cage and they throw a little bit of bait out and the Galapagos sharks they get curious and they come and they swim around the cage and you do this if you want to, you can hold your breath and go down and there is a big plexiglass window that you can look out and then see all of the sharks swimming around.
But that is not really necessary because all you need is a mask and snorkel and you can just put your head under the water and there’s a little area you can look through between the cage bars and the sharks swim by and it’s really easy to see. I really enjoy it because they also do a lot of shark education. They tell people why sharks exists, what their function is in the ocean and that they’re not dangerous and almost all situations and people get a really appreciation for sharks.
And they get to see quite a spectacle too because when I did it a few years ago, I think we probably had 20 Galapagos shark swimming around and if you are lucky something else will show up like a silky shark or they have kind of a lemon shark there I think that’s seasonal that they see and then also there is a lot of turtles around all of that also and sometimes tiger sharks can be around. So you have a chance of seeing a tiger shark too.
So this is really, really nice and something anybody can do running really from about age five to age 90, anyone can hop in this cage and just put their head under the water and see how beautifully sharks swim, how graceful they are and yeah, it’s another one of these unique Hawaii offerings.
[0:25:14.9] CM: Yeah, absolutely. It sounds fantastic.
[0:25:18.4] TR: And you know if you are lucky while you are doing this if there is any whales nearby you can hear their songs underwater and it is the same during the whale season there. If you are diving, you can hear all the calls and all of the whistles and the songs that they sing and the grunts and the noises and you know the whales might be two miles away but their songs are so amazing that they really carry through the water and it sounds like the whale is right next to you while you’re making a dive.
[0:25:49.4] CM: I was just thinking about, we talked about all of these different unique experiences you can have. Obviously Hawaii is a big state. I think it’s eight different islands in total and –
[0:26:01.5] TR: That just in the inhabited area and then of course, what they call the north west islands that’s a lot more different islands and a lot more territory. So, you know, I think water wise it’s probably the US’ biggest state. I don’t know off the top, just the top of my head I am guessing but.
[0:26:21.7] CM: Yeah, I mean with the very useful map, the maps you’ve got at the back of the book, it just outlines where the different sites are located across the islands and it struck me as someone who has never been there that there is quite a lot of travelling involved in between the different islands. It is not like you can just get on a boat one morning at one island and go to a dive site or another or it would be quite a long pull right? It’s quite a big difference there.
[0:26:44.8] TR: Yeah, you either probably need to plan a few weeks or plan a few trips you know? Hawaii is fascinating above the water as well you know? Hopefully we have illustrated with our photos. You know there is a lot of beautiful waterfalls and hikes and you know rainforest and jungle. Like over on Kona the volcanoes national park, that place is absolutely amazing and then there is a couple of craters that you can hike up to.
I mean Hawaii is one of the few places you can go skiing in the morning, snow skiing and in the afternoon go make a dive, you know? You can do it the other way around but you can pull it off in Hawaii because you know it has still some active craters and volcanoes going on and there is even a new island forming off of Kona.
[0:27:39.3] CM: Really? Wow.
[0:27:41.3] TR: Yeah and it has a name too, I don’t remember off the top of my head but they have already named this island that doesn’t even exist yet. So the closest volcano is national park, you know it’s got the volcano aspect but it has some really wonderful jungle trails and then there is a town that is not very far away that is actually up in the rain forest and it’s just super lush around this town. We stayed in a bed and breakfast there a while back and just all the plant life and everything. It was a house that was built in 1890 I think. It had the bathtub that was made out of wood. Hawaii is a place that you should the experience of the land as well as the sea, it’s got a lot to offer.
[0:28:31.1] CM: Yeah absolutely. I was thinking you mentioned earlier about liveaboards. I mean why would a liveaboard typically focus its attention? I mean would you be on a liveaboard there for a week or just four days or what is the kind of?
