Another nice sunny day, looks like perfect weather for our five hour snorkeling trip. Trudge up the beach to where the catamarans come ashore to pick people up (about two resorts up from the Marriott) and away we go…
The catamarans usually go up along the west shore of Maui to Honolua Bay for snorkeling…..not today, still too rough up there. So we head east along the southern coast.
It was eerie how calm the water was…..Suzanne has some great photos of the whales we saw; strangely, the whale was just sitting there on the surface just flopping around, not really diving like usual.
This picture is not so much of Kevin as it is of the volcano in the background. No the hill in the foreground there on the left, you can just barely make it out straight ahead. But, it is the first time on two trips on Maui that we’ve ever seen the top of Haleakala; usually shrouded in clouds.
So we make it out to just offshore of Olowalu; we have to anchor a little further away than the captain would like because there are a lot of boats here, but, stop, everyone gets in the water, and generally told to head towards where everyone else is….usually a lot of turtles another fish. And we stumble across this guy as we’re headed over that way.
I don’t think I have a better turtle picture from any snorkeling trip than the pictures I got here…
The one downer is that the new waterproof camera, after the pictures on the beach in Maui, wasn’t so waterproof! Will be starting some correspondence with Nikon about that when we get back. We do have the older camera, which, sadly, still has the camera flaw that you can see here. If possible, I try to take pictures that are focused slightly off-center so that I can crop it out. But I know (if I ever build up the interest to photoshop) that I can get the spot out of these pictures, so, decided to save the best ones that had it. The turtle is coming up for air, and literally, is heading almost straight for me at his point.
This non-turtle boy is doing what he does….diving. and diving. and diving.
Saw some different fish out here on the first trip out from the boat….I’m with Mom and Cpher mostly, Matthew wandered off at one point…
And sometime after this second turtle sighting we have to devote some time to finding Matthew to keep Mom happy (who was getting worried….I wasn’t, the boy is a fish and there’s a ton of people in the water….can’t think he is having any kind of problems. And he wasn’t).
But after finding Matthew, Cpher and Mom head back to the boat to have lunch, and Matthew and I decide to stay out a little while longer and see what we can see…
And just a few minutes later, we stumble across some more turtles. Zoom the camera out so that I can get both in one shot…
Happily, they keep coming closer together, so, I keep zooming in.
And then there are three of them. It’s a turtle party!
Yes, it was pretty cool to see all of these turtles together in one place. We’re one of the last people to get back on board for lunch…
The Teralani catamaran, off in the distance. That’s Matthew in front of me.
After I quickly ate lunch, I told Cpher and Matthew I would go back in with them (we had about another 15-20 minutes). Matthew just wanted to hang around the boat, but, Cpher wanted me to go with him back towards the reef. And we saw way more fish than we did the first time…these pictures don’t really do the sight justice.
And right before we were about to head back, we ran into the turtles. I’m not sure if it was the same group or if they were different ones….
But we saw three again….and then one swam away to join another two. Cpher’s snorkel tube comes loose at this point so we head back and that’s a good thing…unbeknownst to us, they were blowing whistles trying to get our attention. Time to go..
You’ll notice something in that picture above….the black spot is gone. Sometime during the later portions of the second snorkel trip, the piece of dirt or whatever that was making that spot in the photos must have come loose.
A whole lot of snoozing and relaxing on the way back…
and two boys, contemplating the day at sea…
