Saying yes or ‘Ae can lead to exciting adventures. One never knows what will happen when you say yes to someone’s offer or suggestion. Case in point, I was in Hawaii last week with my wife and another couple for some health related downtime. We weren’t aware that Tropical Storm Hone was approaching the islands, and it came clipped the Big Island as a Catagory One hurricane with winds above 75 mph. One day it was incredibly stormy, and the next was beautifully clear.
We were on the beach at Mauna Lani, and I said to the group, the water looks nice and calm right now, who would like to join me on a snorkel to “fingers reef”? Fingers reef is an advanced snorkel, that takes quite a while to swim to, and then quite a while to return from, but the time at fingers is usually pretty spectacular as you follow the coral reefs that are the shape of the fingers on your hand with beautiful coral, and big drop offs to the deeper blue ocean. There are several arches that you can swim down and go under. It looks like an aquarium.
On the way out, I stopped and asked if they wanted to take a small detour to see if we could find a shark in a cave. Years ago I was told about a cave and it’s general location, and after a few snorkels I found a white tipped reef shark sleeping/resting on the floor of the cave. Over the years I’ve been back to the cave many time with about a 10% success rate of finding a small shark to visit. I tried to find it, and then gave up, thinking we had missed it. We started again toward fingers reef, and 1 minute later I found the location of the cave. As I was turning to point at the cave, suddenly there were two fairly large white tipped reef sharks free swimming. Normally when I see reef sharks they are shy and generally swim away and want to stay away from snorkelers. I usually need to swim down 10-15 feet to look into a cave under the coral. These sharks were free swimming and coming toward us, and not shying away. After watching for a couple of minutes, we headed on to fingers reef.
Within two minutes I saw more sharks, I thought they were the same two, but there were 8 more. They were in the 4-5 ft range, maybe one of them was 6 ft. They were very agitated and they were swimming toward us to check us out. The absolute opposite of shy and swimming away. They came straight towards us and got to within 2 feet of us. We kept retreating. And eventually one of our snorkelers said, I’ve had enough.
It was an amazing sight! I always say, the ocean is not a zoo. You need to go out over and over to run into a special experience, and this was special.
Afterwards, I spoke with a local who said he never spearfishes after a storm. He said that sharks in particular a especially agitated and hungry after a storm, and that most shark bites are after storms. That would have been good to know!
Just say ‘Ae, and see what joy and adventure happens! (By the way, this photo is NOT what we saw. We did not have a GoPro or other underwater camera with us.)
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