He had surveyed all the dive masters and repeated divers at Kona, and five out of five so far, had all agreed that it was a wonderful dive, not to be missed, but that none of them would be doing it this particular day. Two of them even conceeded that they would never do it, for it was too frightening. I agreed with these two, as I had attempted a blue water dive in Phillipines last year to wait for hammer-head sharks and was frightened out of my wits. There were no reference points in deep blue ocean, just infinite blue-ness stretching in every direction, unable to even tell up or down, as there were no bottom to be seen. [Actually you can tell by the direction your air-bubbles were going that this was up.] I was not that comfortable relying on my pressure and depth gauge alone, so blackwater diving is for me at this point, a definite no-no. And amidst all this fear, I was supposed to wait for sharks.
Hawaii is known to have tiger-sharks 14-15 feet long, that frequents its waters. There are even great white sharks around, but usually attacking surfers on Maui instead of Kona. And sharks hunt at night. And they have been spotted by the blackwater divers. And some of them have quit since. All these weighed heavily against the temptation to see deep sea creatures that few humans have ever encountered, and not even discovered until recent years when deep sea probes with cameras had captured them.
It was decidedly unpleasant, from its taste like vomit, down to the tingling numbness of the tongue afterwards. I threw the bar away after one bite and decided not to try the Kava drink itself, which, some people enjoy for its relaxing effects. We found a Kava bar in a corner of the beach, with some die-hard junkies hanging around, but decided to give it a miss.
After consulting my Fodor's travel guide, I decided to spend our afternoon at one of the best beaches in Kona, the Kealakuaka Bay. This bay is reputed for frequent dolphin sightings and since I was enamoured with this beautiful animal, I decided to try my luck. We called a cab and proceeded on the Queen Kamehameha highway south of Kailua to Kealakekua. It took us more than an hour, and as the meter rate jumped to 80USD, Kenon started to complain that it was getting too expensive to go to that particular bay. When we arrived, I was feeling rather dejected as it would cost us another 80USD to get back to Kailua later.
Fortunately, we quickly found an alternative. We could rent a kayak and row over the bay to reach the beautiful snorkelling spot right under the Cook's monument. The monument was dedicated to Captain James Cook, who was the first European documented to have discovered Hawaii in 1779. It was said that he was killed in this bay, when he fought in a skirmish with some locals, shortly after he landed. The cab driver went further to tell us a common joke amongst the locals, which is that Captain Cook was eaten by the locals. It is true though, that early Hawaiians practiced human sacrificial rites, and there is no grave for Cook on the island.
I was nervous as I put on my safety jacket and got ready to enter the bright yellow banana shaped plastic kayak. I sat in the front depression after Kenon had gotten onto the back seat. I asked the young man renting the kayak to us, "I have never kayaked before, is there some sort of instructions or briefing or something I should know about it?" To which he replied, "If you paddle left, you go right and if you paddle right, you go left. That's all."
It really was that simple afterall, even though I was not making any progress on my own, according to Kenon, whom I spied on multiple occasions to have stopped paddling completely and had placed his paddle onto the boat to rest. About two-thirds of the way to the bay, after paddling about 20minutes, a dolphin shot up out of the water just in front of us, and spun a couple of somersault before diving into the sea again. We were utterly impressed and both of us became very excited. Kenon started to paddle hard towards the dolphins, which were actually a pod comprising of about twenty dolphins. Soon, another dolphin torpedoed out of the navy water before diving back in again. They took turns doing acrobatic stunts as the pod swam in the opposite direction to which we were paddling. Even though Kenon paddled hard, they quickly passed behind us. By that time, it dawned on us that the camera was in the dry bag, and we struggled to get it out. I could not turn around and it was fastened to the kayak strings, so we gave up. Instead we stopped everything to enjoy the last of the performance by the dolphins instead.
Spinner dolphins were the only type of dolphins to do acrobatics in the wild. Bottlenose can be taught to do tricks by their trainers in aquariums, but to me, that's not real. No one knows why the Spinner dolphins spin. When I asked the divemaster a few days later, she told me that despite millions spent on research, the best conclusion that marine biologists came up with was that they spin because they could.
