What Lies Beneath

…the “beneath” in this case being mostly water, but also cleverly allowing me to drop in a couple of Waipio Valley photos as well. But I’ll start with the water.

We’ve had a particularly successful underwater season this year, as I showed in a post a week or so ago: lots of sea turtles, moral eels, and the usual panoply of insanely-colored fish. But we had a remarkable outing a few days ago at the City of Refuge (Pu’uhonua O Honaunau), a national historical park that is the site of an ancient Hawaiian priestly enclave, where one could atone for religious transgressions that would otherwise get you killed. I personally have a substantial collection of those but we go in part for the excellent snorkeling, arguably the best on the island for its towering coral gardens alone. The highlight of this particular outing, made with our friends Stacy and Rick, was this chance manta ray encounter as we were returning to shore:

Alice had already returned to shore, Stacy nearly there, and Rick about 10′ in front of me. I poked my head out of the water and shouted for him, but his ears were in the water so I had no other witnesses to the sight. There were three mantas, all with wingspans in the range of 6′, i.e. bigger than me. (You can see a glimpse of a second one in the upper left of the lower image.) The lower picture made me wonder if this guy had been in a fight, since his (or her?) left wingtip looks stubby and chopped off. But the right wingtip looks that way in the upper image, so I assume it’s just a trick of the angle at which his/her wings are flapping. In any case, it was a thrilling sight.

The marine thrills continued the next day on the most productive whale watching trip we have ever made. Six of us went out (us, Stacy and Rick, and our other visiting homies, Vince and Sherry), choosing to book with Captain Zodiac tours because, well, how cool is it to go out whale watching in a military-grade Zodiac? (Answer: very.) The outing was part whale watch, part Whack-A-Mole (“Whack-A-Whale?”), as humpbacks popped up all around us, at one point literally surrounding the boat. We were even rewarded with this honest-to-god breach, a few hundred yards away:

Thar she blows…

Very exciting indeed. At one point we were perhaps 100-150 yards from some kind of mating scrum involving multiple whales. Here’s a video (clicking here or on the image will start it in a new window):

We saw something in the range of a dozen whales in two hours, not counting the several that we’ve seen from shore during the past few weeks. Seems like a good whale year. (The total population of North Pacific humpbacks, who annually migrate between Hawaii and Alaska, is about 15,000.)

Moving back onto land, the final “beneath” part of this post (making good on the tortured title) was the valley floor of Waipio Valley. I’ve written about it twice before (here in 2020 and more briefly here in 2018) so I won’t add more detail now (just click the two links). But as we did two years ago, we took the 4WD tour down the steep valley sides to tour the rivers, taro fields, and farmlands below. So I’ll close with a few photos from the trip:

The valley walls on either side are over 1000 feet high

Monkeypod tree

Eucalpytus with striking colorful bark

Our visitors leave tomorrow, and it was a pleasure having them. We now face about 10 days of having to talk to each other before the next phalanx of visitors arrives: family!

On an unrelated note, I forgot to mention in my last post that that one was my 250th since starting this blog in late 2013. (This is thus #251.) Since that initial post I have acquired a little over 500 followers. So thanks for reading!

Valentine’s Day: True Lava

The Big Island is built out of five volcanoes, two of them still active: Mauna Loa and Kilauea. Mauna Loa last erupted in 1984, while Kilauea last erupted when I started typing this sentence. More accurately, it is been in an on-and-off eruptive state since early 1983, and although it wasn’t doing anything when we were here a year ago, it’s somewhat back in action now. Lava brings tourists, and it is precisely because of these irregular outbursts of varying magnitude that Hawaii Volcanoes National Park attracts over a million visitors a year. With proper precautions — rigorously enforced by the National Park Service — you can get a spectacular view without being parboiled (or, as happens once every year or two, falling into a crater).

The park is a two hour drive from our house, and the lava is of course best viewed at night, so rather than make an exhausting round trip we drove to Hilo (on the eastern, windward side of the island) and met up with our old friends Tom and Carole — he and I being old colleagues from my observatory days — who invited us to spend the night at their house.

We drove to the volcano at about 9:00 PM, passing through drizzly low-hanging clouds en route to the 4000 ft summit; the park is about 45 minutes from Hilo. There is a road, Crater Rim Drive, that, up until part of it was deemed unsafe after a major eruption a few years ago, used to encircle the 3-mile diameter summit caldera. Now it only goes about halfway around and dead-ends at each end. In the middle of the caldera is the locus of the current eruption: Halema’uma’u Crater, essentially a crater within a crater that is currently home to a lava lake several hundred feet deep. Up until about two years ago, Halema’uma’u was about 3000 feet across with sheer vertical walls. But the walls collapsed about three years ago in the last outburst, and the crater is now shallower but nearly twice as big.

We parked at a trailhead and, armed with flashlights, walked a mile over a now closed-off section of Crater Rim Drive to be treated to this sight, about a mile away from our perch:

The third photo is a several-second time exposure that makes the scene appear much brighter than it really was; the sky was black to our eyes. And I don’t know who the family is in the last photo; I only know that they looked cool, silhouetted against the glowing smoke like that. They may have been preparing the child for a human sacrifice to Madame Pele, the volcano goddess, because hey, somebody’s got to keep the crops from failing. Not sure if the kid survived the outing or not, but in any case I emailed the photo to her parents, who enjoyed it a lot.

Kahalu’u Fish

The title sounds like the name of either some seafood recipe or a 1969 acid rock band. But Kahalu’u is the name of the beautiful snorkeling beach quite near our house, and it is, well, full of fish. We usually snorkel there once a week or so because of its convenience, the abundance of sea life, and the relative ease of getting in and out of the water. It’s a small bay, somewhat shielded from the open ocean by a line of lava rock that runs partway across it that acts as a natural wave break. Hence it is quite shallow — less than 6 ft pretty much everywhere, depending on the tide, and usually modest in its waves and currents.

