A GOOD DAY SNORKELING

Aloha! Jackie and I have enjoyed another awesome day here on Kauai! The trades are still blowing a bit stronger than we like and that makes it feel a little chilly, especially when you first get out of the water but the snorkeling more than made up for our slight discomfort. We had a great snorkel...the fish were very cooperative and I got a lot of really good video. We saw the largest stripebelly puffer we had ever seen! This guy must have been close to 2 feet long and very fat. He was out by the buoy and he had two cleaner wrasses working on him. Jackie was the first to spot him. She was swimming along behind me while I was filming a barred filefish and swam over the place where he was getting his cleaning. I must have made a lot of noise because this guy swam out to see what the fuss was and Jackie was able to spy him. I know it sounds kind of strange but a lot of the time the person swimming behind will see the most fish as they will duck into their holes when they sense the first snorkeler and come out in front of the second snorkeler. We also got some video of a juvenile hawaiian hog fish. This guy was about an inch and a half long and very colorful. We also were able to video a panther flounder. We see a lot of these but they blend into the sand so well normally the video doesn't show much. This time I think I got one that you might be able to see on the blog. We also swam with Mr. Honu for a while and saw a ton of other fish to boot but the highlight of our snorkel came near the end. We were maybe 15 feet from shore when we swam upon a great barracuda. This guy was about 2 or 3 feet long and swimming in water that was maybe 15 inches deep! He wasn't the least bit concerned with us and I was able to get a pretty good video. I put all of todays snorkel into one little movie. It is about 10 minutes long so it will be way too large to post. I think I will break it into 3 short clips and post them in the next few days. Our weather guys are predicting rain this weekend so that should be a good time to post these clips. Today's post is one I put together when Mike and Cindi were here. I will also try and post a close up of a tako that I tried to post yesterday but it got lost in the ozone somewhere!