I wrote this piece long ago, about a trip long before that.  Still worth sharing.
(I have no surviving pictures, so I used public-domain stuff.)

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It was the early 1980’s, and Lahaina, and Maui, were among the prettiest destinations in Hawaii. I was vacationing there, and certainly enjoying all they had to offer, but I was there for something in addition to wonderful weather and sunsets.

I had been scuba-diving since 1969, but mostly in the chilly waters of northern California. I was thrilled to be able to dive in the tropical warmth of Hawaii, and there was one additional nugget of delight: I was to be making a night dive off of Lahaina.

It was at that time and place an activity specifically sponsored for dive tourists. Most folks in the sport-diving community have made very few night dives, and making one in a foreign (warm!) locale was an extra attraction.

 

Scuba diving is a mercurial pursuit. You immerse yourself in a foreign medium, where prolonged exposure normally results in drowning. You take a deep breath – and survive. It can be exhilarating, or terrifying, and sometimes both.

I got scuba-certified in 1969 when I was 22 years old, and for a while it was simply an exciting challenge. After some time, it became captivating, enthralling, and one of my life’s passions. Over the course of time, I was lucky enough to dive in a variety of locales, from the California coastline to international ventures. Some of the most memorable locations, for sure, were the islands of Hawaii.

I had made several dives in the Hawaiian islands, including Maui and Molokai, and had enjoyed more than splendid times. But among the most memorable was this night off the coast of Lahaina.

 

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It was about 9PM, three hours after sunset, with no moon to light the waters. It was, as they say, black as the soul of a goat. Until this time, I had done some night dives, but not very many, and certainly none in tropical waters. But, far from being intimidated, I was really looking forward to it.

This was a boat dive (as opposed to a shore-based entry). The plan was to anchor the boat out in the Lahaina channel, just a short distance from the seaside town itself. There, the bottom is reasonably shallow, and intricately detailed with the volcanic structure of the area. It was a popular dive spot.

As with all my travel diving, I was traveling solo and therefore without a “built-in” diving friend/buddy. This time, instead of being paired with some other solo tourist, I was assigned to be with the dive-master himself.

DIVE FOLKS

I should emphasize that I always enjoy meeting and talking with the various people I dive with, but in point of fact, most of them have been at a modest skill level, diving-wise. They often tend to become more of a liability than a partner in adventure. In the Bahamas, I once had to keep an assigned “buddy” from going too deep in an area not supervised by the dive-master. In southern California, I had my “buddy” panic after a regulator failure and try to grab mine. I’ve learned to be careful, and not to expect too much.

In addition, most tourist divers have not learned to keep calm on a dive, and they become very energetic and excited once they get under the water. There is no inherent danger in this, but the extra activity produces a significantly increased rate of breathing — which severely reduces their time underwater, working as it is from the common 80-cubic-foot air-supply bottle. Faster breathing simply means shorter endurance. I enjoy my time below the surface, and I breathe slowly and deliberately and try to minimize physical effort most of the time. Consequently, it’s very common for me to use my air at less than half the rate of my new-found dive partners, with predictable results in bottom-time. With a fast-breathing dive buddy, it can be very frustrating to have to prematurely end a dive (when he’s out of air) with half of my own supply still remaining.

For this dive, the environment was even more demanding than normal, as it turned out. We anchored out in the channel between Maui and its neighbor Lanai, and immediately noticed a 3-4 knot current, pushing the dive boat firmly against its anchor line. Note that a very good swimmer can only manage about 2.5 knots for a short time, so anyone getting downstream of the boat was going to be swept away by the current, and would be in for a very long night. The dive-masters consequently put out a drift line for 200′ behind the boat, and we were all briefed on getting to the drift line in the event we were pulled behind the boat by the current. Everyone was put on urgent notice: if you lost the drift line, go for shore (about 1 mile away) and immediately call the dive shop to let them know you were okay.

