Tag: Hawaii

We’re back in Kona, and after the hurricane delays we’re finally doing some diving. The plan for the trip was to get our advanced open water certification, since apparently the insurance companies are forcing dive shops to be more strict about requiring it, and the good folks at Jack’s Diving Locker found a way for us to schedule the necessary dives after our course on Kauai was cancelled, and then found a way to reschedule again after we were unable to catch our flights out of Kauai. As of now we’ve done four of the six planned dives. Last night was the famous manta ray dive, and while we didn’t have the crazy extravaganza that we experienced four years ago, it is still incredibly cool when a twelve foot wide ray swims a foot over your head. As an added bonus, as I went to kneel down in the diver circle at the bottom I looked to my left and saw a small moray eel smiling up at me, so I had an extra companion throughout the dive. Yesterday’s other fun find was a monk seal on our late-afternoon dive who was scratching himself on the mooring line; you don’t realize how large a seal is until it swims next to you and it’s bigger than a human.

Today’s two dives were both instructional dives required for the course, so we did our obligatory deep dive (one hundred feet) and then the much-dreaded navigation dive. The deep portion of the first dive went fast as we swam down to one hundred feet, did a few quick skills, and then returned to shallower waters where we spent an hour enjoying the fishes. The highlight was a snowflake eel out hunting in daylight; they aren’t big but they’re an impressive white color, and this guy had no fear as he snaked his way along the bottom towards us. The second dive was compass navigation, and without the aid of reading glasses and in a mild swell I did a horrendous job of navigating to the desired endpoint, but Audrey nailed her navigation assignment so we’ll let her lead the way the next time we need to get around with a compass underwater.

Two days remain, then it’s sadly back home and back to work after a most unusual trip.

We’ve temporarily moved from the coast to the rainforest high up on the slopes of Kilauea volcano where we’re patiently awaiting the next eruption, which I can only assume is how all normal would people choose to spend their vacations. Kilauea has been following a fairly predictable eruption pattern for nearly two years, but “episode 55” of the eruption has broken that pattern, and the scientists have now been saying for the past week that it will erupt “in the next 1-2 days”, so we’re constantly checking the livestream when we’re not in the national park to make sure that nature isn’t unleashing her fury while we’re not around. During the past two nights we also had alarms set to go off every two hours, just to wake up and be sure that millions of tons of melted rock wasn’t being ejected a thousand feet into the sky, but so far the magma chamber continues to build with only small overflows at the surface.

My camera has chosen an inopportune moment to die, so it’s going to be iPhone and GoPro photos for the remainder of the trip. Despite the equipment failures it was nevertheless fun to hang out at the crater wall last night and watch the main vent spew out small amounts of lava and smoke under a sky filled with a million stars.

Obligatory caveat: there are many horrible things going on in the world, including people whose homes and businesses have been damaged by the recent storm, so our first-world problems are minor compared to what so much of the world deals with. That said…

We were scheduled to fly from Kauai to Honolulu and then on to Kona today, so we arrived at Lihue Airport a couple of hours early to make sure we would have extra time. On arrival, lines were already all the way down the curb, so it was clear something was amiss. It turned out that the hurricane had knocked out one of the airport’s two backup generators, and the other one was on the fritz today so power kept going off. Every time that happened there was then a 10-15 minute wait for the TSA machines to reboot, and for the majority of the day they were only able to occasionally get one of their three machines running. After an hour of the line barely moving we asked the airline reps what to do, and they told us to stay in line and someone would help us sort things out on the other side of security. I called the Alaskan reservations number, but after waiting an hour for a callback was told they couldn’t do anything for us. Just past the two hour mark we had traversed about a third of the line, and our flight soon left with our bags aboard.

The fire department showed up at midday and started handing out water, ambulances were set up to help people struggling in the heat/humidity, and the power continued to go out on a regular basis. No updates were available on what to do other than “stay in the line”, so we kept our spots assuming that they were just getting everyone on to the next flight on standby once they finally got through. The absurdity of having TSA machines be the bottleneck to getting people off of an island that had just been hit by a major storm was infuriating, and particularly with so many people simply traveling between islands on trips that were little more than glorified bus rides it seems like there easily could have been some force majeure protocol put in place to simply usher anyone on an inter-island flight through, but instead flight after flight left empty while several thousand people waited in the heat and humidity for broken machines whose primary job is finding illicit bottled water.

