[Continuing my diving adventures in February 2008 off Maui with Mike Severns Diving.]
In about forty-five feet of water, a little murky because of its sandy, rubble-strewn bottom, I rounded a compact-car-sized boulder and found myself hovering just above a green sea turtle. About three feet long from slightly hooked beak to tip of tail, the turtle was resting on the bottom, eyes open but apparently asleep. I dropped down to take a couple of photos, then swept around the boulder and found myself in turtle central!
Four green sea turtles even bigger than the one I’d just left rested on the floor to my right, one half-in a crevice and the other three looking like they were trying to squeeze in behind him. Straight ahead a slightly smaller turtle was paddling its patient and graceful way to the surface for a breath of air. To the left three more turtles lay on various humps of coral, a little more spaced out than the ones trying to crowd into the crevice.
Dan, the dive master who had told us on the surface that he always saw at least one turtle here, hung in midwater, grinning around his regulator as he watched us try to figure out which turtle to look at – and photograph – first! As he had promised, the turtles were quite used to divers, and were not disturbed as we eased in for a closer look. Their eyes were open and they followed my clumsy progress as I maneuvered all around them, popping off photos and simply admiring them.
Green sea turtles are the most commonly seen sea turtle species around Maui. Unlike land turtles, sea turtles cannot retract their soft bodyparts – head, four fins, and tail – into their shells for protection. Their front fins are quite long and thick, well-shaped for paddling, and I am always amazed at the grace with which they soar through the water. They can easily outdistance a diver or snorkeler if they are feeling harassed. They’ve been federally protected for three decades now, and like the humpbacks their numbers have made a gradual recovery and are at a healthy 10,000 or so individuals.
Federal protection means it’s illegal to harass a green sea turtle, and for practical purposes, harassment means doing anything that makes them change the behavior they are exhibiting when you encounter them. So we were careful not to touch them or get close enough to inadvertently bump into them, and tried to respect their personal space bubbles as we watched them rest. I tried not to get my camera too close, so that the flash wouldn’t bother their eyes, but I did want to get facial portraits of as many as I could, since I have learned that the markings on the cheek are unique to each turtle and can act as an identifying “fingerprint.”
Dan had mentioned that these turtles seem to have preferred resting spots, and that they will sometimes jealously compete for a prime piece of real estate. If one turtle arrives to find its favorite nap zone already occupied, it may repeatedly bump the snoozer, trying to dislodge it and claim the space for itself. If that fails, it may just lie down right on top of the first turtle! Dan claims he has found turtles stacked three high on some really primo spots.
The turtles on the left had space between them and seemed to be resting happily in their spots, but the ones on the right were definitely in competition for the best position, a flat spot where the lucky possessor could wedge its head and most of its body beneath an overhanging ledge. As I watched, two turtles bumped their shells against that of the guy who’d gotten there first, both trying to muscle in and pry their competition out of its hidey-hole. One of the interlopers gave up fairly quickly, but the other one kept up the harassment, eventually nipping at the half-hidden turtle’s exposed fins and tail with some vicious-looking snaps of its curved beak.
Green sea turtles can go for 20 to 30 minutes on one lungful of air, and only one departed for the surface during the ten or so minutes we were with them. Sometimes they rise and bob along on the surface for a little while, but from the surface you'll often get just a glimpse of a softball-sized head popping up, taking a quick gulp of air, and disappearing again. They eat primarily algae, scraping it off the rocks with their slightly hooked beaks or ripping off big chunks of limu, a seaweed growing in the shallow sandy patches.
They are quite single-minded when eating, and don’t let divers, competing turtles, or anything else distract them from their determined grazing. On an earlier encounter with a single turtle at another dive site, a fellow diver and I landed on the sandy bottom, one on either side, hunkering down so that we were eye to eye with the turtle, who was maybe three feet long. It looked at each of us and went straight back to hooking and gulping strands of limu like it couldn’t care less.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Review of Murder on Molokai: A Surfing Detective Novel
A slim volume from Island Heritage Publishing, Murder on Molokai has Hawaiian Private Investigator Kai Cooke looking into the suspicious death of an environmental activist. Kai is a surfer and has an emotional, almost spiritual connection to the sun-soaked, wave-washed Hawaiian Islands. The first-person narration appeals to all five senses:
- Describing his first glimpse of Molokai, the tiny island on which the environmental activist died: “Sloping plateaus painted the west in cocoa brown and rust red; sheer sea cliffs in the east soared in moss green.”