Two additional drift lines were then tied up to the anchor line, one for each side of the boat, so that the divers could hang onto the lines and control their positions and their descents.

At the “go” signal, everyone jumped over the side, kicked hard to the drift lines and then swam hand-over-hand up to the anchor lines. There were about 15 of us or so, and I was among the first few to rendezvous at the anchor line, about eight feet down, waiting for everyone else to get ready to go to the bottom.

From this vantage point, two things were strikingly noticeable. First, the 4-knot current had us sticking straight out from the anchor line like flags in a gale wind. As we hung on with one hand and shined our dive lights around, the turbulence was pummeling as the water washed by us. Second, I clearly saw 15 different divers, of varying degrees of competence, desperately thrashing their way through the dark waters to an unseen rope, waving their dive lights, blowing bubbles, dropping gear, bumping into one another and the boat, and generally presenting the appearance of a huge stringer of frantically struggling fish. Whenever I smile or grin underwater, my mask fills with water — on this occasion, I was constantly emptying it.

DOWN ON THE BOTTOM

Finally, all of us somehow managed to work our way to the bottom, which was only about thirty to forty feet or so below us (shallow by scuba standards). At this depth, even novice divers can usually get 45-50 minutes of bottom time, under normal circumstances. However, these conditions were hardly normal. The current was still strong, all the way down to within a couple of feet of the bottom.

Normally, a diver will ‘hover’ 3-4 feet off the bottom for the best visual advantage. At this depth, divers will also not kick up much sand or silt from the bottom (with visibility-reducing effects). But for these circumstances, I knew immediately that this wouldn’t work, and I modified my own habit and allowed myself to sink to within a few inches of the bottom. I took a very light hold on any available rock, and minimized my fin action so as not to stir up the silt. With this technique, almost no effort was needed to position myself wherever I wanted. Meanwhile, everyone else, except for the dive-master, could be seen to be hovering at the 4′ level, and (due to the current) furiously flapping their fins against the current, blowing streams of bubbles, and generally looking like so many animated aquarium pumps. I vigorously motioned some of them down toward me, but they probably thought I just wanted them to see something, and they continued to stay above me.

The dive-master also was familiar with the anchor-point technique, and he and I began to have a quiet, peaceful time sticking our heads into holes and shining our lights around under rocks and what-not. The bottom was varied and diverse, with much to see and investigate.

Despite the current, the visibility was excellent, more than 100 feet. As I had eagerly anticipated, everything looked different at night. Also at night, different sorts of creatures come out to be seen. We saw several lobsters and crabs, all night crawlers, and plenty of the usual tropical fish population, all semi-sleeping. I got very absorbed in the dive, a luxury born of not having to watch out for a novice buddy, and the next time I checked my air, only about 20 minutes after our descent, I discovered that only the dive-master and I were left on the bottom. When I signaled to him a question mark (“what’s up?”), he pointed to his air gauge, indicating that everyone else had exhausted their supplies.

We compared our gauges, which were about equal. Both of us still having about 2/3 of our air left, we elected to stay down, and I for one began to really enjoy myself. I think the dive-master felt the same. Me, because I didn’t have to end my dive early for a neophyte partner, and the dive-master because he got to dive without worrying about a bunch of newbie customers — but still “was obligated” to stay down with me because I was a customer.

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THE CHIMERA

This was about when the magic began. I looked up from a ledge I had been peeking under, and, thinking to survey another area, swept my light across the reef. From one edge of my vision to the other, a vast array of diamond-bright, intense red points of light shone from every crevice in the rocky surface. The nature of the light was very similar to a small red LED, but smaller and brighter. They were everywhere. It was as if the reef had been invisibly festooned with tiny, ruby-red Christmas lights as far as I could see in any direction. At first, I thought I was looking at pyrite minerals or sand-spar or some such inorganic substance, so I swam over to one to get a better look. As I got near to it, it disappeared.

