Night Snorkel

Started: 2025-01-13 20:30:15

Submitted: 2025-01-13 23:02:30

Visibility: World-readable

Swimming at the beach in Hawaii, and snorkeling with manta rays

The first thing I did, on the morning of our first full day on the Big Island of Hawaii, was nip across the street to get coffee. We were staying in a resort on the edge of Waikola Village, which looked like a large residential neighborhood with two shopping centers facing each other across the main road. The strip mall on the south side of Waikola Road, unimaginatively named Waikola Plaza, looked like it had been built yesterday; the asphalt parking lot was still shiny and black, most of the storefronts had temporary banners indicating that they were coming soon. The sign at the edge of the road advertised a Foodland grocery store, but that appeared to refer to an empty lot that would become a Foodland in a future phase of development. It felt like the development was waiting for the second part of "if you build it, they will come". A few days later I found a sign on a fence with a full plan of multiple phases of development, including two hotels, a second chunk of strip mall (currently occupied by large earth-moving equipment) and a bunch of lofts scattered around the site. (There was a gas station, which the Google Maps satellite photo represents as an empty lot.)

The one thing that Waikola Plaza had going for it was a coffee shop, named Kohala Coffee, which advertised that it was serving "100% Big Island Coffee", which was perfectly adequate to caffeinate me for the day.

We drove to nearby ʻAnaehoʻomalu Beach, which turned out to have public access via a parking lot tucked away behind the resort that dominated the beach. (One of my guidebooks gives the pronunciation of the beach, and the bay in front of the beach, as "a-nae-ho'o-ma'lu". One of my approximate heuristics for pronouncing Hawaiian names is to try to pronounce as many syllables as possible, which seems approximately correct in this case.) We reached the beach from the south side, where lava flows reached all the way into the ocean. We headed to the edge of the main sandy expanse of the beach, staying in the shade. It was the middle of the morning (local time), the sun was bright and the air was comfortably warm, and it was glorious.

Immediately inland of the beach were a pair of fishponds where pre-contact Hawaiian civil engineers had built an elaborate system of canals to feed the ponds with the right mixture of salt and fresh water, introduce fish fry from the ocean, and feed the fish in captivity until they were ready to be harvested. Surrounding the fishponds were platforms where houses and other buildings had stood for the caretakers of the ponds.

There was a green sea turtle lurking in the surf at the edge of the beach, where a promontory of lava rock extended into the ocean. I could see a vague leathery shape sloshing around under the water but it was hard to get a good view from the shore.

By the time I got back from my walk around the fishponds (which included an investigation of the shack on the beach renting paddle boards and other gear, though I wasn't sure I really wanted to pay $50/hour for a paddle board), Julian was swimming in the water. Calvin stayed on the shore, sitting in a beach chair in the shade, far from the water.

I grabbed my GoPro and headed into the water. The tropical water was swimming-pool warm, just barely cold enough that it took a moment to get used to it, but once I was fully immersed it was fine. I carried my GoPro on a floating leash attached to my wrist, which meant it was always easy to access, but it was often in the way, and tended to interrupt my swim strokes.

The other thing that interrupted my swim strokes was the volcanic rocks on the ocean floor. The water was murky enough that it was hard to see when I was floating near a rock, and more than once I banged my foot into a rock that I couldn't see. I ended up with scratches and cuts on both of my feet, which was unpleasant but didn't end up causing any real problems. It did occur to me that I should have brought my water shoes, but it also occurred to me to wonder if I really wanted a fourth pair of footwear (after my shoes, Chaco sandals for all-day beach trips, and flip-flop sandals for short trips to the pool).

Julian swam out with a body board, and spent most of the time floating around on the board. (In a pool he's a competent swimmer; he can do a forward crawl better than I can. But in open water he was more comfortable swimming on a body board. His cousin Caleb was swimming in circles around everyone; he competes regularly in swim meets.)

The surface of the water was calm but the water was moving just enough that it pushed me back and forth into the rocks that Julian was resting on, threatening to further injure my already-battered feet. I found a submerged rock to sit on, and then discovered that there were tiny spiny red sea urchins hiding in the holes in the rock. I couldn't see them especially well from the surface, but I could hold my GoPro under the water and snap a picture and confirm that they were there.

At some point while we were in the water Julian saw the Golden Gate Bridge tattoo on my back and commented on it (and correctly identified the bridge), and I tried to remember if he's seen it before, and it seems like he must have had the opportunity to see it but maybe he didn't really notice it until now.

Julian had swim goggles so he could see more under the waves when he stuck his head under the water.

Back on the beach I built a sand castle with Caleb. The sand was adequate for sand castle construction, but it was still a bit coarse compared to the fine beach sand back home, so it didn't have the same ability to hold its shape or support elaborate tunnels and arches.

When Julian was ready to get out of the water he scraped his foot on the rocks next to the shore, so Kiesa went down to the water to carry him up to our beach towels but slipped and scraped her own knee on the rocks. Julian would also have benefited from water shoes, but he rejected the water shoes that Kiesa tried to give him as we were leaving for the airport the previous morning.

