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Apr. 19th, 2006 01:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenLast Tuesday, my brother's girlfriend, Aimee, arranged for Devin and I to go snorkeling off a catamaran, like the one I took out on the "booze cruise" last time I was in Hawai'i, only this one was much earlier.
Snorkeling is fun. When you can't dive--which is often, with my budget--you snorkel. Hawai'i's not a bad place for it, neither, because TURTLES!!!!
I saw, for the first time ever, a turtle at the surface of the water while I was not in the water. This doesn't seem like an achievement, but let me tell you: it is weird seeing them like that. I've seen them in the water while I was snorkeling or scuba diving, and I've seen them with my feet on the ground while they were in a pool at an aquarium. I have never been on a boat and seen one come up to the surface of the ocean. It was spectacular.
After the snorkeling, there was much to drink upon the catamaran, so Aimee and I were rolled back to the hotel by Devin, and we shopped some until we met up with Aimee's parents. They're pretty cool. They got bumped up to a posh sister hotel to the one they had booked originally because it was their 35th anniversary. The hotel they were in cost something like $750/night, but they paid only what they would have at the hotel they booked for. The Royal Hawai'ian (where they ended up) had carved wooden doors and pink everything else--pink towels, bedspreads, lotions, robes, etc. Aimee was wearing pink and we nearly lost her to the camoflauge.
We at with Aimee's parents and mine for dinner at Duke's, a seafood restaurant where, ha ha ha, I had caesar salad. I also had steak, so it wasn't so healthy. But I forgot my ID, so no booze there for me. Just as well. I was going diving the next day! No booze for me!
The really most awesomest thing ever about my trip happened one week ago today:
Shark cage snorkeling actually. As a birthday present, my brother and his girlfriend paid for me to go on a shark cage snorkel off Oahu's North Shore. Aimee had a bad experience with her dive in the main tank at the Sea Life Park last time I was out, but she hopped right into the water for this and was so brave! HUGS TO AIMEE WHO I KNOW WILL READ THIS!!!!
What can I say but that the whole experience was amazing in ways that defy description in any language? They take you out on a boat to a cage with an open top that floats out on the ocean. You get into the cage, you snorkel, you watch the sharks swarm about to eat what the boat chums for them. The whole thing is very professional in ways that my later and earlier scuba dives weren't. These guys know their shit. They answered any question, joked and were serious at all the right times, and they had a system that, yeah, rakes in the dough, but that also makes a lot of sense. They don't chum too near the cage from the boat, so the sharks won't associate people in the cage = food. That's logical in many ways, and does double reassurance to anyone who might still be nervous about the whole thing. They were very knowledgeable about the sharks we saw, respectful of them, saddened when they saw injured or parasite-ridden ones, and all-around cool, cool guys.
I guess you'd be cool no matter what if you did what they do for a living, but still.
The sharks were nine-to-twelve foot Galapagos sharks and about six-foot Sandbar sharks, and they numbered about thirty or so, which we were told was a very good number, so we were lucky. The Sandbar sharks were few and far between, ethereally pale white-blue and occasionally speeding upwards out of twinkling twilight blue water to grab a bite and disappear again. The eerie way they approached with a purpose and vanished again impressed upon me--for the first time ever--how scary it might be to meet one of these animals outside of my controlled environment. I've dived and seen sharks before, but they never approached me, and I certainly saw them coming. Having never dived so far off from the shore or a reef outcrop before, I'd never gotten to see a shark pop into my peripheral vision like that.
The Galapagos sharks were the gluttons, hanging about just waiting for the food. Something else I got to see at the surface of the water: shark fins. You know in Jaws where that's the herald of doom? I was at the edge of the boat before we got in the water practically jumping up and down with excitement. THEY ARE SOOOOO CUTE!!!! Their tails stuck out, too, and were floppy and they were all universally adorable. The top of a Galapagos shark body is about the same as your stereotypical shark-shape, a tannish-brown color that only becomes faintly golden when you hop into the cage and see the light striking them as you are level with them.
Breathtaking.