- Awakening on Molokai itself the next day: ‘“Errr-errr-errooooo! Err-errooooooooo!”A rooster strutting the grounds of the ‘Ukulele Inn jolted me awake the next morning before dawn.’
- Describing the lei-filled floral shop above which his office is located: “The ginger’s sweet, pungent odor raised the hair on the back of my neck.”
- Narrating the long hike to the spot where his client’s sister died: “We hiked through the first few canopied switchbacks, nearly every turn bringing breathtaking views of the wave-pounded peninsula. In the open stretches, the sweltering sun beat down, but to our great advantage: No rain-slick boulders or gooey red mud to challenge our footing today.”
- Describing the drinks over which he reports to his client: “They even tasted like milk shakes, with a coconut and pineapple sweetness that masked double shots of vodka.”
The plot could use a few more twists and turns, but the characters are interesting, and the glimpses of setting are well-done. This book is worth reading to get yourself in an island frame of mind. (It’s the first in a series, and the only one I’ve read thus far.)
Preview Your Destination with a Good Book
Thinking about a trip somewhere? Whether you’ve already booked a long weekend away or are in the early stages of planning a multi-week trip to the other side of the globe, reading fiction set in your destination can give you a the flavor of the place before you even leave home. You can read before you go, or stockpile books and read them during your actual trip.
I always get a kick out of driving through a place just as I’ve reached mention of it in book I’m reading. The first time I remember this happening was on my first international adventure, a guided camping tour of Australia that I took soon after graduating from college. We of the Never Never, by Mrs. Jeannie Gunn, tells the story of a white couple managing an enormous cattle station in the rugged outback landscape 300 miles south of Darwin, Northern Territory at the turn of the 20th century. Reading the story as the gravel highway between Darwin and Ayers Rock unrolled beneath the bus tires transported me out of my plush seat in the climate-controlled vehicle right into the arid, dusty land zooming past outside the windows.
Audiobooks are another great way to get into a new place. On the last few driving trips I’ve taken through the American Southwest, I’ve been sure to pack along a couple of audiobook versions of Tony Hillerman’s wonderful mysteries. His series features Navajo Tribal Policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, and he uses myriad telling details to evoke the setting with such intensity that I can smell the rain falling on the parched desert of Navajo Country even when I’m holed up in my fog-shrouded house on the coast of northern California.
In 2007 I toured Mesa Verde on my own, then met up with my archaeologist friend Erica at Chaco Canyon. When I packed for the trip, I was disappointed that my local library didn’t have an audiobook of Nevada Barr’s Ill Wind, a Ranger Anna Pigeon mystery set in Mesa Verde that I had read several years before, for me to take along for the Mesa Verde National Park portion of the trip. But they always have a Hillerman on hand, and I had the great luck to find A Thief of Time, one of my favorites of his, in which a woman archaeologist working at Chaco goes missing. Reading about fictional pothunters destroying the picturesque, peaceful ruins with backhoes gave another layer of meaning to my own wanderings through the ruins of the store rooms and living floors and great kivas. As I admired and photographed the amazing stonework of the prehistoric complexes and contemplated the people who built and then walked away from them hundreds of years ago, I understood what might drive a modern-day researcher to try to trace one ancient artist’s work through time and space.
Has the setting of a story you’ve read ever inspired you to take a trip? Do you tap into fiction when you’re in the planning stages, or do you take along fiction set in your destination?
I had so much else going on when I was getting ready for my February 2008 trip to Maui that I didn’t get a chance to look for fiction to read ahead of time or even take along with me. I went to the Borders Express bookstore in Kiehei soon after I arrived and scanned their shelf of “Local Authors.” There wasn’t much fiction, and I found only one mystery: Murder on Molokai, by Chip Hughes. I’ll review it in my next post.
