Not Even Not Traveling 65: Hawaii - Diving in Molokini

Our Snorkeling Excursion

It was Christmas Day. The tour owner himself was driving the boat. Apparently, he let a lot of his staff take the holiday off and now he was captain. He seemed to be having fun with it. He punched the throttle. His big, ninety-capacity boat hit the waves like a jet ski. Diane leaned close and told me it reminded her of a kids-only roller coaster she rode as a child in Hershey park.

We noticed whale tail fins to the port (left) side, far away.

Then the boat turned. We gave each other looks of surprise. The vessel spun completely around. This wasn’t supposed to happen. One of the crew approached us.

“We forgot the food,” she whispered. It turned out the captain hadn't waited at the dock for the catered food to arrive. And it was a tour requirement. So he seemed out of practice at being the captain. 

When we got back on the correct course, the owner kicked the engine up another notch. Diane and I stood at the front, bouncing, and watched the ocean and the shorelines. Our ship was turning towards a small island. After a while, a single flying animal popped out of the sea to our left. It glided for a while, not really flapping. Then folded its wings and popped back into the sea.

“Was that a flying fish all alone?” I asked. The alone part was what surprised me most.

“Yes,” said Diane.

We looked for another but never saw one.

In time, our ship slowed and approached a cove on the northwest shore of the island. Another tour group had set anchor in the cove, too. 

Coral Hygiene

"This is a protected marine habitat," the captain warned over the loudspeaker. He started describing the fines we would pay for touching the fish, going ashore on the beach, and a list of other impermissible activities, each of which would result in the sort of fines that would wreck a small country's defense budget. I listened with a smile because I knew, for each rule, someone had decided, "I'll bet I can ride a sea turtle with a horse harness" or something like that and now that’s why we have the rule. People are amazing.

Now, since I have facial hair, I had to use vaseline to get a good mask seal as we suited up. It gave me the dignified appearance of a man who just head-butted a petroleum jelly monster but hey, it did the job. I mean, for the first time in my life, my diving mask didn't leak. In the water, I dove down to test it. (The trick: don't breathe.) Still no leak. We paddled toward what looked like the prime spot. Everything was perfect. I could see fish forty feet down to the bottom. Then thirty, then twenty. We stopped and paddled in circles. 

Now, these first ten minutes were what Diane later described as "bad." She was hyperventilating. Between the cold of the water and the weirdness of breathing through a tube, her body was trying too hard. She was convinced she would never want to go snorkeling again and she was probably composing a one-star review for it, mentally. I experienced something similar. I kept tasting salt water no matter how hard I clamped down on the mouthpiece of my snorkel. As I relaxed and paid attention to the fish beneath me, though, the seal of my lips around the mouthpiece improved. Everything started to feel natural. Breathing was never difficult again, the entire day.

So my first-time snorkeling advice is, give yourself a couple minutes to adjust. We both got comfortable.

After our adjustments, the snorkeling experience was great. We were looking down on a coral reef and a range of fish I've only have seen in aquariums before. They included a few slender, bottle-nosed specimens I'd never seen anywhere. One of them was long and thin and silvery blue. It blended with the seafloor so well, it was difficult to make out. When I pointed it out to Diane, she had a hard time understanding. 

Soon enough, we were pointing out weird fish to each other more or less constantly.

Half an hour later, the captain rang a bell to call us back to the boat. Our next snorkeling site was the stretch of island shoreline informally called "turtle town." 

Swimming with Yertle

When we got in at the turtle site, though, we saw forty feet down to blank, blue nothingness. We maneuvered. We tried to find interesting fish and underwater alcoves. In theory, we were swimming with turtles. But we weren't. We didn't see any. 

Well, not for a long time. Eventually, I noticed a rock moving far away. I realized the rock had flippers. After I watched it move for a while, I went and got Diane. I pointed it out to her in the same manner she and I had used to point out fish before. It took a while for her to see it. After she started tracking the animal, we swam together above it for twenty minutes.