We were hoping to make it onto the 5pm flight to Kona, and after a six hour wait were tantalizingly close to the TSA scanners, but four consecutive power outages left the line at a complete standstill. At nearly 5:30pm, when we were just about at the front of the line, I realized that our boarding passes had disappeared from the app, and not wanting to be stranded we went online and booked two of the remaining seats on a flight to Honolulu just as we got to TSA so at least we could get out. Finally into the airport, we tried to follow the advice we’d been given in the morning to ask about updating our connections, only to be told (again) that there was nothing they could do.

As we settled in to wait for our flight, TSA began sweeping through the terminal and told everyone that they would need to leave the terminal and be re-screened; we were later told that a few people might have gotten into the airport without being screened so security protocol demanded sending everyone back through the machines. Audrey had been holding it together all day while I’d been getting sick with stress, but being asked to go back into a security screening line after already having spent seven hours in line was a bridge too far for her, and we walked back out of the airport with her understandably in tears.

Thankfully they put us into a much shorter line for “re-screening” passengers, the power stayed on, and a little over an hour later we were back in the terminal, only to discover that our flight was delayed for three hours. I’m typing this from the terminal at 10:30pm, nearly thirteen hours after our arrival, hoping that this journal entry won’t further anger whatever evil spirits have been awakened on this very, very long day.

Hurricane Lowell passed well to the west of Kauai late Monday night, hitting the island with 50 mph winds and 70 mph gusts along with a four-foot storm surge. Unfortunately it peaked exactly at high tide, so while our hotel had limited impacts, many places along the coasts were inundated on their first floors, and power was knocked out to about 90% of the island. The lack of power was mostly an inconvenience for us – the hotel has a generator so we were able to go to common areas to recharge things, they kept us fed, so the worst of it was not being able to cool off in the heat since the pools are out of commission and the ocean is full of runoff – but a lot of residents and businesses on the island are struggling. After a two-day outage power returned to our hotel late yesterday, although my parents were still in the dark a mile away at their timeshare.

Kauai is an amazingly beautiful place even after a hurricane, and Audrey and I sat out on the beach watching the sunset for a while last night, but given the damage and the fact that they need to focus on recovery we’re cutting our time here short and heading to the Big Island early. I’m not sure when or if we’ll be back to Kauai again, but after many family trips here over the years this island has become one of my favorite places in the world, and it’s sad to have to depart for perhaps the final time after a natural disaster, although the people here have handled it with resolve and an impressive spirit of community, so I’m sure they will help each other to pull through.

This post is being written from a location in a rainforest a few miles east of the 1000 foot deep Kilauea crater lava lake. Coqui frogs are chirping (loudly) outside in the fern-covered trees, and we’re hanging out under soft lights in a wooden cottage with a wraparound deck. I did something right in a past life.

When the journal last left off we had returned from our second manta ray dive. The adventures since then couldn’t compare, but it has nevertheless been fun. We took a lounge day to rest up, during which I snorkeled with sea turtles a few times in water with limited visibility, so while they were the most chill turtles I’ve ever been around (one kept moving closer to me as he grazed on algae, until I finally had to get out of his way), the videos don’t do the experience justice. While celebrating with drinks and snacks at sunset we looked out in the water and saw two small (six foot) mantas cruising the shallows, apparently drawn in by plankton that were attracted to the hotel’s lights. Their wingtips kept popping out of the water as they looped around in water that didn’t look deep enough to support such a large fish, obviously enjoying their dinner.

Today we left the Kona area and headed south around the island towards Volcano Village. We were tipped off to an epic snorkel location, so after a visit to the Heavenly Hawaiian coffee plantation we drove down to the coast and jumped in the water, and were almost immediately greeted by a four foot moray who surprisingly swam around, fully visible, for several minutes; they are almost always tucked into crevices with only their heads sticking out, so seeing one out in the water for such a long time was special. The rest of the snorkel was great, too, with lava and coral combining to create an underwater metropolis of fish.

We made a very brief stop at Kilauea on the way here, but had to rush in order to checkin, so we’re returning to hopefully take some nighttime photos of the current eruption, provided there aren’t too many people with the same plan already there.