PAST

October 25, 2005

NEXT

One of the best moments of my trip to Maui was while I went snorkeling. Now, I had never gone snorkeling before and never really understood what the big deal would be. Yeah, you float on the water, face down, and look at all the little fishies. Yeah, "Big Deal!" Well, after I went the first time, I was totally enthralled, and wanted more. Especially after my first encounter with a medium-sized sea turtle. Now I had been close up and pet sea turtles at aquariums, but I had never been this close to one out in the ocean.

I was swimming around and decided to get away from some of the other people, as it was getting rather congested. I turned and looked down about 40 feet and saw the sea turtle, Not only that, but it appeared to be coming up towards me. I watched as this thing came all the way up, right in front of my face, looked right at me and turned. I was in awe and totally fascinated by its lack of fear. I'm pretty sure that it was just wanting to surface for a little air. But it seemed to want to check me out at the same time. I was so upset with myself that I didn't have a camera with me at that moment.
So then I reached out and very lightly touched the front, left flipper, and started sliding my hand across the back of its hard, smooth shell. Just then I felt a hand quickly and abruptly grab my ankle and pull me backwards. My head went down and water filled my snorkel and I gasped on about 20 gallons of water. (Okay, maybe that's a slight exaggeration.) 
I came up for air and to clear my snorkel and immediately turned back to find that the poor turtle was engulfed in the center of a crowd of people. Reaching and grabbing, I think it was a little overwhelmed, so it dove back down to the bottom.
I then turned my attention to whom it was that grabbed my ankle. It turned out to be my friend Patrick. Later he expressed his concern that I may get bitten and also wanted to help protect the turtle. 
So after that, we started affectionately referring to him as the "Snorkel Police". In which he kept jokingly replying with, "But I saved your life!!" We laughed, and it was all good.

A few days later we all went on a snorkel cruise, where we rode a boat to a different part of the island. It was a blast and I took up all the pictures on my underwater camera. Yeah, not too good results, and no sea turtles. But we all had a great time.

The next day we went back to the same beach and around the rocks to the place where I saw the turtle before. Armed with a new camera I swam all over and just saw a bunch of fish and took numerous pictures. About the time I was going to head back in, I decided to move away from the crowd of people around the rocks and went out into the deeper water to see if I might be able to spot something else. After a while I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I turned, and just in front of me, I saw a turtle coming up to surface. I started snapping picture after picture as it was coming up. I swam over and right up along side this amazing creature. This one looked to be about full-size. I didn't want to bother it so I just floated there next to it. It looked over at me a few times and resumed getting gulps of air. Then it would look down for a while and back to me. I swam back away from it a bit to try to get some different shots of it and was surprised when it followed me a bit and stayed within a close proximity. I reached out a few times and touched its shell and pet it. It didn't seem to bother it at all and seemed to be totally fine with me there.
After what seemed like several minutes, it finally gave me one more look and swam off down to the bottom and away into the distance.

I was so excited that I actually got to see another turtle and to get up so close. And the snorkel police wasn't there to stop me. I turned around to see if anybody else saw it and there was nobody around, at all. I was all alone. And that made me feel even more fortunate. Especially since I was able to take so many pictures.

Well, pictures? I was so thoroughly disappointed in all of my underwater images. I had used up two disposable, underwater cameras. One camera seemed to work fine, out of the water, but there just wasn't enough light for anything to come out under the water, with the "underwater" camera. I was concerned that this might turn out to be a problem, but most of the pictures were just under the surface, and the water was very clear, so I was thinking that wouldn't be too bad. Apparently that didn't seem to matter and the whole roll was pretty much a waste. I had hoped, with them being "underwater" cameras that they could have compensated and made them with a slower shutter speed. But I wasn't that lucky.

The other camera was even more of a disappointment as I had taken numerous photos of the large sea turtle that I swam with for a while, as well as some cool shots of some other amazing fish. Apparently, many of those images could have actually came out quite well. But, after analyzing the negatives that were returned, I am convinced that the people at Walgreens destroyed the film themselves. There were only two shots out of the whole roll that actually had something on them. This shot being one of them and, as you can see, it didn't fair too well. For some reason, they didn't even print the other photo.

So I have learned again, how much I hate conventional film cameras. 
Next time I think I'll just stick my digital camera in a clear plastic bag and go for it.

Galixy.net