[0:28:43.7] TR: Yeah, the Aggressor is one I am familiar with and it’s been there for quite a few years now and basically they’ll start up on the northwest coast of Kona and just rundown all the coast through all the sites. There is probably 50 or 60 popular dive sites along the Kona coast and they try to give you and experience where you can see also the cream of the crop and like our 50 best book does and try to end it at the southernmost point, which is where the waters converge.
And then there’s a good chance to seeing polagic action and that kind of thing but the dives in between there, like we spent a whole day in a place called Manuka Bay once and that was popular with everyone because there is a school of dolphins come in there and while you are not supposed to approach dolphins you can go snorkelling but if the dolphins come to you well hey, that’s fine. So a lot of people just spend time snorkelling out into the bay and waving for the dolphins to swim by and got some beautiful dolphin photos.
The spinner dolphins, and a lot of the people that enjoyed the diving more, it was a great place for giant frog fish and they were finding the striped conga eels and a lot of really colourful invertebrate and marine life, fish life. So it had something for everybody and you have to spend a whole day there on the liveaboard, which was nice and also night diving there and then they just moved down to another place like the Ka’au Crater or one of the other popular sites and so it allows you to get a much more “in depth look” at the areas.
[0:30:27.0] CM: Okay and as we start to bring this to a close, obviously the other very famous area in Hawaii is Pearl Harbor and obviously you can’t go diving there because that’s a war grave but there is quite a few other wrecks around Hawaii as well though isn’t there?
[0:30:44.1] TR: Yeah that was when we were running through this book that surprised me as well.
[0:30:47.8] CM: Me too.
[0:30:49.0] TR: Even Maui has a couple pretty good wrecks and off of Pearl Harbor, you know there’s planes, there’s ships, there is some purposed sunk ships and there’s one that I believe the submarine company, the Atlantis people have sunk one or two wrecks so their guests can go swimming around them but they are out in sand flats so they’ve become a real fish attractors because there is not much else around. So all the fish gravitate over to the wrecks.
So you see a lot of turtles. If you want to see turtles, if you are a turtle person, Hawaii is the place to go. Virtually every dive site it seems has a lot of green sea turtles and even a few [inaudible] and then the fish schools are attracted to the bigger wrecks just a really big thick schools of the snapper and the goat fish and the sand flats, if you are lucky you can see a squadron of beagle rays. There is quite a bit of the central part of Oahu and a lot of those are wrecks.
[0:31:51.8] CM: Wow, there is so much stuff to do in Hawaii and so the only question is which brings us down to earth a bit, the bump is that I have this impression of Hawaii as being quite expensive place to go on vacation. I mean would that be true or are there ways that you can cut your budget with that obviously having to cut safety system.
[0:32:13.3] TR: Yeah and it is best to work with your dive shop and tell them what your budget is going to be but in this day of Airbnb’s once we get this virus thing under control I think, the Airbnbs are pretty good deal. You can shop around within your budget and see what you can find. You don’t always need a car. Some of the dive shops will pick you up if you are staying fairly close that’s why I say work with a dive shop. They may have somebody that they can recommend.
On Oahu of course is a big popular spot. So it has a tendency to be a little more expensive but it’s kind of shop around I’d say. You can land a really nice place. Maui has got some incredible resorts or I found like a little place that was over on Kona that had been part of the Japanese family for a long time and it was pretty reasonable. I think it was only 45 dollars a night or something. So I was able to rent a car and stay in it. They had an old section that was still the old Japanese thing, that looked like Hawaii back in the 1900s and then it had like a new section too that overlooked the coffee area and so I got real nice sunset every night from my little balcony room and was able to hop on the car and drive around and visit anything I wanted to.
You can do shore drive you know for Kona so that’s another thing. We really recommend that people who haven’t dived there before use a dive shop, at least to experience some of the walk in dives first. Because you know waves can change there quickly. It is not famous for surfing for no reason. So you have to know what is going on but you know once you understand this seasonality of some of these places, you could probably do that on your own. You could probably find an Airbnb to stay and if you are goal is just to go snorkelling, there is a lot of beaches with shower facilities and little restaurants nearby and everything that you can go and get in the water yourself.
