Snorkeling and Flowers

One thing we all really wanted to do while in Hawaii was to go snorkeling. We looked at several options, and finally settled on a trip offered by the Pacific Whale Foundation. They do a lot of work to protect Hawaii's sea life (including whales and dolphins), and the kids were free so it seemed like a good fit. 

We were mostly interested in the opportunity to snorkel at Molokini - a famed reef for snorkeling. We woke up at 5 am so we could arrive in time and get on the boat. It was super windy, and cool, so we put on as many clothes as we could and enjoyed the boat ride out to the volcanic crater rim. 

We arrived and the water was very choppy...so choppy that they wouldn't let us off the boat. They decided to wait a few minutes to see if it would calm down and in the mean time they spotted a Hawaiian monk seal swimming. These creatures are endangered and extremely rare. The crew of the boat said they had never seen one swimming in the wild. The pics I took were all blurry because my manual focus was on instead of my auto focus, but I'll include one here anyway - proof that we saw this guy.

After about 5 minutes, they decided it was just too unsafe and choppy to let us off to snorkel, so they headed to the second snorkel site - Turtle town. Really it was just an area about 1/2 mile off shore from the beaches near our resort. But it had some pretty cool reefs and we got to snorkel for about an hour. When we first jumped in, there weren't many other snorkelers there, so we saw some turtles swimming around. We also saw a lot of fish, and even an eel!

On our way back to the harbor, we saw a whale. Our boat was closer than the whale watching boat, so we got a pretty cool view. It appeared to be a mama whale that was feeding her calf. It's tail stayed out of the water like this almost the whole time we were watching.  I guess that's the position they are in when they are feeding. 

Of course when the tour was over, the sun came out. Kevin and Kayleigh decided to do a little more snorkeling right off one of the beaches. We could also see several boats out at Molokini, so the winds must have died down. 

In addition to our big activities, every day included walks along the ocean front path and the resort. I snapped several photos of interesting plants and flowers. 

These were everywhere and I recognize them as plants we also saw in Thailand. In fact, quite a few of the flowers were familiar because of our trip to Thailand. 

This is what it looked like prior to blooming.

mid bloom

full bloom...