Questions to ask yourself in Maui:
- Should we snorkel or SCUBA today?
- Is that turtle bigger than that turtle?
- I wonder how hard it is to find a job for a water purifying engineer in Maui?
- How many whales am I listening to as I am swimming among coral reefs?
Next to the whale watching, the diving and snorkeling we did was probably the best thing we did in Maui. The Hawaiian Islands are the most remote large islands in world (over 2000 miles from other land), providing unique species of animals and fish that are only found here. Or at least that is what we were told several times. Unique or not, the diving was just straight fun.
We both SCUBA'd for the first time. We did two dives with an instructor and went up to 40' underwater from a shore dive. It was a sensory overload. The large green sea turtles, colorful topical fish, warm water, and the song of a humpback serenading us in the background. Did I mention the taste of seawater? Mmmm. Anyhow we didn't really have any underwater cameras and didn't take any pics of us geared up, so you will have to take my word on this. If you have never SCUBA dived, definitely do it. If you have, do it again and do it on Maui.
Snorkeling I have done several times but apparently not in the right places or with good equipment. Usually it takes me about 5 minutes before I inhale half the ocean and gag from the nasty taste of the water. For some reason after SCUBA, I got snorkeling. I think I used to always over swim, rather than just sort of float. Relax and enjoy. I did enjoy. Turns out, from our hotel in West Maui, we had a coral reef just 20 ft from the shore. I rented the snorkel gear from the cabana and had several days of entertainment. Our last day we went on a snorkeling trip (see Sea Mammals entry). We had two dive sites and this time were prepared. Katie, thinking ahead, bought us each a cheapo underwater camera. Turns out underwater photography with these cameras works as long as the things you are taking a pic of are 3 feet from your face. I accidentally came face to face with a turtle and we hung out for about 10 minutes together but the picture of him surfacing right in front of me didn't come out because I ran out of film. You guys remember film right? I forgot that film meant you couldn't just take 500 pictures then weed them out afterwards. 27 pictures later, I missed my cool turtle pic. Fish aren't as photogenic, but check the ones we were able to get:
Snorkeling with green sea turtles was amazing
One of our tropical fish pictures actually turned out!
Unfortunately, we didn't take these pictures, but we did see these water creatures:
___________________________________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment