Another great day at the big island! I didn’t take many photos today, but did put together some videos. This ended up being a pretty late night, so the blog post is coming late, sorry folks!
So the day started borderline stormy. The sun was blocked for most of the day. Still, we headed to the beach right by our airbnb because even stormy weather here is nice.
The airbnb has a kayak, which my dad and I carried down to the beach. Once we got down to the beach, we realized the damn thing had a wheel attached to it. That would have been nice to know…
Anyway, Bae and I took the thing out almost right away. It was pretty damn rough, but we managed to get into the water and back out no problem. My dad took a video of us landing the boat back on the beach hoping we would wipe out, but we were much too graceful.
As soon as we got farther out from the beach in the kayak, Bae saw a whale spout. We were hoping to keep catching glimpses of the whale, so we didn’t really go anywhere, but kept the boat pointed out so we didn’t get tipped by the huge waves. Here’s the Garmin for that so you can see exactly where we were.
After Bae and I spent some time looking for the whale, we came back in and Bae swapped for Father Freedom. He and I tried to get a bit closer to the whale, but it was really rough and windy. Progress was very tough. Here’s the Garmin for that. It’s pretty much the same.
I also put together a video so you can see how rough it was. Maybe. Just look at the video and assume it’s rougher than it looks.
It was really awesome getting some great looks at the big ole Humpback whale. We didn’t see it breach or anything, like Bae saw a few days ago, but I got to see its hump a few times, and then its tail when he dove. He could stay underwater from about 12 minutes or so. I could tell it was a he because of the way it was.
After working hard to kayak pretty much nowhere, we came back to the beach and FF and I did some snorkeling. It wasn’t quite as good as yesterday, but we saw a big moray eel. Probably like…..17 ft.
For the afternoon, we headed back up to Kona to get on this boat that takes you out for some night time Manta Ray sightings. It sounded AMAZING. Sadly, and I’ll just tell you right off the bat, we didn’t get to see any 🙁 . They passed around a booklet where like 94% of people on these tours see a manta ray, but we saw nothing.
It was still fun enough, though, besides the seasickness. As mentioned previously, the water was pretty goddamn rough today. I wasn’t that sick until we tied up to the underwater parking spot and just got rolled by the big swells for an hour.
Some background about the manta rays: apparently they can be 15+ ft across, and weight 100lbs per foot across. That’s huge. Apparently they just eat plankton, which congregate under the lights. All of these boats race out to get these good parking spots, tie up, then put these surf boards into the water with lights on the bottom. Our surf boards had PVC pipe around them, which we hung on to and would theoretically watch the manta rays swim below us.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see any…snd it wasn’t just our boat. There were some 20 boats out there doing the exact same thing, and nobody saw nothing. FF and MMW are going to go back on Friday night, so hopefully I will have some Manta Ray footage to share with you! Here’s the not manta ray footage:
My advice for doing this is: 1) Don’t go on full moon. I don’t have much evidence for this, but I suspect that the manta rays can eat fine elsewhere with the big bright moon congregating plankton, so maybe the lights aren’t as effective. 2) Bring Dramamine, even if you never get seasick. I rarely get seasick, but I was feeling it pretty hard towards the end. Bae was barely holding on.
Welp, time to go to the volcano!!! BYE.