First Cathedral

A collapsed volcanic lava tube off Lanai's leeward south coast, southeast of Manele Bay, forms a cavern the size of a small chapel: roughly 30 m long and two stories tall, entered through a wide archway whose floor drops to about 18 m. Where the roof caved in, holes in the ceiling let shafts of sunlight pour onto a fallen block of basalt that divers call the Altar, and on calm summer middays the beams turn the chamber into a stained glass effect that gave the site its name. Walls crusted with orange cup coral shelter green sea turtles, resting whitetip reef sharks, spiny lobster wedged into cracks and clouds of endemic Hawaiian reef fish. The classic finish is the Shotgun, a narrow chimney at the back of the cavern where divers time the surge and get flushed into open water one at a time.