That's the best word for the whole trip. Sharks are beautiful animals, and that's what they were. They were not monsters. They were not inanimate. They just were, and what they were was magnificent. To watch them swim is to see evolution at its finest. Sharks have evolved so very little, compared to a lot of other animals, over the 350 million years we can verify (from the fossil record--go Darwin!) they have existed. They haven't had to evolve--they are perfect. They swim so gracefully it seems effortless, yet the whole of their body is muscle and sinew to achieve that effect. Their fins stabilize them and provide an up/down in an environment otherwise fairly devoid of directionality.
I squeeeeed into my snorkel when one would swim by and blink its nictating third eyelid at me. I wish it would have stayed white and dangerous-looking, since I didn't see too many doing the distended-jaw feeding thing. Several times, I was so tempted to reach out and brush their skins, and, even though I did slip an elbow through the bars and a foot down the bottom of the cage once or twice when I got knocked about, I never did. Touching them seemed...not allowed? I mean, I didn't really worry about the guys running the thing, and I was absolutely not afraid of having my hand bitten off or anything (it was a possibility when there were sharks feeding in the water I would venture a limb into, but that wasn't what stopped me).
It just felt like an intrusion. Like I was damned lucky to see these fantastic creatures and that by wanting more, wanting to touch them, maybe I was being an ingrate, was demanding too much. And yeah, I didn't want to risk limb-loss when I couldn't accurately gauge depth and distance with the distortion (not to mention the waves knocking up and down), but still. It seemed like heresy to touch them. If more religion were like this, more people would be in church on Sundays.
The only problem with these two blissful days of water play was the mal de mer my brother and I both caught on the tripp to the shark cage. These were some choppy seas, 4-6 ft. swells. In the shark cage, I banged every part of my body into the thing. If you let go of the cage, it would come roiling back to wallop you good for your carelessness. Even when holding on, you might take a few bumps. So, I learned to hold on.
The problem with that was that trying to stay straight while the ocean bumped up and down meant seasickness and lots of it. I vomited about three times into the water, which, well, at least I got to practice how to do that with a mask and snorkel on, so, should the problem ever arise again while diving, I know what to do, how to get air without getting water when I'm finished, etc. But lordy, was that not fun. It didn't nearly ruin my trip, not by a longshot, but it took some hours to get my stomach righted (strangely, McDonald's fries helped after I took some dramamine to settle my stomach).
My brother was worse off than me, poor thing, but Aimee managed to be one of two out of a party of six (not including the tour guys) who didn't purge. So, not only was she perfectly okay with the sharkies, she didn't end up voiding her breakfast into the water (she did end up with some on her bathing suit--yuckie, sorry about that!). Ugh, I'm dizzy and uncomfortable now just thinking about how bad that was...
Unfortunately, Darryl's crazy nausea probably caused some mucousal backup or something like that ended up keeping him on the boat when we went out diving shortly after our shark encounter. He tried but couldn't equalize pressure in his ears and surfaced. I stayed under with our group. The first dive was a drift dive, which was good up to the point where we went past the one group doing drills who then saw like a billion turtles go by and we couldn't win against the current to get back to them.
The second dive was shallower and meant to be longer, maybe an hour, but we spent only 35 minutes under, and a lot of that was, well, boring. We covered the same ground over and over, and I chased between groups when they seemed to have found anything interesting. Dive-boring isn't the same as land-boring. The most boring dive is still a million times more exciting than anything else just for the fun of playing underwater. I had a good time, even if I was frustrated at the utter lack of a plan to see stuff and the constantly being pulled back to the main hole we'd entered over. That was my worst regret about Darryl not being able to clear his ears and come with. With a buddy, I might have gone off where I pleased. Oh well, next time.
I got to see a cool eel gaping at me, and I saw a turtle at the surface from below that I scurried upward to take pictures of before being dive-signal yelled at by the instructors for doing so. Whatever dudes. It was a turtle. I got to swim back down with a turtle. You can take your non-functional buddy system and shove it.
