Honolulu dive shop recommendations

Hi, folks. I'll be spending my winter vacation in Honolulu this year. I'm very excited.

It'll be my wife's first time to visit Hawaii and we're gonna do all the touristy stuff. We'd also like to get a few dives in if possible. We're both certified.

I'd love to get some recommendations regarding a good dive operation in the Honolulu area. First priority is service and attitude. We're not professional athletes, just vacation divers, and I'm pretty out of shape. We'll need someone who can deal with that fact. It would be nice to use our credit card to pay (so we can get miles, of course), but if you know a great operation that does cash only, please don't hesitate to recommend them.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can share.

I forgot to mention our potential dive dates... Dec. 27, 28, or 29.

I know this is not the same island but if you ever go to Maui, I recommend Extended Horizons. They were great!

Sorry I can't help with Honolulu diving...

If you would like, I can give you the info for a night time shark fishing trip my wife and I did that was really cool. We caught 3 Galapagos sharks, one weighing in close to 300lbs.

Diving out of Honolulu isn't the best but I've had decent trips when I've been. I went with http://www.islanddivershawaii.com/ and they were a solid operation IMO. Good about pick-up/drop-off at the hotel and, if you want, you can do both morning and afternoon runs with them and get 4 dives in on any given day.

I did a few dives on North Shore with http://www.oahudiving.com/ and found it to be a great outfit. I recommend it to anyone who asks.

Great! Thanks for the recommendations. I'll check them out right away.

Regarding the fishing, my wife's not really into that. Plus we've got two kids, so a night excursion is not possible. Will keep in mind for when my kids are older, though. (Hopefully this won't be the last time I get there.)

Aarons is pretty good. did my master dive course there. free pick ups in Waikiki too. http://www.hawaii-scuba.com/

Thanks. Will check them out, too.

agreed, but we really did like the drift diving off the SE shore & swimming into the lava tubes. Another south side dive site, The P-51 Mustang dive site was neat, on approach what I thought were sea reeds, were actually garden eels that went down into the sand upon approach, but if one stayed still, they all came back out. And of course seeing the plane.

I just looked at their website and it hasn't been updated in at least a year. I wonder if they're still in business...

...or maybe they've got so much business that they don't have time to update the website. Hopefully it's the latter.

I rarely see a dive shop which spends much time updating their website.

Yeah, fair enough.

We booked with Aaron's. Will let you know how it goes.

Btw, they never responded to my e-mail, but were quite professional over the phone.

Thanks again, everyone, for your input!