that has to do with either sensory deprivation or the realization that some of the larger ocean animals capable of inflicting harm are most active at night.
A school of small squid flickered like moths in and out of our beams as we adjusted to the pressure at sixty feet. A moderately-sized octopus (“takū”) moved quickly along a row of boulders at the edge of the flat. It would seem difficult to describe anything with eight arms covered with suction cups as graceful. But this animal, slinking in and out of the rocks, coordinating all of its limbs in a seamless, flowing manner was nothing short of it. Cephalopods are thought to be particularly intelligent. Among other reasons, this probably has something to do with the neural processing required to integrate the motion of all those arms. I’m not sure whether the octopus I saw combing through van-sized stones was brilliant or not, but its motion clearly was.
I followed it along the rocks, until loosing it in a room-sized cave. I approached the enclosure tentatively, recalling the night dive at Onekāhakaha when the massive moray buzzed me. The entire ceiling was coated with circular orangish cups with feathery tentacles wafting the water for zooplankton. The smooth calices into which the corals retracted during the day were fully open, revealing active tentacles. I kneeled at the mouth, lighting up the dense colony while taking care that my exhaled air bubbles didn’t collect under the ceiling where they could harm the animals. Another, larger species soon came on the scene, also pursuing the aggregated zooplankton.
A school of a dozen giant manta rays soon surrounded me as I moved back onto the sand flat. Like swans flying effortlessly in slow motion, the mattress-sized rays cruised through the night, banking with mouths agape. Their backs were black and dotted with off-white spots. Their bellies were stark white, their wing tips sharply pointed, and their thin black tails trailed perfectly symmetrical bodies.
They swam directly at me, filter feeding. My dive light bore through gaping mouths and gill arches, illuminating the particulate snow swirling behind them like the effluent flow from a jet engine. Their mass and alien-like feeding appearance should have been daunting. But they passed on all sides of me, harmlessly grazing like a herd of elk moving down a mountainside in the Montana Missions, gliding elegantly and massively in the warm, dark, water.
~~~
I settled down the sloping reef through bright parrotfish. An offshore flow nudged me from the abrupt meeting of land and sea further down the Kona coast. I rocked along, inching through vivid corals on narrow reef benches rimming a deep channel cut from the volcano. A black chasm emerged on a sudden, shear face, fifty feet down – an ancient artery from a still-beating heart. It was eerie, like an image that appears in a troubled dream.
There was no life inside the lava tube, though I could see only a few feet in. The current sea floor was the fault along which a huge chunk of the Big Island slid back to the ocean. The tube had extended further, but was shaved clean as the rock calved off violently in a massive motion that triggered tsunami on the other islands. I stared into the void as the current sifted out the steep gorge. It was every bit as powerful an image of the islands’ rise and fall as lava scorching the sea.
Kealakekua Bay was a profound, striking blue. The marine life was brighter and bigger than anywhere else I found in the islands. The surface was calm, with soft, clear water and an omniscient overhead sun that fueled huge coral heads along steep shelves. The steep channel extended down the scoured fault, flushing deep currents in and out with a cool, nutrient-rich tidal rhythm underlying warm, calm surface layers of rich life.
A winding road fell from the highway at the town of Captain Cook, switching back past large fenced homes interspersed with cafes and shanties. The bay seemed larger through each break in the coffee trees, tucked against the steep volcano where the ancients buried royalty in cavernous lava tubes shaved off above the sea.
I had launched with one of my best friends on the southern rim of the horseshoe bay at mid-day and paddled the mile or so over to the steep northern rim and the marker commemorating the explorer who brought Hawai’i to the attention of the world. The monument itself (a miniature version of Washington’s obelisk) was less of a memorial to Cook than the profound spectacle of the bay itself. As we crossed, pods of spinner dolphins milled quietly, surfacing slowly in graceful half-slumber, their tight, hydrodynamic fins, flanks, and flukes glistening as they rolled in azure columns of light from the tall sun. The animals tried in vain to ignore tourists in dolphin-watching boats. Despite their obvious infatuation with the animals, they failed to understand that these animals, who feed mainly at night, came into the Bay to rest during the day. Viewing them passively from an idle kayak seemed a more sensitive and rewarding experience than blasting after them with outboards. It was also perhaps more respectful in the eyes of the ancients buried in the volcano above.
Kealakekua Bay was where Captain James Edward Cook’s legendary world-circling voyages came to an end. Cook and his men landed briefly on Kaua’i in early 1778 while searching for the Northwest Passage. When Cook returned to Hawai’i that November, he was mistaken by natives at Kealakekua Bay for Lono, the white god of plentiful harvests. The locals began to suspect that the white men were less than divine when one of them died and they had sex with native women, despite Cook’s orders against it. They left after several months on peaceful terms, but a mast on one of their ships snapped and they returned. The locals were suspicious, wondering what they had done to displease them and Cook was killed in a skirmish that nearly set off a full-scale battle. His fellow sailors buried him in Kealakekua Bay before returning to Britain with news of his death. As they introduced the western world to the Hawaiian Islands, Cook’s bones were slowly incorporated into the living foundation of the same reef I had come upon two centuries later.
I eased away from the black tunnel, down the steep slope toward deeper corals. Huge black triggerfish sparred and a sea turtle pushed past an array of large fan corals waving in subtle undercurrent. From the deep I noticed a flash, followed by several more. A school of cold blue bonito were feeding along the outer walls of the bay. Their streamlined bodies seemed sculpted by a mechanical engineer, with an emphasis on power and speed. As I drifted over the feeding school, they darted below me at a feverish clip. Their dark backs were nearly invisible as I looked down on them against the dark bottom; not accidentally, anything looking up at them against the bright sky would have similar difficulty detecting their light bellies. “Countershading” is a simple adaptation upon which many open-water marine animals have converged.
I lost the school against the darkening bottom as I drifted into a hundred and fifty feet of water. I slowly ascended and the current ceased pulling me out to sea. After the free ride out, I had to swim back and it would be easier at the calm surface. I pumped by BC full of air so I was completely positively buoyant and could direct all my energy to pushing forward. Swimming in dive gear is not the easiest thing in the world, but the panoramic view and warm, calm water helped me along.
The spinner dolphins were revving up in the bay, preparing for the evening hunt and I thought about the boats we had seen hounding them earlier. The ecotourism intrusions into their mid-day resting habitat raised an important and complex conservation issue. As people continue to expand their footprint and desire to see animals in their natural environments, wild places for wildlife continue to dwindle. The dolphins, like the falcons and grizzlies I myself intruded on in wonder at Glacier National Park, would no longer experience life as their ancestors had. On the other hand, it’s unquestionably better that people were chasing them with cameras and fascination than with harpoons. Some people want to try and shut off all human contact with the animals. Others oppose any restrictions on the number and nature of interested people around them. As was becoming increasingly common for me, I saw the most logical approach as an educated balance where animals would have meaningful and enforced protection, but people could experience their beauty in a way that might make them care more about conservation.
I swam back toward Cook’s monument and the sun dipped into the tranquil ocean behind me, drawing shadows on the green coffee fields and dairy farms stretching above the bay.
