Awesome Photos

It was on one of my wonderful trip to The Big Island of Hawaii that I came upon these magical creatures, Green Sea Turtles, or Honu, in Hawaiian.  These guys lived through the age of the dinosaurs, survived the earth’s age of ice and have been swimming the oceans for over 200 million years. For the first time in all these millennia, six out of the seven species are either endangered and on the verge of extinction.  And that, pisses me off to every extent possible!  For if you have ever jumped in an ocean full of these sweet and gentle creatures your life would be changed, as mine was.  Even as I write this I deeply miss swimming in those turquoise waters with the Honu calmly paddling from murky yards away until I could see them clearly beside me.

This photo was a fluke.  Here’s why: I had driven the stretch a hundred times from Kona to Puako and yet I had never ventured out to this lone gorgeous lagoon I always saw as I drove.  It seemed to be inletting from the ocean- out past the volcanic ridges.  I figured there was no way to get to it.  Or, if there was, it would take a days walk.  Leave it to my wife, a new-comer to Hawaii, who said: “Let’s try walking there!”  And so on that day we did.  The walk was maybe 45 minutes and what we found was amazing.  An enclosed blue-green crystal lagoon with hundreds of turtles in it and around it.  There were Mamas, Daddies, and babies.  Grandmas and Grandpas too.  It was a huge turtle family reunion.  We spent hours just amazed at what we had come upon.  As I took picture after picture as they all looked  up at me lazily, I had a feeling that perhaps they had been bothered for a photograph once or twice before.