Hawai’i Day Seven: Supermoon

A supermoon sounds like an extra-special honeymoon kind of trip, right? Because that’s exactly what we’re having. It just happens that we also started today with coffee and watching the year’s last actual supermoon sinking into the Pacific. Our own supermoon continues!

Last night we went out to the movies—which may seem like a silly thing to do in Hawai’i, but we only go once or twice a year, so it feels like a Treat. And vacation is for treats! We saw Wicked: For Good—not because we’d particularly been looking for it (we haven’t seen Wicked), but because it was what was playing when we showed up. For about the first ten minutes I worried that it was a mistake—but it turned out not to be horrible. I may even look up the first one.

This morning Jon cooked us a hearty breakfast and we packed sandwiches for between dives… and we headed south again along the coast. We got there so early, we were virtually the only people out on the rocks, after we geared up and walked out to the water.

We took the reef left for the first dive, down to about 70 feet for most of the near-hour we were underwater. The farther down you go, the more colors are filtered out by the water above you, so even the pink fish look gray farther down. White and black and yellow are the most common color combination, and that’s striking even at depth.

Highlight of the first dive—because I’d never seen one in person before—was a spotted eagle ray! In fact, despite my University-of-Hawai’i-specific marine biology education, I had to look up what type of ray it was, after we came up—spotting one is so rare they didn’t even make us learn the name for survey-research.

We hung around the dirt parking lot where we’ve paid a Local Uncle $5 to park every day, chatting up the few folks starting to arrive, and making short work of our sandwiches even though it wasn’t yet ten in the morning. Then it was gear up again, when our surface interval made it safe to go down again.

This time we went to the right on the reef, and not as deep, which means we didn’t make it down to where we saw that enormous moray eel the other day. That thing was as big around as my thigh, I kid you not! Highlight of the second dive, in the sense of being another thing I’d never seen in person before, was a crown-of-thorns starfish. It’s an ugly-ass thing, though, so I won’t waste a picture on it.

All this seems a proper baptism for my new phone, yes? (This time with the double protection of waterproof pouch & phone insurance.) 😉

We dropped off the rental dive gear at Jack’s Diving Locker—we can’t dive tomorrow because you need at least 24 hours between diving and flying, to avoid killing yourself with the Bends. So it was home to the condo, to inhale the last of the ahi poke from the other night. And now it’s afternoon pool-time! Jon is doing word puzzles in a lounge chair, and I’ve been sitting here in the shallow end, triaging photos and writing.

I realized long ago that writing helps me appreciate what I’m experiencing. It’s why I journal—and a reason I blog.