Somethine I noticed on my last dives in Hawai'i struck me again this time, and my opinion of the reefs' health was confirmed with an IMAX I saw the day after. Hawai'i's reefs are dying. There's so much dirt and silt on top of the reefs, so few splotches of color that indicate living coral, it made me sad for the entire time I was diving. That just should not be. I've seen dead reefs before--in Fiji, there were whole outcrops of reef that were spotted with live coral on top of a dead base. But this was the worst. If live corals in Fiji polka-dotted the reef, live corals in Hawai'i were little more present than stains on a not-frequently-worn shirt. It's that bad.
WORSE, that stupid instructor doing her Advanced Open Water navigation test attached her rope TO THE ONLY LIVE CORALS IN A TEN FOOT RADIUS OF WHERE SHE WAS DOING HER FUCKING DRILLS. Excuse me, but there is so much dead stuff around you, and you had to wrap your rope around the only bits of live staghorn coral in your immediate vicinity? WITH BARE HANDS!?! Oh God. No wonder the corals are dying. If the 'professionals' are treating coral this poorly, imagine what the novice tourists are doing.
Maybe it's just me, but I flinch every time I see a video or a real life situation where someone touches coral. Just...just don't, people, okay? Sure, maybe it won't hurt if just you do it, but how likely do you think it is that it will ever be just you doing it? In the IMAX video we saw, some of these divers trying to research reef health and causes of reef disease/injury would touch corals. In their defense, most of them were wearing gloves when they did, but still ::FLINCH::
I understand our human impulse to understand everything by experiencing as many sensations from a thing as possible, and since smell and taste are (or should be, if you're doing it right) off the list when diving, touch seems a natural extension of your eyes and your (limited) hearing. BUT DO NOT SUCCUMB. You can break off a twig when you go camping to mark your trail. The plant making that twig will replace it and thousands of others every year. It takes thousands of years to build a reef, and coral is infinitely more fragile because it takes a successful symbiosis of algae and coral to build the reef and maintain it. We're doing enough to kill coral by dumping waste, logging and letting the silt run into the ocean and smothering the coral, we don't need to touch the fracking coral! /eco-frenzied ranting
I love playing in the water. I wish everyone else could play in the water, too. But at this rate... ::le sigh::
Snorkeling is fun. When you can't dive--which is often, with my budget--you snorkel. Hawai'i's not a bad place for it, neither, because TURTLES!!!!
I saw, for the first time ever, a turtle at the surface of the water while I was not in the water. This doesn't seem like an achievement, but let me tell you: it is weird seeing them like that. I've seen them in the water while I was snorkeling or scuba diving, and I've seen them with my feet on the ground while they were in a pool at an aquarium. I have never been on a boat and seen one come up to the surface of the ocean. It was spectacular.
After the snorkeling, there was much to drink upon the catamaran, so Aimee and I were rolled back to the hotel by Devin, and we shopped some until we met up with Aimee's parents. They're pretty cool. They got bumped up to a posh sister hotel to the one they had booked originally because it was their 35th anniversary. The hotel they were in cost something like $750/night, but they paid only what they would have at the hotel they booked for. The Royal Hawai'ian (where they ended up) had carved wooden doors and pink everything else--pink towels, bedspreads, lotions, robes, etc. Aimee was wearing pink and we nearly lost her to the camoflauge.
We at with Aimee's parents and mine for dinner at Duke's, a seafood restaurant where, ha ha ha, I had caesar salad. I also had steak, so it wasn't so healthy. But I forgot my ID, so no booze there for me. Just as well. I was going diving the next day! No booze for me!
The really most awesomest thing ever about my trip happened one week ago today:
Shark cage snorkeling actually. As a birthday present, my brother and his girlfriend paid for me to go on a shark cage snorkel off Oahu's North Shore. Aimee had a bad experience with her dive in the main tank at the Sea Life Park last time I was out, but she hopped right into the water for this and was so brave! HUGS TO AIMEE WHO I KNOW WILL READ THIS!!!!
