Day 7: Lahaina & The North Shore of Maui

I am going to update this post later with some commentary when I have time, but for now I'll let you look at some pictures:

Lahaina and The North Shore of Maui

Leaving the State Highway, for a little bit...

Day 3: Molokini & Big Beach

We decided to sign up for a snorkeling tour to a small, crescent-shaped island off the coast of Maui called Molokini.  The snorkeling part of the tour was uninspiring - we a saw a couple of different types of fish than we had seen the day before off of the beach but there were so many people around that it lost most of its appeal.  We did see a box jellyfish, which everyone became aware of after a couple of people from our boat swam through its path and the jellyfish's tentacles became wrapped around one person's wrist and another's upper arm.  I tried to take a picture of it but the throw away underwater camera was not such a good performer...  Apparently the reef has taken quite a toll with all of the tourists traffic and in retrospect, we probably shouldn't have gone.  The tour did incorporate a few other stops that made it worth while.


We figured that we couldn't top our whale watching exploits from the day before, but we ended up pretty close to another humpback while on the way to Molokini.  Inadvertently, a whale watching portion was included in our tour as the skipper had to come to an abrupt stop as a humpback and its baby surfaced within 100 yards of our boat.  We were told that if you end up within 100 yards that you must stop and let the whales pass by.  This put us quite a bit closer to the humpback than the day before and this time I was able to have my camera to take pictures:


The above was a time-lapse of a humpback starting its dive.

On the return from Molokini, we stopped at a spot where there is a sunken ship and did a quick dip to take a look at it.  It was quite far down so most people saw it from afar - I dove a little of the ways down, but not quite that far.  So, I did see a little more of the boat and the fish that were hovering around above it, but I discovered something unexpected - the sounds of the humpbacks.  By equalizing the pressure in my ears, it allowed me to hear under water a lot better and thereby the humpbacks.

Our last stop was at "Turtle Town".  As soon as we approached this area there were many sightings of turtles surfacing for breath and looking for food on the ocean floor below.  Once we dove in it seemed that this "town" of turtles was some sort of imaginary myth designed to bring tourists in and their money but after a while I saw one swimming around, and then another, and then another.  Then, I looked at the ocean floor and among the different coral in the reef I saw a turtle hanging out, just lying there.  We also saw a turtle with some white, fluffy tumours all over it, fish hovering around it, picking at it.  Jenn said that she could see through the shell...

In the evening we went exploring a little further south to watch the sunset from Makena Bay.  We found Big Beach and as its name says, it was a very big beach.  A lot of sand, large crashing waves right at the beach with people boogie boarding those waves, humpbacks swimming out in the distance with Molokini and the sinking sun as a back drop.  The breaking waves were very large - I took a series of pictures with some kids in front of the waves to demonstrate how large the waves were:



Afterwards we went to Maui Taco again for some really good Mexican fast food.  Jenn had more of the mango chicken taco salad (this was all that she would have at maui Taco..).

Slideshow of the pictures of this days action is below!