By the end of our dive time, we had gathered a group of five, all tracking the turtle. As I started looking around the ocean bottom a little farther, trying to find more to track, I got separated from the group. Basically, I got lost. I figured that if I found the turtle again, I'd find my group. So I paddled in a big circle until I found a turtle moving pretty far beneath me in the near-dark of the sea. When I looked around, I found no other swimmers nearby. That was weird. I tracked the turtle for a while, convinced the other snorkelers would show up. I kept looking but I never found any people. So I swam away from the turtle, back toward the distant boat. In a minute, I found my group. They were tracking the original turtle, which I had lost. So I must have found a different, smaller turtle. 

I paddled around the larger group for a while. The captain blew the "all back" horn. We clambered aboard, divested ourselves of the diving equipment, and took our seats. The boat bounced. Around me, people ate from the food supplies from the tour buffet.

Hawaii Whale-0

The captain took us to where he had noticed a whale surfacing in the distance. I’m good at spotting whales even in whitecapped seas, or so I assumed after the one time I did it, so I got up when I heard the news. I marched to the prow of the boat to look. At first, I saw nothing important. I know the spout plumes move differently, at least to my sense of motion, than the regular, white, ocean spray. After about a minute, I saw one, a plume twice as tall as the waves. 

I pointed. Everyone around me turned their heads too late. There was nothing for them to see. In a minute, I noticed another plume. I pointed. 

"He probably is seeing them," my wife said in support of my phantom ability. Our fellow passengers weren't sure. They shook their heads. An Australian lady sidled up next to me.

"Are you really seeing them?" she asked.

"Yes."

"I love whale watching," she told me. She described the one other time she had gone to see them on a cruise off the coast near Perth. After six hours, she finally glimpsed one. She'd been thrilled. Now, I thought, we were seeing three sets of plumes. I mentioned it.

"Seems unbelievable." She said it with a smile. Finally, when we got close enough, I pointed and she saw what I saw. She exclaimed, "Oh, it's lovely!"

After they heard her remark, a few other ladies came to join us. Soon the other passengers started to see the plumes, too. They swarmed to the decks of the boat, every corner and cranny. We listened to the captain, clearly a veteran of this sort of event, as he described what we should look for. He said we were pulling up beside a mother and her calf.

I wondered where the third whale had gone. From the timing of the plumes, I was pretty sure I'd seen one, but it had disappeared when the boat drew close. Meanwhile, from the bridge, the captain kept up his narration. He kept saying this was a mother and calf but, if so, the calf was mostly grown. These were both large humpbacks. We kept watching them for ages. They kept surfacing. The Australian lady was thrilled. 

Finally, I remembered my camera. Since it was really my phone, I hadn't been able to take it for pictures of fish or turtles. I could use it now, though. I headed down below decks. Despite the wall of glass windows there with great views of the whales, the space was deserted. Amused, I dug through my bag. 

“A breach!” The captain shouted in surprise.

Whoops. I ran to one of the windows, phone in hand. Sure enough, I saw a whale come down in a terrific splash. It had not done a belly flop so much as a back flop. The huge creature had turned while in the air. A moment later, the second whale rose up.

"Another breach!" yelled the captain. "Two! Very rare!"

We stared as the pair of whales seemed to play. For a minute, they swam near the surface. The ocean roiled.

"Another!" he shouted. Sure enough, the smaller whale leaped out of the water again. It twisted and fell with a mighty, booming splash. 

For a few minutes, the whales settled down to a routine of skimming under the waves and surfacing from time to time, usually together. They were a synchronized swimming team. After I finally took a few photos and videos, I meandered back up to the fore deck.

"Did you see the breaches?" Diane asked. She shielded her eyes from the sun as she turned to me. 

"Oh yeah." I nodded. We pointed at the whales and talked about what we had seen for a few minutes. At last, one of the whales kicked up a tail fin. 

"Uh oh," I mumbled. A moment later, the other whale did the same. 

They were gone. We had spent more than twenty minutes with them, though. And we had been up close. The Australian woman pattered across the deck toward us. Her gestures were wide, her eyes crinkling. She couldn't stop smiling.