After the pod of dolphins had passed us by, we continued paddling towards the Cook monument. We managed to arrive in another ten minutes. The shallow area was stunning to behold, absolutely clear seawater crystallized the sea floor into millions of shades of blues and greens, with occasional brilliant yellows and fire reds darting amongst the corals and rocks. Kenon exclaimed, "There's my Flame Angel! This is where they caught it!" as he pointed to a small but brilliantly orange angelfish with purple vertical stripes and neon blue anal fin. [He used to have a marine reef tank, in which a prized Flame Angel was kept.]
We could see right to the bottom of the sea floor from the kayak, the visibility was unsurpassed by any sites we had been to before. Tying the kayak to a mooring stone, which looked to be carved out of the last stone step leading to the monument, we were ready to snorkel the bay. Kenon jumped from the kayak directly into the sea while I was slightly more cautious, preferring to climb onto the stone steps and putting on my snorkel and mask first. Passing his equipment to him, he pushed himself up onto the steps and placed them on, so that we can continue. I had to urinate and called out to Kenon that I was going to urinate in the bay, to which he freaked out and shouted, "Sharks can smell urine, and there's no one else here!" and got out of the water. I swam about the bay exploring the stepped coral reef, there were a whole school of yellow tangs fluttering in the surf near the volcanic beach, a large purple parrotfish and lots of clams and urchins in small caves formed by depressions in the reef. The drop-off was very close, however, and we both knew that this bay is deep enough for large animals. We only snorkelled for 10 minutes at maximum, before we both got too frightened by our own imagination to continue, knowing full well that snorkelling on the surface resembles wounded animals a lot more than bubble-blowers in the sea.
Afterwards, we paddled back to our starting point, and returned the Kayak. I had stripped off my clothing and after showering and drying off, I put them back on to get into the cab. To my shock, and likely to the cab driver as well, Kenon had not brought an extra set of clothes and had to travel back in his salty and wet clothes. This amused me all the way back to Kailua, as I imagined that the cab driver would have thought Singaporeans must be crazy to just jump into the sea after he sent them to their destination, and climbed right back on afterwards.
Along the way, the driver drove us to a famed Painted Church on the next hill. It was deserted and dimly lighted by the setting sun when we got there. The inside of the church was modest, the whole church made very simply of wood, painted different colors. On the walls were painted murals depicting stories from the New Testament. Outside the church, I was deeply impressed by a table of items for sale, left completely on its own, not even with CCTV monitoring, in the outdoor with a box next to it for money collection. The prices of each item was stated on a sticker and patrons were trusted to pay on their own. This would never work in Singapore, I thought to myself, embarassed to the core upon realizing how low the morals of a society in which I lived amongst daily.
Exhausted when the cab finally pulled up outside our hostel in the late evening, I was glad that I had at least decided not to do the blackwater dive today. Kenon had called in to reserve his spot for the night. We rushed to change, and ate at McDonald's because we were running late, pleasantly surprised that the McD menu was completely different. I ordered a BLT while Kenon had a Classic Chicken burger. It tasted good too.
We went back to Honokahao harbour and got onto Moana Lu'u again. By the time the boat stopped for the dive, it was already pitch black outside, and 10pm. The dive briefing began. "First things first," Mike, the divemaster said, "when you get in the water, descend right away. No splashing on the surface like wounded animals. You don't want that." Trepidation.
"And a special dive signal that you might never have used before, " Fist with thumbs up moving rapidly up a few times, "means GET OUT NOW, no decompression, no hesitation. Just head up as fast as you can and jump into the boat." More trepidation.
"When we finish the dive, I will give the ascend signal to each of you one by one to ascend individually. We don't want to all head up to the surface and act like shipwreck survivors." Oh! Trepidation!
The dive was, however, rather uneventful. I waited on the boat for Kenon while he descended into pitch black darkness, with a small torchlight. Pools of light shone beneath the boat for 55minutes before the first of them came back. There were only 3 divers and 2 dive guides. Everyone was rather impressed with what they saw, and one of the lady divers exclaimed, " That was the weirdest thing, I felt like I was floating in space with translucent, bio-luminescent objects streaming past me!" I thought that was pretty cool! But too bad, I didn't have the courage to risk it.
Just when I thought that, a large splash was heard from the starboard side, and we turned in time to see a large tail [about a foot wide] disappear into the dark waters, sending shivers to everyone's spine. Fortunately all the divers were accounted for.
Utterly exhausted close to midnight, we headed back and slept, Kenon with heaves of relief the whole night through.
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