Hmmm, I thought, I must have moved away from the proper angle to see it. So I backed up, but could not find a position from which to make it reappear. Oh well, there were a thousand others, so I just picked a different one and moved toward it. It disappeared. I picked another, went over to it. Gone.

Now I was mystified, muddled, motivated. I wasn’t quite sure I was looking at something alive, but it was clear that my presence was influencing it. I moved toward one, watched it blink out of existence, and noted the distance at which it vanished. Then I moved toward another, and stopped just outside that distance. I let my vision adjust to where my light was shining. There, just in about the same place as the bright point of light, was a <<something>> in the water, kind of like the way an ice cube looks under water – clear, but refractive. Remember the alien creature’s camouflage in “Predator”? Like that. The mirage-like image was still, not moving, and not recognizable.

I stared at it for minutes and couldn’t make it out, and when I moved toward it – you got it – the damn thing disappeared. Ah, but this time it reappeared just a couple of feet away! I moved ever so slowly this time, not directly at it, but obliquely, so that my motion was not so “threatening” to it. Finally, I got within about 3′ or so, allowing me a clearer look. The clear/translucent thing looked a lot like a tiny, transparent lobster, about two inches long, with slender antennae threads at one end where the bright point of light was. Damn. It was a shrimp. Unbelievable. The mysterious pinpoint light was its highly reflective eye. And – there were thousands of them. As I swam around the reef, anytime I got to within 3-4 feet of them, with a snap of their tiny tails they would retreat from me faster than my eyes could follow, leaving only the plain rock where shining red eyes had been.

I experimented with the shrimp for a while, getting close to them and studying all possible avenues of escape, before I would move my hand or head in such a manner as to cause them to scoot away. I was never able to follow their motion in any way. Some of them would only move a foot or so, and the eerie feeling was that of watching a teleportation occurring; they would simply disappear from one position in my field of view and reappear eight inches away. It was, in a word, mesmerizing. I may very well have been watching the fastest thing in the ocean.

After all this time, we had been down for well over an hour, and everyone else had been up on deck just waiting for us. (They could see our bubbles, so they knew we were okay.) We took another look around, and although we still had nearly 20% of our air left, we decided to go up. We worked our way to the anchor line and again fluttered like flags in the current as we ascended. (Despite our long bottom-time, the shallow depth did not require any decompression.) Paying rigorous attention to never losing the drag-lines, we clambered back onto the boat uneventfully.

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There’s always a vague sense of having “survived” a night dive. It is, after all, a strange, threatening, and somewhat unforgiving environment; probably every one of us has some elemental fear of the dark, and there is an undeniable sense of relief when one is safe on the boat again. In this case, the striking rewards of our dive made the subsequent relaxation all the more exquisite.

When we (finally) arrived on board, we were met with a slightly cool reception by some. There had been a rumor that we had gone down with high-capacity tanks and that’s why we took so long. Most of the divers didn’t buy that, but a few thought they’d been short-changed.

Apparently, the early departure of the majority dive crowd had left the shrimp population a bit braver for the dive-master and me, because none of the previous divers recalled having seen any red lights at all.

After I told them of my “shrimp adventure”, I’m not sure they actually believed me – or maybe they were just pissed at having to wait. None of this mattered to me very much at all; I had just had a transcendental underwater experience, and I was content to simply bask in the wonder of it. I was in a wonderfully peaceful, almost dream-like state as we motored back to the harbor, and Lahaina.

The warmly-lit night life of the town welcomed us back from the nearby channel, and it was clear and balmy and wonderful as only Hawaii can be. The stars shone even more brilliantly than the tiny eyes of the shrimp, and I wondered if I would remember such a dive for a really long time. Today, it’s been over 30 years so far – – so I guess I will.

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STILL CURIOUS?

The place that sponsored my dive is still in business, and they offer all kinds of treats and training.
http://www.lahainadivers.com/

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