Hawaii Day 7 - Snorkeling Fun!!

I said on my post about our horseback riding that I was really looking forward to that day's excursion, but today was TRULY the day that I was most excited about! We were going snorkeling with dolphins!

My experience with snorkeling, or anything involving wearing goggles has never been a great one. My hair always ends up getting in my way, I can't find a mask to fit my face, you name it and it's been a problem for me. All of those problems equal my mask never getting a good seal so my mask has always filled up with water, or fogged quickly. Either way it's taken away from my enjoyment of wearing a mask while in the water. I brought my own goggles that I had, but again they were not sealing correctly, so I used the goggles from the dive tour that we went on. Everything worked amazingly well! My goggles sealed correctly so I never had my mask fill up with water or fog up, so I had a great time snorkeling today!

Before we left the dock Michel took a picture of a boat whose name he thought was funny:

If you can't see it clearly it's called "Kid's Inheritance" :)

Michel also took a picture of me before we left the dock. Notice, my hair is pulled back and I have on my swimsuit with my cover-up on top. Yeah, that didn't last long (the looking somewhat-put-together).

Before our first snorkel drop I put on a wetsuit top that I had rented and took my hair down because I can never get my mask to fit over my ponytail. I have special snorkeling needs apparently :)

Now, I'm ready to go!!

I rented a wetsuit after reading many accounts on TripAdvisor.com where people said to get the wetsuit because the water was cold. Boy, were they right! During our first time in, the water wasn't too cold because we were swimming where it was only about 10-12 feet deep. However, I get chilly easily. During our second time in the water (with the dolphins) the water was about 25-30 feet deep, and definitely MUCH colder. Anyways....

...back to our first drop in the water...we drove around looking for seaturtles poking their heads out of the water. The first thing that we spotted though was a monk seal lying on the beach - a public beach!! We took a picture, but it was too far away and you really couldn't make out what you were looking out. Our boat captains told us that monk seals are an endangered species, but they'll swim in the water for a couple of weeks, and then they'll find a beach to lay on where they can just sleep for a week. Must be nice... :)

....so, again, back to our first drop in the water, we quickly found some sea turtles and were released to go into the water. We saw all kinds of awesome fish, and got some up-close looks at sea turtles. At one point I was swimming only about 10 feet away from one, and he was swimming on the surface of the water, so it was really cool!!

In case you can't make it out, this is a picture of a sea turtle swimming about 12 feet below us

Here's the sea turtle that we were really close to...he didn't seem bothered by us at all!

Such an awesome experience - seeing marine life in their natural habitat!!

We snorkeled here for about 20 minutes before moving on to the next spot. One of our boat captains said that the spot we were going to had reported seeing a pod of dolphins, so we were going to try and find them, too. It didn't take us too long before we found some...

Again, it was SOOO cool to see these magnificent creatures play in their natural environment. For a few minutes we just saw their fins sticking out of the water, but they started doing a couple of tricks for us.

Michel caught the end of this dolphin doing a flip out of the water...so cool!

They had no fear swimming right alongside our boat

In some of the pictures you can still see the shoreline. We were probably only about 100 feet away from the shore when we found the dolphins. These were spinner dolphins which are very common to Hawaiian waters (as told by our captain). They're much smaller than bottlenose dolphins, and generally only grow to be about 6-7 feet long and a couple hundred pounds. Babies are only about 4 feet long and 150 pounds. We were actually very lucky and saw some babies - they were so cute! I would bring one home with me if I could! We were told that the babies were only 1-2 weeks old, and a couple jumped out of the water....coolest. thing. ever!!

We were allowed to go in the water with them, but were warned that they would be very skittish to have people in the water since there were baby dolphins. Unfortunately, this was true. We saw about eight dolphins - all cruising the bottom of the ocean - about 20-25 feet below us. we were able to see them from the top of the water, and even took a picture, but it wasn't even worth saving. It just looked like a shadow! Oh well...I'll always remember it :)

Awesome snorkeling today!!

Before we headed back to the boat docks, our captain took us to see where the Black Pearl was (the actual ship used in the Pirates of the Caribbean)!

Then he drove the boat around so that each family could have their picture with the ship in the background.

What a great trip!! I'll never forget our fun snorkeling experience!