We left the beach and drove back to our condo in Waikola Village for a late lunch. The boys headed over to the game room attached to the pool and found a pool table. Everyone else lost interest by the time I arrived but Calvin and I finished a game, which mostly reminded me how little practice I've had playing pool. (It's easy enough to hit the ball I want to hit, but much harder to get it to go precisely where I want it to go.)

In the evening I headed out towards Kona with Tristan, Jessica, and Caleb for a night snorkeling trip. There were multiple outfitters offering similar tours from different places, and I initially navigated towards the wrong one until I double-checked the location and turned us around to head in the right direction. Along the way we had just enough time to stop for shaved ice in Kona, at a tiny kiosk in front of a drug store in a strip mall, before heading to the harbor to board our boat just after dark.

We found the right tour operator and boarded the boat, picking up thin wetsuit jackets along the way. We sat on the upper deck of the boat as it cruised out of the small craft harbor at night and into the ocean off the Kona coast, picking up speed to transit down to Keauhou Bay, twenty minutes away. To our right the open ocean loomed, dark sky indistinguishable from dark ocean. To our left we could see the Kona coast, lit up in a narrow band along the water and stretching up the hillside into the clouds. Occasional personal fireworks lit up the sky in advance of the new year beginning at midnight. (As we cruised down the coast it was already midnight, Eastern time. Every year on New Year's Eve I remember the day I spent on-call as App Engine SRE, watching the load peak at midnight in each time zone as everyone sent new year's messages. I honor this tradition by posting my own new year's messages right at midnight, in as many time zones as I care to acknowledge.)

We arrived in Keauhou Bay to find other boat already set up in the bay, shining their own lights into the water to attract manta rays for the amusement of their customers. The story goes that the nearby Outrigger hotel accidentally shined construction lights into the water, which attracted plankton which attracted manta rays, and this started a pattern where tour boats shine their own lights into the water. (This seems like the kind of thing that might not get started today, because of well-intentioned environmental restrictions, but now that it's established it's harder to stop.) We assembled on the lower deck for a briefing, then shuffled out the back of the boat to jump into the ocean.

It's been about six years since the last time I went snorkeling, so I was not totally acclimated to the idea of sticking my whole face under the water and breathing through a little tube. It didn't help that I was trying to do this in open water in the dark, where I could barely see the water. I swam to the next open space at the end of the raft with my mask off, then spent some time to get comfortable with the snorkel and mask.

It turns out my GoPro doesn't handle low light conditions very well, but this marginal photo gets the idea across. The boat crew had set out rafts behind the boat that were the size of long skinny picnic tables, maybe a meter wide by four meters long, made up of one-inch PVC pipe making up a frame around foam in the middle. Bright blue lights shined down from the middle of the rafts into the water below. People in snorkel gear lined up on both sides of the raft, holding the PVC pipe with their hands, supported by pool noodles at their ankles, lying face-first in the water looking downwards.

At first all we could see was plankton in the water glowing in the bright lights. After what seemed like a long time a manta ray appeared, swimming into view using its big lateral fins as if it were flying in the water.

The manta rays swam barrel rolls under the raft, looping around to catch as much plankton as they could in the strip of ocean illuminated by the raft. They swam right up to the raft, their huge bodies jaws seeming to stretch from one end of the raft to the other, their massive lateral fins extending to the people on each side of the raft, close enough that I was worried I'd touch them accidentally.

Manta rays are filter feeders, relying on scooping up water and filtering out the plankton in their way, letting the rest of the water flow through the gills on their bellies. When the angle was right I could see straight through their mouths into the slits on their bellies.

We spent long periods of time not seeing any manta rays at all, and sometimes the crew tried to relocate the raft in the water for better viewing. (This was a bit disorienting, because I tried to maintain my position on the raft but the raft was moving in the water.) Then the manta rays returned and we saw two at once.

I take mostly still pictures, and I've shown the best ones above; but to really get the impression of the manta rays I have a short video clip I took, which captures the way they swim through the water, swooping up to expose their shockingly-white bellies to the lights on the raft, and swim away into the depths of the ocean. My video is embedded here; you can also find it on YouTube.

People began to get out of the water, leaving gaps in the rafts that the crew filled by moving the remaining people. The crew detached rafts as they were no longer needed and began to return them to the boat. I stayed out until the crew called time, then swam back to the boat. I divested my snorkel gear and stood briefly under a hot shower to wash off the salt water, then grabbed my beach towel and began to dry off for the trip back to the harbor. We rode back sitting on the upper deck, which was windy in the open but was still warm in the tropical air.

We drove back to the condo in time to count down the new year in Pacific Time, our home time zone, even though our local time was two hours earlier. Despite my philosophical objections to celebrating the new year in the wrong time zone I went to bed before midnight, biding 2024 farewell, hoping that 2025 isn't as bad as it seems like it might be.

I have even more photos from the beach and manta ray snorkeling at Photos on 2024-12-31.