What can I say but that the whole experience was amazing in ways that defy description in any language? They take you out on a boat to a cage with an open top that floats out on the ocean. You get into the cage, you snorkel, you watch the sharks swarm about to eat what the boat chums for them. The whole thing is very professional in ways that my later and earlier scuba dives weren't. These guys know their shit. They answered any question, joked and were serious at all the right times, and they had a system that, yeah, rakes in the dough, but that also makes a lot of sense. They don't chum too near the cage from the boat, so the sharks won't associate people in the cage = food. That's logical in many ways, and does double reassurance to anyone who might still be nervous about the whole thing. They were very knowledgeable about the sharks we saw, respectful of them, saddened when they saw injured or parasite-ridden ones, and all-around cool, cool guys.
I guess you'd be cool no matter what if you did what they do for a living, but still.
The sharks were nine-to-twelve foot Galapagos sharks and about six-foot Sandbar sharks, and they numbered about thirty or so, which we were told was a very good number, so we were lucky. The Sandbar sharks were few and far between, ethereally pale white-blue and occasionally speeding upwards out of twinkling twilight blue water to grab a bite and disappear again. The eerie way they approached with a purpose and vanished again impressed upon me--for the first time ever--how scary it might be to meet one of these animals outside of my controlled environment. I've dived and seen sharks before, but they never approached me, and I certainly saw them coming. Having never dived so far off from the shore or a reef outcrop before, I'd never gotten to see a shark pop into my peripheral vision like that.
The Galapagos sharks were the gluttons, hanging about just waiting for the food. Something else I got to see at the surface of the water: shark fins. You know in Jaws where that's the herald of doom? I was at the edge of the boat before we got in the water practically jumping up and down with excitement. THEY ARE SOOOOO CUTE!!!! Their tails stuck out, too, and were floppy and they were all universally adorable. The top of a Galapagos shark body is about the same as your stereotypical shark-shape, a tannish-brown color that only becomes faintly golden when you hop into the cage and see the light striking them as you are level with them.
Breathtaking.
That's the best word for the whole trip. Sharks are beautiful animals, and that's what they were. They were not monsters. They were not inanimate. They just were, and what they were was magnificent. To watch them swim is to see evolution at its finest. Sharks have evolved so very little, compared to a lot of other animals, over the 350 million years we can verify (from the fossil record--go Darwin!) they have existed. They haven't had to evolve--they are perfect. They swim so gracefully it seems effortless, yet the whole of their body is muscle and sinew to achieve that effect. Their fins stabilize them and provide an up/down in an environment otherwise fairly devoid of directionality.
I squeeeeed into my snorkel when one would swim by and blink its nictating third eyelid at me. I wish it would have stayed white and dangerous-looking, since I didn't see too many doing the distended-jaw feeding thing. Several times, I was so tempted to reach out and brush their skins, and, even though I did slip an elbow through the bars and a foot down the bottom of the cage once or twice when I got knocked about, I never did. Touching them seemed...not allowed? I mean, I didn't really worry about the guys running the thing, and I was absolutely not afraid of having my hand bitten off or anything (it was a possibility when there were sharks feeding in the water I would venture a limb into, but that wasn't what stopped me).
It just felt like an intrusion. Like I was damned lucky to see these fantastic creatures and that by wanting more, wanting to touch them, maybe I was being an ingrate, was demanding too much. And yeah, I didn't want to risk limb-loss when I couldn't accurately gauge depth and distance with the distortion (not to mention the waves knocking up and down), but still. It seemed like heresy to touch them. If more religion were like this, more people would be in church on Sundays.
The only problem with these two blissful days of water play was the mal de mer my brother and I both caught on the tripp to the shark cage. These were some choppy seas, 4-6 ft. swells. In the shark cage, I banged every part of my body into the thing. If you let go of the cage, it would come roiling back to wallop you good for your carelessness. Even when holding on, you might take a few bumps. So, I learned to hold on.
The problem with that was that trying to stay straight while the ocean bumped up and down meant seasickness and lots of it. I vomited about three times into the water, which, well, at least I got to practice how to do that with a mask and snorkel on, so, should the problem ever arise again while diving, I know what to do, how to get air without getting water when I'm finished, etc. But lordy, was that not fun. It didn't nearly ruin my trip, not by a longshot, but it took some hours to get my stomach righted (strangely, McDonald's fries helped after I took some dramamine to settle my stomach).