I always get a kick out of driving through a place just as I’ve reached mention of it in book I’m reading. The first time I remember this happening was on my first international adventure, a guided camping tour of Australia that I took soon after graduating from college. We of the Never Never, by Mrs. Jeannie Gunn, tells the story of a white couple managing an enormous cattle station in the rugged outback landscape 300 miles south of Darwin, Northern Territory at the turn of the 20th century. Reading the story as the gravel highway between Darwin and Ayers Rock unrolled beneath the bus tires transported me out of my plush seat in the climate-controlled vehicle right into the arid, dusty land zooming past outside the windows.
Audiobooks are another great way to get into a new place. On the last few driving trips I’ve taken through the American Southwest, I’ve been sure to pack along a couple of audiobook versions of Tony Hillerman’s wonderful mysteries. His series features Navajo Tribal Policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, and he uses myriad telling details to evoke the setting with such intensity that I can smell the rain falling on the parched desert of Navajo Country even when I’m holed up in my fog-shrouded house on the coast of northern California.
In 2007 I toured Mesa Verde on my own, then met up with my archaeologist friend Erica at Chaco Canyon. When I packed for the trip, I was disappointed that my local library didn’t have an audiobook of Nevada Barr’s Ill Wind, a Ranger Anna Pigeon mystery set in Mesa Verde that I had read several years before, for me to take along for the Mesa Verde National Park portion of the trip. But they always have a Hillerman on hand, and I had the great luck to find A Thief of Time, one of my favorites of his, in which a woman archaeologist working at Chaco goes missing. Reading about fictional pothunters destroying the picturesque, peaceful ruins with backhoes gave another layer of meaning to my own wanderings through the ruins of the store rooms and living floors and great kivas. As I admired and photographed the amazing stonework of the prehistoric complexes and contemplated the people who built and then walked away from them hundreds of years ago, I understood what might drive a modern-day researcher to try to trace one ancient artist’s work through time and space.
Has the setting of a story you’ve read ever inspired you to take a trip? Do you tap into fiction when you’re in the planning stages, or do you take along fiction set in your destination?
I had so much else going on when I was getting ready for my February 2008 trip to Maui that I didn’t get a chance to look for fiction to read ahead of time or even take along with me. I went to the Borders Express bookstore in Kiehei soon after I arrived and scanned their shelf of “Local Authors.” There wasn’t much fiction, and I found only one mystery: Murder on Molokai, by Chip Hughes. I’ll review it in my next post.
Monday, April 21, 2008
The First Singer
(In February 2008 I spent four wonderful mornings diving with the Mike Severns Diving outfit in Kihei, Maui. Here's a writeup of another of our memorable wildlife encounters.)
We were motoring in towards the southwest shore of Maui, having completed our first dive in Molokini crater, when Andy slowed the boat and craned his neck, peering out over the bow at the water ahead.
Divers, divemaster, and deckhand all lunged to our feet and peered in that direction; this was my second day with the crew, and I knew by now that slowing down probably meant he had spotted whale activity of some sort.
“I think it’s a singer,” he said, pointing ahead of us as he slowed the boat to a dead stop and cut the engine. “I just saw it dive, and I’m pretty sure it’s alone. If I’m right, he’s hanging motionless underwater, with his head lower than his tail, and he’s signing. If we’re quiet, we may be able to hear him.”
We all stood silent as the boat drifted in the direction Andy had seen the whale submerge. At first the predominant noise was the slap of waves on the metal hull, but after a couple of minutes the boat found her groove and the slapping vanished. I heard a phrase of faint, deep moaning that lasted just a few seconds. When I looked around, wondering if my imagination was running away with me – I’d heard recorded whale songs dozens of times in my life – I was pleased to see that others heard it, too.
Andy was nodding excitedly. “Everybody put an ear on the railing,” he said, demonstrating the pose himself.
Somewhat skeptical, I set my ear against one of the round metal pipes that formed a cage-like railing system all around the boat – and heard more moaning, higher-pitched and very distinct. The metal hull of the boat amplified the sound like the body of an acoustic guitar and transmitted it through the railing to our ears. “Hey, Andy, pull the string tighter, I can’t hear so well,” deckhand Jeff joked, referring to the tin-can-and-string “phones” we had all played with as kids.
We were motoring in towards the southwest shore of Maui, having completed our first dive in Molokini crater, when Andy slowed the boat and craned his neck, peering out over the bow at the water ahead.
Divers, divemaster, and deckhand all lunged to our feet and peered in that direction; this was my second day with the crew, and I knew by now that slowing down probably meant he had spotted whale activity of some sort.
