Captain Cook

It’s 6am. I wake up Zach so we can head back to Captain Cook and do our snorkeling before the tourist boats show up. We grab our snorkeling gear and my old Minolta 110 underwater camera. After a cup of fresh Kona coffee for me and a hot chocolate for Zach, we jump in the rental and drive back to Kealakekua Bay. I could never get tired of a drive like this; everywhere my head turns my eyes see beauty. We are in God's paradise and how grateful I am to be here with my family. Back home, with all the usual distractions: Work for me and school for Zach, we really don’t have a lot of father and son time. As we descend the canyon and arrive at the beach, Kimo spots us and gets our kayak ready. I want to pay him up front but he says "no worries, brah, you pay me when you get back." It's another beautiful morning - Kona is on the dry side of the Big Island and the weather is consistently warm and sunny. Both of us climb into the red kayak and take turns paddling out to the Captain Cook monument. It's a lot faster in the kayak than it was trying to swim! We keep on the lookout for the spinner dolphins but we don’t see any. The good news is that when we get there, we are the first visitors of the day. Zach drags the kayak up onto the rocks and we put on our snorkeling gear - flippers - check; snorkel and mask - check; camera - check. We're all set. We enter the water, take a deep breath and dive. Wow! I can't believe how many beautiful fish there are! Bright yellow trumpet fish dominate the underwater population. As we gently swim beneath the crystal clear blue Pacific water, we move our arms and legs slowly so we don’t scare away the fish. The trumpet fish seem to like our presence. There's a whole school of them just cruising around. They seem curious and interested in watching us. As we continue our journey, I am snapping pictures like crazy. We see all kinds of living coral - white, red and black. We see Angel fish and black fish with orange spots. These fish are a spooked by our presence and move very quickly into hiding behind the coral. We even see a skinny little creature called a pencil fish and some kind of creature that looks like a miniature moose - at first glance it looks like an Octopus but it is not. The colors on the fish are unreal - there are spotted fish with deep blue tails and others that are white with bright yellow and blue stripes. This is some of the best diving I've ever seen! After an hour or so, we've seen enough. Besides the cruse boats have arrived and the tourists are starting to jump in and dominate. It's time to go. I can tell Zach is blown away by all the beauty we have just seen. I'm gratified that I can share this experience with him. I wish Channa and Sam were here to see this but hopefully the pictures will turn out nice and they can see what we saw. We step into the kayak and paddle back to where we started and Kimo is there to greet us. We thank him for the great time we've just had, pay him and head back to the condo so we can hook up with Channa. It feels like we've been out all day but its only 9:30 am. We still have the whole day in front of us. I want to show Channa the volcanoes.