Posts Tagged ‘snorkeling’

For the last three days my friend from Tokyo has been visiting. What’s really great about this is that it gives me a chance to get out and do stuff I wouldn’t normally do on a daily basis. Today’s trip was to Irabu Island.

Irabu Island is a small island located a few kilometers from Miyakojima, Japan. They are currently building a bridge to Span the two islands, but at this point you have to get there by ferry. That’s where today’s journey began.

We originally planned to take the 10:30 ferry, but being a busy time of the year, it was already full by the time we got there. So we had to pay a little more to take a different, but faster ferry. We loaded our car on the ferry and we were arriving in Irabu about 15 minutes later.

Our first stop was at a look-out spot shaped as a bird. Since it was the highest point on the island we had a great view. I decide to finally try and use the Photosnyth program I had on my iPhone for a while. The program is absolutely amazing. It allows you to take panoramic photos without doing any work at all. The photo below is the first location I just mentioned. Definitely check out the program. Did I mention it’s free?

The next spot was Shimoji Airport (located on an even smaller island) where they do “touch and go” landing training for pilot trainees. There is a road right at the end of the strip where you can take great videos/photos. The mix of a beautiful ocean with the shake and sound of a plane as it comes in to land is pretty exciting. Below are some of the videos I took. I will have a new HD camera soon, so I will be making even more videos. These were taken on my iPhone.

My main computer is current down waiting for a new power cord, so I edited this video using Openshot for Linux. Openshot is a free program that is both easy to use and free. As far as I know it’s only available for Linux. But it looks like it might be offered for other platforms as well in the near future.

Next was the ocean. As you can probably tell from some of the pictures in the video. The spot (I can’t remember the name) had a good mix of shallow coral and deeper, bluer water. I was diving to probably about 15 meters, but I couldn’t take my camera with me since it’s only good to 3. That will be changing soon though.

After that we went to see another look-out location and then got back on the ferry home.

Tomorrow will be more snorkeling and some more beautiful site seeing.

About a year and a half ago I had rode on a glass boat and was extremely disappointed. My wife’s parents weren’t up to snorkeling since her dad had recently had a stoke, but still wanted to see the ocean. We payed about $20 for a half hour ride over the reef. The problem wasn’t the location or the weather. Both were great. The problem was the boat itself. Basically the operation had taken a regular boat, cut a hole in the bottom and inserted a piece of glass. Picture a bucket with a piece of glass in the bottom and you have the boat we were on.

After riding that I swore I would never recommend the glass boat to anyone.

Last month, my friends parents came to visit and they took them on a different glass boat. This one was set up completely different. Instead of looking down from the top, there are windows mounted in the hull that look out into the ocean. Since there were few people, we were even able to lay down.

When we first got onto the boat I looked into the water and saw a sea turtle. We didn’t see any on the actual trip, but it was good to see one anyways.

The following video is a compilation of videos I took while on the trip. These are all from the iphone, since my camera is dead. Should have another one in a few weeks.