“I think it’s a singer,” he said, pointing ahead of us as he slowed the boat to a dead stop and cut the engine. “I just saw it dive, and I’m pretty sure it’s alone. If I’m right, he’s hanging motionless underwater, with his head lower than his tail, and he’s signing. If we’re quiet, we may be able to hear him.”
We all stood silent as the boat drifted in the direction Andy had seen the whale submerge. At first the predominant noise was the slap of waves on the metal hull, but after a couple of minutes the boat found her groove and the slapping vanished. I heard a phrase of faint, deep moaning that lasted just a few seconds. When I looked around, wondering if my imagination was running away with me – I’d heard recorded whale songs dozens of times in my life – I was pleased to see that others heard it, too.
Andy was nodding excitedly. “Everybody put an ear on the railing,” he said, demonstrating the pose himself.
Somewhat skeptical, I set my ear against one of the round metal pipes that formed a cage-like railing system all around the boat – and heard more moaning, higher-pitched and very distinct. The metal hull of the boat amplified the sound like the body of an acoustic guitar and transmitted it through the railing to our ears. “Hey, Andy, pull the string tighter, I can’t hear so well,” deckhand Jeff joked, referring to the tin-can-and-string “phones” we had all played with as kids.
The sounds were fascinating:
- Long, drawn-out moans at high, medium, and low pitches. The low-pitched ones really reverberated through the boat and into your flesh and bones.
- Short, deep “huh” sounds that made me thing of punctuation marks.
- Short and long squeals that reminded me a bit of recordings of dolphins, but seemed a bit lower-pitched and more drawn out to my untrained ear.
- Noises I can only describe as “bubbly” – the sort of “glub glub” effect you get if you try to speak with your mouth underwater in a swimming pool.
The sounds got louder as we drifted over the singer, then started to fade as we drifted past him and away. When Andy was sure we were a safe distance past the singer, he started the boat and motored slowly away. We had listened for about fifteen minutes, and the song would go on for another five to ten minutes.
Although female humpbacks issue short vocalizations, only the males of the species sing, and they only do it when they are here in their Hawaiian islands breeding waters. Researchers don’t know if every male of breeding age does it, but many do. They also don’t know what prompts them to start, or why they sometimes sing over and over again and other times take breaks in between.
Remember singing “Row Row Row Your Boat” in school when you were a kid? The teacher would divide up the class into three groups, and group one would start whie group two would wait and start with “Row, row, row” as the first group began “Merrily, merrily…”, and then group three would join in later stil? The whale singing is like that, but far less organized!
Being underwater or listening through a hydrophone, you often hear several males singing simultaneously. They are all singing the same song, but in a “round,” so that the first phrases of one singer overlay the second chorus of another and the fifth of yet another.
There is one song for the season, and all males sing that song, with one of them occasionally making a change that all the other singers then immediately pick up on and incorporate into their songs. Nobody knows why they introduce these changes. The changes accumulate over the season, which runs from January through May, and by the time the whales leave the Hawaiian islands to go feed in the waters off Alaska, the song has changed considerably. When the first hydrophone picks up the first singer next year, he’ll be singing exactly the song that they left off with at the end of the 2008 season, and over the course of the season, other males will introduce changes so that it’s a different song by the end of the 2009 season.
The noise carries for miles; other whales, with their highly attuned hearing, can hear it for at least 25 miles around, while we mere humans, when submerged, can pick up the tune broadcast my a male some five to seven miles away. Scientists are sure it has to do with breeding, but they have yet to fully explain the meanings of the songs. It could be anything from advertising his presence to showing off his fitness for mating – we may never know the true meaning to another whale.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Close Encounter with Humpback Whales
(In February 2008 I spent four wonderful mornings diving with the Mike Severns Diving outfit in Kihei, Maui. Here's a writeup of one of our memorable wildlife encounters, which happened before I even got my gear on!)
During Captain Andy’s introduction talk aboard the Pi’iili Kai, he went over all the usual safety stuff, pointed out various features of the boat – the side gates we would giant-stride out of, the stern ladders we’d use to get back onto the boat at the end of the dive -- and ran through what the day would probably be like. Then he said our first dive would be out at Molokini crater. “Usually it takes us 15 minutes to motor out there,” he said. “But this is humpback season, so it could take us a lot longer!”
