Old Kona Airport Beach

Great dive site and just minutes from Kailua-Kona. We chose to dive at the front end of the old runway immediately past the hockey rink. You can park right on the edge of the pavement and hike your gear down across approximately 30 meters of a sandy beach and then another 20 meters of lava rock. You'll see a circular entry point that is somewhat protected from the surf. Getting in the water is easy (giant stride) and getting out isn't bad either if you time the waves and come up on a slanted rock as a wave comes in. The rocks can be slippery so be careful. Once in, it's maybe 30 meters out to dive depths. I followed a long, flat ridge out at approximately 10 meters of depth for a good 15 minutes. Lot's of nice coral here with the normal fish species. I'm not sure how far that ridge goes out, by I finally broke off it to the south where you can get to a sandy bottom at about 25-30 meters deep. There are some garden eels here in the sand. On my way back in I began hearing the strangest sounds coming from the deeper water. It turned out to be the song of the humpback whale and we heard this multitude of eerie sounds on every dive north of Kona over the next few days. One caveat for this site, the homeless population has adopted this area 'for camping out' and you can see their 'hooches' scattered about in the brush. We had no problems whatsoever, but locking your car and keeping things out of site in your vehicle is a good idea. Just as we were ending our trip I noticed they were erecting some sort of chain-link fence in this area. It did appear though that they left room to access the beach, but it's likely to be a bit longer walk.