Fish, Whales, Dolphins, Turtles

This photo shows a longfin anthias, a fairly rare fish which Len has been hoping to see for several days. The very accommodating diveshop, Kona Diving Company, made sure that they had one dive this morning where they found him, enabling Len to take this photo and also quite a few more -- all wonderful, in my opinion.

The entire boat trip today was unusually wonderful, as I already wrote to a few relatives. Before we were even much outside of the harbor we saw spinner dolphins on the surface, probably sleeping; then a big bottle-nose dolphin swam past us and went under the boat. Later we saw a pod of around 3 humpback whales jumping, breaching, and lifting their pectoral fins out of the water. They were around us for around the next 2 hours. We were unusually close to them, though outside the legal 100 foot distance. Better than many whale-watching trips, though they are supposed to be really good here at this time of year, when whales are migrating past the islands.

Diving and snorkeling -- which was what the boat trip was supposed to be for -- were both great. I snorkeled with a turtle and watched a school of fish swim under an archway in the coral and come out on the other side. Lenny saw a lot of stuff underwater, and took great photos, as I mentioned. I had my little camera with us, but the dolphins and whales weren't close enough for that type of photography. It was very sunny on the water, while at the same time, up on the mountain there was thunder and hail. (The captain's brother texted him about hail at 1500 feet).

So it was a nice end to our boat trips this time -- we don't have any scheduled for tomorrow, and our plane out is Monday. We hope the weather will cooperate with our scheduled planes coming back.

PS From the sea-facing terrace of the restaurant where we ate dinner, we saw a beautiful sunset with a real, though slightly anemic, green flash!