Whales have right of way around Maui, which is the center of the Humpback National Marine Sanctuary. Also, since the humpback is both on the Endangered Species List and protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, people are supposed to give the humpbacks a wide berth – 100 yards, by law. “Sometimes these guys pop up right in front of the boat with no warning and I have to slam on the brakes,” Andy warned us. “It’s like having a three-year-old run out in front of your car.”
So it was no surprise to any of us that, five minutes into our cruise between Kihei boat ramp and Molokini, we were veering off course to avoid a small pod comprising mom, calf, and escort. Our veer took us closer to another pod, though, just as one of them started doing pectoral slaps. Andy cut the engine and we drifted, watching the 40-something foot long beast roll back and forth on the calm surface of the ocean, repeatedly flinging one 15-foot-long front flipper skyward and then bring it down on the water with a resounding smack. White water fountained up around the graceful pectoral fin each time it plunged into the sea, and cascaded off it again as the pec rose for another slap.
The long pectoral fins are relatively narrow and look thin compared to the animal they are attached to. Dark on the upper side, white beneath, they are rounded at the tips and have a lacy crenellation around the edges, which often carry barnacles the size of a toddler’s fist.
After a few slaps another pec – this one belonging to another 40-something-foot-long leviathan – rose into the air and smacked down, doubling both the sound and the whitewater fury of the display. The first humpback brought its second pectoral fin into play, rolling rapidly back and forth, smacking down first one, then the other, as though to outdo its competition. The only other sound was the occasional blast of a humpback expelling a breath at 300 miles per hour through the paired blowholes, or nostrils, on top of its head.
We drifted for five or ten minutes, and the pectoral slapping display showed no signs of abating as Andy started the engine and turned us again towards our dive spot. Researchers suspect the slapping is a form of communication between humpbacks – the sound carries for quite a distance both above and below water – but what it really means is for the whales to know and us to wonder.
During Captain Andy’s introduction talk aboard the Pi’iili Kai, he went over all the usual safety stuff, pointed out various features of the boat – the side gates we would giant-stride out of, the stern ladders we’d use to get back onto the boat at the end of the dive -- and ran through what the day would probably be like. Then he said our first dive would be out at Molokini crater. “Usually it takes us 15 minutes to motor out there,” he said. “But this is humpback season, so it could take us a lot longer!”
Whales have right of way around Maui, which is the center of the Humpback National Marine Sanctuary. Also, since the humpback is both on the Endangered Species List and protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, people are supposed to give the humpbacks a wide berth – 100 yards, by law. “Sometimes these guys pop up right in front of the boat with no warning and I have to slam on the brakes,” Andy warned us. “It’s like having a three-year-old run out in front of your car.”
So it was no surprise to any of us that, five minutes into our cruise between Kihei boat ramp and Molokini, we were veering off course to avoid a small pod comprising mom, calf, and escort. Our veer took us closer to another pod, though, just as one of them started doing pectoral slaps. Andy cut the engine and we drifted, watching the 40-something foot long beast roll back and forth on the calm surface of the ocean, repeatedly flinging one 15-foot-long front flipper skyward and then bring it down on the water with a resounding smack. White water fountained up around the graceful pectoral fin each time it plunged into the sea, and cascaded off it again as the pec rose for another slap.
The long pectoral fins are relatively narrow and look thin compared to the animal they are attached to. Dark on the upper side, white beneath, they are rounded at the tips and have a lacy crenellation around the edges, which often carry barnacles the size of a toddler’s fist.
After a few slaps another pec – this one belonging to another 40-something-foot-long leviathan – rose into the air and smacked down, doubling both the sound and the whitewater fury of the display. The first humpback brought its second pectoral fin into play, rolling rapidly back and forth, smacking down first one, then the other, as though to outdo its competition. The only other sound was the occasional blast of a humpback expelling a breath at 300 miles per hour through the paired blowholes, or nostrils, on top of its head.
We drifted for five or ten minutes, and the pectoral slapping display showed no signs of abating as Andy started the engine and turned us again towards our dive spot. Researchers suspect the slapping is a form of communication between humpbacks – the sound carries for quite a distance both above and below water – but what it really means is for the whales to know and us to wonder.
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