My brother was worse off than me, poor thing, but Aimee managed to be one of two out of a party of six (not including the tour guys) who didn't purge. So, not only was she perfectly okay with the sharkies, she didn't end up voiding her breakfast into the water (she did end up with some on her bathing suit--yuckie, sorry about that!). Ugh, I'm dizzy and uncomfortable now just thinking about how bad that was...
Unfortunately, Darryl's crazy nausea probably caused some mucousal backup or something like that ended up keeping him on the boat when we went out diving shortly after our shark encounter. He tried but couldn't equalize pressure in his ears and surfaced. I stayed under with our group. The first dive was a drift dive, which was good up to the point where we went past the one group doing drills who then saw like a billion turtles go by and we couldn't win against the current to get back to them.
The second dive was shallower and meant to be longer, maybe an hour, but we spent only 35 minutes under, and a lot of that was, well, boring. We covered the same ground over and over, and I chased between groups when they seemed to have found anything interesting. Dive-boring isn't the same as land-boring. The most boring dive is still a million times more exciting than anything else just for the fun of playing underwater. I had a good time, even if I was frustrated at the utter lack of a plan to see stuff and the constantly being pulled back to the main hole we'd entered over. That was my worst regret about Darryl not being able to clear his ears and come with. With a buddy, I might have gone off where I pleased. Oh well, next time.
I got to see a cool eel gaping at me, and I saw a turtle at the surface from below that I scurried upward to take pictures of before being dive-signal yelled at by the instructors for doing so. Whatever dudes. It was a turtle. I got to swim back down with a turtle. You can take your non-functional buddy system and shove it.
Somethine I noticed on my last dives in Hawai'i struck me again this time, and my opinion of the reefs' health was confirmed with an IMAX I saw the day after. Hawai'i's reefs are dying. There's so much dirt and silt on top of the reefs, so few splotches of color that indicate living coral, it made me sad for the entire time I was diving. That just should not be. I've seen dead reefs before--in Fiji, there were whole outcrops of reef that were spotted with live coral on top of a dead base. But this was the worst. If live corals in Fiji polka-dotted the reef, live corals in Hawai'i were little more present than stains on a not-frequently-worn shirt. It's that bad.
WORSE, that stupid instructor doing her Advanced Open Water navigation test attached her rope TO THE ONLY LIVE CORALS IN A TEN FOOT RADIUS OF WHERE SHE WAS DOING HER FUCKING DRILLS. Excuse me, but there is so much dead stuff around you, and you had to wrap your rope around the only bits of live staghorn coral in your immediate vicinity? WITH BARE HANDS!?! Oh God. No wonder the corals are dying. If the 'professionals' are treating coral this poorly, imagine what the novice tourists are doing.
Maybe it's just me, but I flinch every time I see a video or a real life situation where someone touches coral. Just...just don't, people, okay? Sure, maybe it won't hurt if just you do it, but how likely do you think it is that it will ever be just you doing it? In the IMAX video we saw, some of these divers trying to research reef health and causes of reef disease/injury would touch corals. In their defense, most of them were wearing gloves when they did, but still ::FLINCH::
I understand our human impulse to understand everything by experiencing as many sensations from a thing as possible, and since smell and taste are (or should be, if you're doing it right) off the list when diving, touch seems a natural extension of your eyes and your (limited) hearing. BUT DO NOT SUCCUMB. You can break off a twig when you go camping to mark your trail. The plant making that twig will replace it and thousands of others every year. It takes thousands of years to build a reef, and coral is infinitely more fragile because it takes a successful symbiosis of algae and coral to build the reef and maintain it. We're doing enough to kill coral by dumping waste, logging and letting the silt run into the ocean and smothering the coral, we don't need to touch the fracking coral! /eco-frenzied ranting
I love playing in the water. I wish everyone else could play in the water, too. But at this rate... ::le sigh::
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-19 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-19 08:00 pm (UTC)