The sun is not even up that we're on our way to join Captain Dan for a whale excursion. These elite travelers do back and forth between Alaska and Hawaii every year. The feed on the rich waters up north and come to Hawaii to mate. Everyone on board is trying to spot them and my travel partner is very good at it. She points me and my camera in the right direction a couple of times. Whenever we see something, we get close and wait for them get back up for air; which takes around 10-15 min. Over the course of the 3-4 hours we'll spend out there we'll see lots of them. Sadly for us, none of them will be in the mood for a breach (jumping out of the water). Our captain is very knowledgeable about these beautiful animals and we learn a great deal. Among the surprising things, we learn that the equivalent of a fingerprint for a whale is the tail. They all have a unique design and that's obviously how their population is counted by scientists over the years.
Back on terra firma, it's late morning and we're super hungry which is perfect for us to try the local breakfast “loco moco”. It's a huge mound of rice, meat, eggs and gravy. During the whole breakfast, we'll have lizards (one of them tail-less) passing by and sometime stopping to eat some honey the birds fighting over bread crumbs. Each time we put the food a little bit closer to us but there's always a bold one to come pick it up... entertaining ;) The plan this afternoon is turtle bay. To get there it's at best a dirt road. My travel partner is behind the wheel once again and she gets to practice her 4*4 skills. We leave the car at the parking lot and hike for a while on the beach, looking for turtles and a spot to sunbath. It's all black sand once again of course. We see our first turtle shortly after. I'm a bit worried because it does not look like it's in great shape. The sun is high in the sky and I wonder if it's not too tired to get back in the water... We're not supposed to touch turtles so we leave it there but we'll check it out on the way back. After a good little hike, we finally reach turtle bay. We go to the far side, hike a bit on lava flows and find a mini-beach for ourselves. There are two little island in the bay, both of them full of sleeping turtles. We have our snorkeling gear but also our camera so we decide to go one at a time. I take first watch and my partner goes in the water to bother the local wildlife. She follows a turtle for a while, says hello to passing fish then come back to our beach. During my run, I'll see nothing for a long time. Sure I can see the turtles sunbathing but nothing in the water... I'm on my way back when I'm caught by surprise by a turtle and a fish racing each other. They pass so close to me I surface in a hurry... jerks!
It's time for us to go back already, we want to catch the sunset at Makalawena beach. We hike all the way back to the car and check on our turtle friend on the way. It looks better, no need to call 911. It was probably just sleeping like all the other turtles we saw this afternoon. We struggle to find the beach and decide to stop searching before we lose the sunset altogether. It's cloudy so the sunset is meh... and we'll find out later, it's not the beach we were looking for. We can't stay up late tonight either since we have a dive booked for the next morning. A storm is coming our way though and it'll hit Kona during the night. We'll have 2 power outages and the wind will blow in the stupid wind-bells our host installed all over the house... not a great night of sleep :/