Swim around and do whatever you want and quite a few of them are suitable for beach dives too. But we’d recommend that you go with somebody first and get the hang of it first before you just jump in your own, you know?
[0:34:40.8] CM: Awesome. So the other thing as well with the launch of your new book, you are doing something a bit different to get it going, which is using Kickstarter is that right?
[0:34:50.8] TR: Yeah, we thought we do that as a format to get it out there and by using Kickstarter, we are able to offer some kind of initial pre-internet prices I issued. So people can buy an eBook from us and it is available either for Kindle or for Apple iBooks and you can get the soft cover edition from us. And then we have some other perks to go with it. David is pretty famous for his mural photography. So we offer a couple of prints from David and from myself.
That you can get this poster size, 24 by 36 frame posters and that comes as part of one of the perks and also we have a special launch dry fit shirt that we’ve made that has Hawaii on it and dolphins all over the place and even a picture of the cover on one’s sleeve and that’s our official launch t-shirt and we have a face mask that’s good for sun or you could even wear it as a COVID covering over your regular COVID mask, we have that.
And so all of those are mixed in as part of packages or rewards that people can buy for supporting the project even though we did most of the work ourselves, we had some expenses. So it is a very modest amount that we are trying to reach and that we hope people will support us in that one and then it will be available on all the usual outlets pretty soon as well especially if you like Amazon and Apple iBook’s and those places.
[0:36:33.4] CM: Awesome. Tim, well I wish you every success with the Kickstarter and then the general sales afterwards and Hawaii is now added to my ever growing list of places I really want to go and dive. So that is your fault.
[0:36:47.6] TR: Okay.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:36:49.7] CM: Thanks very much for listening to the Dive Happy Podcast. You can see the show notes for this episode and browse all the other episodes at divehappy.com/podcast. You can also sign up for the Dive Happy newsletter so you get notified when the next episode comes out. Sign up at divehappy.com/podcast. I pinky promise I won’t spam you and finally if you enjoyed the podcast, please tell other divers about it. Please rate the podcast on iTunes, it really helps boost the show’s visibility. If you’re not sure how to rate a podcast in iTunes, please go to divehappy.com/podcast for details on how to do that.
Thanks for listening, until next time, dive safe, dive happy.
Browse More DiveHappy Podcasts
- #36: Tonga Humpback Whales
- #35: Tubbataha Reef Diving
- #34: The Father Of Palau Diving: Francis Toribiong
- #33: Sogod Bay Diving
- #32: LAMAVE Whale Shark Research
- #31: Dream Job: Marine Biologist
- #30: Dumaguete Diving
- #29: Komodo Diving
- #28: Diving the Yonaguni Monument, Japan
- #27: Diving Koh Lanta
- #26: Moalboal Diving
- #25: Diving The Banda Sea - Part 2
- #24: Diving The Banda Sea - Part 1
- #23: Diving Hawaii
- #22: Diving Malapascua
- #21: Diving Taiwan
- #20: Diving Japan
- #19: Diving HTMS Chang And Alhambra Rock
- #18: Diving The WW2 Shipwrecks Of Coron
- #17: Diving Lembongan
- #16: Diving Romblon: the Philippines’ Secret Super Macro Paradise
- #15: Triton Bay Diving 2020
- #14: Dream Job: Liveaboard Cruise Director
- #13: Diving Triton Bay
- #12: Diving Tubbataha Reef
- #11: Diving Yap
- #10: Diving Truk Lagoon
- #09: Diving Sogod Bay
- #08: Misool Eco Resort
- #07: Diving Palau
- #06: The Manta Rays Of Myanmar’s Black Rock
- #05: Diving Myanmar
- #04: Diving Bali
- #03: Diving Cenderawasih Bay
- #02: Diving Komodo
- #01: Diving Raja Ampat
- Dive Happy Podcast Home Page
