We got up early this morning to go snorkeling with dolphins. Now, we had no guarantee that they would find us dolphins, but that was the goal. Now snorkeling trips are very different from scuba ones. For one, there are little kids. This can be a plus. The kids we had were so excited at the prospect of dolphins, which made it fun. Another difference is that you have a huge variation in ability to swim and comfort in the water. That makes it a challenge for the people in charge and makes it interesting when it is time to get in.

Once we headed out of the marina, we immediately encountered a pod of Hawaiian spinner dolphins. They were sleeping. Turns out that dolphins sleep by essentially “turning off” half of their brain at a time and entering a trance like state, letting the other half of their brain control their body and continue swimming, coming up for air, and maintaining some alertness for predators. While they are sleeping, they swim side by side in pairs or groups. We couldn’t get in the water with this pod of dolphins because it was a busy boating area, so we headed off.

It didn’t take too long before our ship captain to hear reports of where there was a pod of spinner dolphins for us to meet up with. We got ahead of them and got into the water. It was great! It ended up being a pod of about 30. They swam by us in a few small groups at varying depths. Basically, that means I had a few seconds to take pictures, so I gave it all I had. We got back into the boat and leap-frogged them twice, so I got a few more pictures. One of our boat guides got some awesome videos because he free dove and got really close each time they came by.

After we stopped leap-frogging the dolphins, it was time to head to a reef snorkel site. On our way there, we were paced by a bottlenose dolphin for a while. Then someone spotted a humpback whale. That led to us hanging around for a while waiting for it to come back up for air…and once it did we were hooked and hung around watching longer until it was clear that it had dove down deeper. The extra critters ate up our second snorkel site time, but nobody was complaining.

After we grabbed lunch, went to the condo, and cleaned up, we had to go for a fun and exciting COVID-19 test so that we can fly to our next island in a few days. This was our 3rd test for this trip.

Once that was done, we drove out to see the Puakō Petroglyph Field. There are more than 3,000 carvings into the lava rocks here. They date as far back as 1,200 years ago, but this site was used for centuries, with some as late as the 16th century. Most of these are human shapes. There are apparently some animals, but we didn’t find them. Its a 1.6 mile round trip very uneven trail to get to these petroglyphs. Not a hike at all, but not a paved walkway.