Got up really early at around 5am and headed to the Pacific Whale Foundation. At around 7am we boarded the Ocean Voyager with about 100+ tourists and headed for Molokini. On board the staff was very friendly and served us breakfast of muffins, fruit and juice. After about a 30 minute ride in the warm ocean breeze we docked at Molokini along with 5 or 6 other ships and went for a dip. The last time I snorkeled was in 6th grade at Catalina Islands off the coast of Los Angeles. The water was freezing even with a wetsuit on, my googles leaked and everytime I put my face in, water would go into my snorkel. I also didn’t know how to swim, but for some reason the adults wern’t concerned about that and dumped me in the water anyhow. I spent an hour hopelessly paddling around trying to hold on to a inner tube the group had with them to save drowning kids. Needless to say, it wasn’t a good experience. I was a bit afraid that the water here would be cold since we’re pretty far from Maui. But, I’m here, so might as well do it. I grabbed a snorkeling life vest and a noodle and jumped in with flippers, goggle, snorkel and camera. The water, it turns out, was actually quite warm, about 70F and quite clear.
After a few minutes of watching everyone else swim around with their heads down, I finally got the courage to put my face in the water. My goggle didn’t leak, I could breathe and there was stuff to see! Fully enjoying myself now I spend the next hour splashing around chasing fish trying to get their pictures. There was plenty of fish, including milletseed butterfly fish, moorish idol, and black durgons.
Jae stayed by my side for the most part, he enjoyed chasing after the fish and trying to get closer to them. I watched him as he chased this dinner plate size fish around. Suddenly he stopped in the water and then frantically tried to swim away from the fish. As I watched, a stream of brown stuff was released from the fish and started to travel towards Jae. Hee hee, I guess the fish didn’t care much for Jae and showed him so….

Turtle Town
After about an hour or so, we boarded the boat and took off for Turtle town. On the ride over we had a bbq lunch and saw some whales pass by in the distance. After 30 minutes we reached “Turtle town”, or rather the spots where the green sea turtles like to hang out. We put our gear back on and jumped in, the water was colder here but just a few degrees less than at Molokini. We swam out and followed a Marine Naturalist for a guided reef tour. The guide would swim over and pick up certain items to show us, he brought up a collector urchin, a slate pencil sea urchin (native Hawaiians use to use it for makeup during dances) and pointed out some other interesting fishes. While swimming around we actually saw 2 green sea turtles! They were swimming well below us but we all tried to snap pictures anyhow. My disposable underwater camera didn’t do too good a job of capturing the fast swimming tutles. We spent the rest of the time swimming around trying to find more turtles.

After an hour we had to go back. I was quite tired by then so I was glad to go. On our way back to the dock the captain spotted a turtle right alongside our boat. We looked and sure enough there was a turtle swimming alongside the ship with it’s head sticking out. Then all of a sudden we saw another one and then a pair, pretty soon we saw 5 or 6 turtles swimming around the area. It was pretty neat to see them with their heads sticking out looking at us. That was quite a treat for our little snorkeling tour.It was past 12 by the time we got back to the dock and went home, where we took a nice long nap. We didn’t bother doing anything more for the day, afterall this is Maui and relaxing is the main event.