Hawaii Manta Ray Night Dive
Hawaii is a popular tourist destination for all travelers. You’ve got the USS Arizona, the best beach in the world, and fancy condos.
You’ve also got great ideas for the active and healthy traveler. This article is about Hawaii’s Big Island’s famous Manta Ray Night Dive, one of the ten best dives in the world on most lists.
During the day, this area is known as Garden Eel Cove — a more-or-less routine Hawaiian coral dive — but at night, the locals call it Manta Heaven. Here, attracted by the abundance of light-seeking phytoplankton, the Big Island’s resident manta rays (Manta birostris) come to feed. It’s a classic symbiosis: The divers bring lights, the lights bring plankton, the plankton bring mantas, and the mantas — huge but harmless creatures that swim in exquisitely slow arabesques in the spotlights — bring divers from around the world, by the thousands.
Manta Rays are bigger than Sting Rays (it was a sting ray that killed Steve Irwin), 20 or more feet and up to 3,000 pounds.
This is not only an option for certified divers – snorkelers can watch from the surface.
Written by Health conscious traveler on April 26th, 2007 with
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