Diving at Okinawa

Since I've been to Okinawa and have seen most of the sights in Okinawa during my first trip, this is mainly a dive trip for me. There isn't very much to see at Okinawa actually...to borrow the words of a Japanese diver I befriended: "the best thing in Okinawa is the sea".

I joined a Japanese dive operator called シーサ Shisa, recommended by a Japanese friend who used to live in Okinawa. They were cheaper than the other English-speaking dive operators catering specifically to foreign suckers. As a result, however, I was the only gaijin and had to use a lot of Japanese. Diving in Japan is expensive. I paid about 14,000-yen (S$190!) for 3 dives a day (compared to 12,000-yen for only 2 dives by English-speaking operators).

Anyway, I had a really good time diving with Shisa. The equipment was good, and dive guides and fellow divers were really cool. One of the divers wore a pink pig's head hood to dive cos it's the year of the pig! We went to Kerama islands for diving, about 1 hour away from Naha.

On the way to Kerama, we saw a whale! It blew water several times and then we saw its tail flip through the air once.

Marine life at Okinawa is very similar to Malaysia, but less coral and a lot more sandy bottom dives (or maybe it was just the sites we went to). Underwater visibility is superb, but the water is quite cold (about 20-22 deg). I had to wear a 5mm wetsuit and a hooded vest. Some divers even wore drysuits!

Saw a couple of interesting crabs there (all macro life there, but the southern islands are famous for mantas in summer):

コノハガニ Konoha crab (don't know its English name...help!). Really interesting, never seen before. Tiny tiny crab, only about as big as your thumb nail and its pincers look just like sea grass. I wouldn't have known it was a crab if my dive guide did not point it out. (Speaking of which, all dive guides carry a magna doodle board instead of a slate...really easy to erase so they write a lot underwater and don't have as many hand signals as us)

キンチャクガニ Kinchaku crab (again, I don't know the English name for this one). This crab was even smaller than the Konoha crab. Blends in really well with the sand and has really cute pincers that look like little blossoms of flowers.

Other things I saw were all normal seen-before stuff. A very pretty Pegasus fish walking across the seabed. ウミテング (umi tengu) in Japanese.

Lunch time! You can either bring your own lunch or buy a bento box from them, but they provided complimentary drinks and soup. Everyone enjoyed the tonjiru soup...there's a stove on board, so the soup was served hot! Was really delicious!

Onsen on board! There're these 2 tubs under the floorboards that contain seawater heated by the engine of the boat. You can soak in them to keep warm. Feels really good! My new friend from Hokkaido and I enjoyed having our lunch with our legs warmed by the onsen.
Lionfish
Scorpionfish

Many sea snakes!! Yikes! They totally freaked me out! You should have seen how madly I finned around the reef cos I thought one of the snakes was chasing me...my dive guide told me after that that they won't bite and even if they do, you won't get poisoned cos the poisonous fangs are right at the back of their mouths. How reassuring...

Cultural note: Japanese divers have the custom of passing their log books around (and almost all of them use the folder type) for fellow divers to sign, write comments, and draw pictures. Kind of like what we did with autograph books at primary school. So I did the same. When they saw my log book they went "Wow! Everything's written in English!" I controlled really hard not to burst out "DUH...abaden?!"