Alice is 99% recovered from her various travails — a little residual swelling in ankle is all — so we were able to resume our snorkeling routine. The tide was in at 1 PM today when we went, and the currents somewhat stronger than usual, so Alice did not last long. But we were nonetheless rewarded with a pretty typical display, and I took these photos with my little Panasonic Lumix waterproof point-and-shoot camera. You can click on the individual images to see them at full resolution.

The guy at upper right is a humuhumunukunukuapua’a, a.k.a. the reef trigger fish. It is the state fish of Hawaii, and I am very proud of the fact that I once got a discount on a t-shirt for pronouncing it correctly to the sales clerk. (It’s easier than it looks: just say every letter.)

The close-up of the sea turtle was a lucky shot… and an illegal one. Honu are protected, and you are not supposed to approach closer than 10 feet to them. The turtles themselves, however, are not aware of this particular rule. I was actually on my way back to shore when I got caught in a current that swept me rather faster than planned towards shore and straight into this turtle who was blithely swimming upstream against the current out towards the sea. I was about 2′ from banging into him (her?) head-on and frantically twisted myself barely out of the way, retaining just enough presence of mind to aim the camera and click the shutter as I swept past. It’s one of the best sea turtle shots I’ve ever taken, which makes this is a good day. Happily, most of them here are.

Even Paradise Has the Occasional Pothole

We have been on the island for nine days now, and although things are typically wonderful and beautiful — we have already had two spectacular whale sightings from shore — the Truth in Blogging Code requires me to report that Alice has been having a bit of a bumpy ride. In the past week and a half she has “enjoyed”:

• A respiratory infection necessitating a doctor’s visit. (Assorted PCR and other tests determined it to be a bacterial infection as opposed to COVID or flu.)
• Some unpleasantness whose details I will spare you, resulting from the antibiotic that the doctor prescribed.
• A popped molar crown. She is at the dentist having it reattached as I type this.
• A twisted ankle that put her in an ankle brace for a couple of days, resulting from stepping into a pothole during a nighttime walk.

So while she is not quite ready to be put into an outrigger canoe, set afire, and pushed out to sea, it has not been the smoothest of visits for her so far. (And anyway, it’s Vikings who do that, not Hawaiians.) But these things are all ephemeral, and our life here is already on its way back to its usual idyllic character, if not quite there yet. We’ve had one glorious snorkeling outing whose sights included an enormous green sea turtle (honu in Hawaiian), and a sunset trip to the summit of Mauna Kea, which is always a pilgrimage for me. Here’s a quick cell phone shot of the scene:

From left to right, those observatories are the Subaru telescope, built by Japan (the name means “Pleiades”, as in the constellation and has nothing to do with the car); the twin-domed Keck telescope run by CalTech; and NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF). That’s Maui on the island behind the IRTF.

Alice did not actually come all the way to the summit, choosing not to take any chances in the 13,800′ thin air while she is still recovering from her respiratory bug. We were actually bringing our Kona next door neighbors there for an excursion, so she stayed behind at the visitor center at 9000′ elevation.

And of course there have been the legally-required beautiful sunsets — at least one complete with the famous Green Flash optical phenomenon — visible from the lanai behind our house.

We’ve also had one particularly satisfying outing for me, to the Paleaku Peace Garden about 20 minutes south of our house, a serene mediation/botanical garden situated on a hillside overlooking the Pacific. Founded 50 years ago by a then-recently-arrived lady named Barbara Defranco — a cheery Earth Mother-type who still runs the place — it is an ensemble of meditative botanical garden niches honoring assorted religions: Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Ba’hai, Hindu, Native American, pretty much everbody except the Scientologists and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (a.k.a. Pastafarians). Here are a few shots to give you the idea:

But the centerpiece is the “Galaxy Garden”, an elaborate 100-foot-wide assemblage of hedges and local plants that is actually a surprisingly accurate scale model of our actual Galaxy, complete with spiral arms and nebulae. Here’s an overhead drone shot of it:

The Galaxy Garden was designed (at considerable expense) by a well-known astronomy illustrator named Jon Lomberg, who lives near here. But Ms. Defranco and Lomberg had a falling out a year or two ago, and when she decided that she wanted to redo the excessively-complicated signage, she had no one to turn to. Enter me, naively wandering into the place a year ago and asking for permission to do some drone photography (usually forbidden there), based on my pleas that I was an astronomer, photographer, and generally cool guy. It was the “astronomer” part that got their attention, and faster than you can say “Om Mane Padme Hum” I was given carte blanche to do whatever photography I wanted in exchange for redesigning the Galaxy Garden signs. Which over the past year I have done. So here’s Lomberg’s rather complex original intro sign at the entrance to the galaxy:

…and here’s my version, installed last fall, and seen by me for the first time a couple of days ago:

The background image on the new sign — the tree silhouetted against the Milky Way — is my own photo, taken a year ago at the volcano. In any case, I was very pleased to see my creation there and am quite proud of it. There are a couple of other small signs around the Galaxy Garden which I have also agreed to redo, in return for which they have offered Alice and me a lifetime family membership, which we have happily accepted. (Family membership in Paleaku, which allows us unlimited visits and two guests per visit, normally costs $150 per year. So this seems like a perfectly fair deal to me. In truth, I asked for a two year membership, and Barbara immediately replied, “How about lifetime?”)

So as you can see, we’ve struggled just a little bit to get into our annual groove, but I think we are back on track and ready to settle in with a heavy duty schedule of snorkeling and not caring about the rest of the world.