Hawai’i Day Four: UNDER the Water!

6:30am. The “Little Mermaid” theme song is chasing Israel Kamakawiwo’ole around in my head. Hawaiian music followed by “Under da sea, under da sea! Darlin’ it’s better, down where it’s wetter, take it from me!” Heck, I’ve loved that movie since I made my sophomore-high-school boyfriend take me to see it in the theater when it came out. And today is our day for going Under da Sea. We rented our dive gear yesterday evening, so we could head out today without fuss.

Coffee on our balcony as the sun comes up behind us, lightening the sky shade by shade, and the water stretch by stretch. We’ll see the sun hit the water farther out first, then closer and closer to us as the sun climbs. Waves coming in and the first surfers showing up as soon as there’s light in the sky. The swell doesn’t look anything like the last couple days, though, for which I’m glad, with reference to diving and snorkeling plans. Disappointing for the surfers, no doubt, but it makes our activities easier and more fruitful if the surf isn’t up so fiercely. When we were in the dive shop yesterday just before dinner, they were scrambling to reassign a scheduled boat night-dive to a shore-diving option because their boat couldn’t get out of the harbor!

8:30am. Jon is making cheese & egg muffins, and I am salivating at the counter, trying to distract myself with the computer. There are only about a dozen surfers out there, not like the 29 we counted yesterday, 30-some the day before that. Bodes well for our diving, I think…

4:30pm. We got two dives off our first tank—one good one at Manini Beach and one AMAZING one at Honaunau Bay. There may or may not be pictures forthcoming, of said amazing dive, depending on what a certain bag of rice can do for a certain iPhone 16, for which we may have found the max depth. It was still working when we came UP from 70 feet—but then it got fussy. Hence the bag of rice. And oh!—do I want to show you those pictures! An eel the size of my thigh, sticking his head out of the reef. Moorish idols up close (because when you’re diving, you have as much time as you want to hang right there and photograph, not like when I’m snorkeling, or “free diving,” and limited to what my breath can do). Apparently my phone wasn’t working long enough after the dive to have sent anything to the cloud from that dive, so here’s the last photo that uploaded: Me cheerily gearing up! It’s a brave last picture, if last picture it is.

We had a whole second pair of tanks, for at least one more dive—but my damn right ear refused to equalize (still hasn’t, in fact), and you can’t go down with your ears in a “squeeze” or you’ll blow out an eardrum. We hung around the shore there at Honaunau for a couple solid hours, hoping and hoping for my ear to clear—but we finally had to head back to return the equipment.

Despite all the protein bars we’d snarfed while we waited, we were fairly starving by the time we got back to the dive shop to return the gear—we’d actually done a heavy surface-swim at Manini, coming in with some surf, plus just the swimming that comes with the diving. It’s an energy-consuming activity, and we definitely needed to replenish the energy.. So we headed right back to the Ono Loa Grill, just down the way from the dive shop, for another round of the amazing fish tacos we’d had the other day. Just as good the second time around—and just as messy, with sauce running down my arm.

Then we stopped at the store for that bag of rice, and a few other grocery items, and headed home to shower off the salt, bag the phone in the rice (where I have strict instructions to leave it alone until tomorrow), and watch some episodes of “Lost,” because apparently we were the only people on the planet who had never seen it. (It’s actually fun right now to watch them, knowing they filmed the whole thing here. Not on the Big Island, I mean, but in Hawai’i. On Oahu.) I foresee an early bedtime—I’m pretty worn out, so I”m hoping to sleep well.

2:30am. I was right and wrong about the sleep. We were out by eight—but now I’m wide awake again, finding myself moon-and-wave watching. The moon is closer to full every night that I’ve gotten up to watch it on the waves… Somehow it’s hard to be upset about these odd sleepless intervals, when they’re nearly as soothing as being asleep. My ear still hasn’t cleared, so I guess that third dive wasn’t meant to be.

I will share one happiness, though, that I discovered in gearing up yesterday. I’ve always hated the part of having to stand up and hump the gear to the water—and the extra weights you have to wear as part of the gear, to help sink you to the bottom. This time, though, when I stood up dreading those 12-pound weights… I felt oddly light. And it dawned on me that I’m very recently 17 pounds DOWN, myself—which means that even the 12-pound weights were five pounds LIGHTER than what I’d been just walking around with a couple months ago. That realization felt great! I think I had a spring in my step all the way to the water! (I still did need a hand up the step-formation, getting out of the water at Honaunau… We’d just had another surface swim coming back in—swimming to which my thighs, in particular, are unaccustomed—water was surging back and forth at the exit, and I suddenly felt those twelve pounds dragging downward when I tried to get up. Jon got me out of the water, and a kind stranger gave me a hand up the step-formation.)