By Adam Dorfman
I’ve been a recreational diver for 20 years, and over that time I’ve visited many reefs, walls and shipwrecks. I’ve been diving with manta rays, dolphins and numerous shark species, both during the day and in the darkness of the night. This year, I wanted to try a different kind of scuba dive, one that would be totally unique. I found just such a dive: the Pelagic Magic black-water night dive off Hawaii’s Kona coast.
In this video, I include a small portion of the pre-dive briefing. Before we got anywhere near the dive boat, the six divers participating met at Jack’s Diving Locker for “night school,” which was not just a dive briefing, but also an in-depth education. The class lasted about an hour; it was fascinating and kept my attention the entire time.
In my research prior to the dive, I’d read that this very “spooky” dive is not for everyone. Although the Pelagic Magic night dive is a staff favorite at Jack’s Diving Locker, some staff will not participate because it freaks them out. Full disclosure: after listening to all this chatter about the dive, I began to have some apprehension and uneasiness about it myself. Just before we were about to jump into the black water, we were told that “if you get freaked out, don’t be ashamed to come back aboard the boat. It happens all the time.”
I was the first diver on the boat to get my BCD clipped onto the safety tethering system that would keep me from drifting off into the over 4,000-foot abyss. As a visual depth reference is almost nonexistent when looking down at the dark water, I kept a close watch on my depth gauge until I realized that I could use the weighted down-line as a visual reference, as long as I didn’t spin around too much and become entangled in the ropes. The divemasters are watching to make sure that doesn’t happen, but if it does, they’ll quickly help untangle you from the safety line. Once I leveled my buoyancy off at about 45 feet, I let my eyes adjust to the darkness, and within a minute I began to notice strange creatures floating past me in the current. I was about to witness an underwater world that was completely alien to me, and the dive quickly began to live up to its title of “magical.” After using all of my allotted dive time, I surfaced and the only thing I could say was “Wow, I had no idea that was all going on down there in the dark, I want to do it again!”
I can easily understand why some divers would want to climb back on the dive boat and say “no way.” My wife and I felt that the experience can best be described as one of solitude, peacefulness, wonder and mystery. I would recommend this dive to any experienced diver looking for something different from the norm. There are a few other dive operators in Kona that make this black-water pelagic dive, so you’ve got options. I found Jack’s Diving Locker to be one of the best dive operators that I’ve ever used. The staff is top notch; Pink Floyd played us home on the dive-boat stereo; we enjoyed a brief visit with a juvenile oceanic whitetip shark; and the hot shower on the dive boat after the dive was the icing on the cake.
