My name is Jenna Kinghorn and I’m a recovering technical writer. A few years ago I cashed out some stock options, left the fast pace and high stress of computer networking, and started working on what then looked like a mystery novel.
Five years and nine drafts later (I am fortunate to have an extremely patient and supportive husband), WILD JUSTICE is indeed starting to look like a novel, but more of a thriller with a strong action/adventure component than a classic mystery novel.
With my tenth (and hopefully final) draft underway, I’m starting to look at ways to market my book – first to agents, then to publishers, and finally to readers. One of the items on my marketing To Do list is “start a blog.”
So I’ve been puzzling for months over what my blog should be about. Since my novel, WILD JUSTICE, is the first in a planned series, I want a blog topic related to my writing. I’ve read plenty of other blogs by aspiring novelists, so I know the world doesn’t need another one of those. And I love adventure travel, but there are plenty of travel blogs out there already, and since my adventure trips happen at the rate of one every year or two, it would be kind of tough to stretch that into a years worth of blogging.
But one of the factors that led to me writing WILD JUSTICE was an amazing trip I took to British Columbia, during which I had a slightly-closer-than-it-should-have-been encounter with a mother grizzly bear and her two cubs. (More on that in a future post. Suffice it to say nobody, including the bears, got hurt.)
What I came away with from that amazing trip was a deep appreciation for the amazing natural beauty of Vancouver Island, Knight’s Inlet on the Canadian mainland, and the narrow stretch of water in between. I was thrilled by the wildlife supported by the screaming tides, and mesmerized by the square miles of conifer showing off every shade of green in an artist’s palette. We saw a mink foraging in tidepools, watched eagles snagging salmon right out of the ocean, thrilled to hundreds of Pacific white-sided dolphins surrounding our inflatable dinghy as we motored along, almost fell out of the boat with glee when a pod of killer whales dove right under us, and witnessed a mother grizzly teaching her cubs how to snag salmon as they went upriver to spawn.
That is the backdrop against which WILD JUSTICE is set, and as I played with ideas for what I might contribute to the blogosphere, I realized that the setting of a mystery, and how well that setting is portrayed, is an important element to me.
I read books so that I can go places: places I’ve never been, places I’ve experienced but would love to spend time in again, and places I hope to explore in person someday. Some books take me there; others might promise to, but fail.
So this blog will be a combination of musings about adventures I’ve experienced in person and “reviews” of armchair adventures I’ve taken through mystery genre books. I hope readers will be inspired to take more armchair adventures via the books I review on this blog. And I hope they will be inspired to get out into the real world and see some of the beautiful places I report on. I look forward to hearing about your travels, real and imagined.
Bon Voyage!
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Morgan’s First (Successful) Whale Watch
My wonderful husband Morgan loves to tease me and knows he can always punch my hot buttons when he makes fun of my interests in ecology, conservation, and wildlife. So when I started planning our February 2008 trip to Maui, he pretended blasé disinterest. When I told friends I couldn’t wait to set eyes upon the humpback whales – creatures I’d been longing to see in their winter playground ever since I learned about their migration habits back in elementary school (I’m 42 now!) – he would shrug and say, “Ah, you’ve seen one big fish, you’ve seen 'em all,” shooting me a mischievous sidelong look.
Two plus years of marriage have taught me not to rise to the bait. My inner schoolteacher – or maybe she’s my inner encyclopedia fact-checker, I’m not sure – clamped her lips shut on the outgraged “Whales aren’t fish!” that she wanted to shoot back. And as far as seen one, seen 'em all…he was entitled to a bit of cynicism, since we hadn't seen a single whale on our previous attempt at whalewatching last summer.
The whalewatching part of our trip began officially on Thursday evening. While I was diving Molokini and Turtle Arches, Morgan had remained behind in California, slaving away for his corporate masters for a few more days. He finally flew to Maui after work on Wednesday and slept in Thursday morning while I went on yet another dive excursion. And so our sunset cruise aboard Ocean Voyager, a whalewatch boat run by The Pacific Whale Foundation out of Maalea harbor, was Morgan’s first taste of the humpbacks I’d been raving about on the phone every night when I called him.
I had our binoculars around my neck, and he carried our Nikon D200 with a 70-300 mm zoom lens. We boarded the big boat and took spots in the almost bleacher-like seats on the bow, and as we watched the ocean on the other side of the breakwater that forms the tiny harbor, a whale breached just a couple of hundred feet away.
It happened in a flash. A huge, dark, submarine-shaped creature broke the surface of the beautiful blue water. It soared into the air at about a 70-degree angle until it’s entire 40-foot-long body except for its tail flukes was visible. Water cascaded from its form, flowing down the beautiful dark creases of its white throat and belly, glittering like icing on the frilly margin of tubercles crenellating its fifteen-foot-long pectoral fins. Then it fell back into the water with a monumental splash, twisting around and landing on its back. White foam spewed thirty feet into the air, and everyone who had been looking in that direction surged to their feet with a gasp and a cry of “Look at that!” or “Over there!” or “Did you see that?!”
Everyone.
Including my supposedly jaded and blasé husband, who had peeled the lens cap off the camera and was holding it up, trained on the now smooth spot in the water where the whale had vanished. Farther out towards the horizon another whale breached, and then off to our left, a few hundred yards from where the first breaching humpback had disappeared, another whale rolled on the surface, smacking its pectoral fins in a frenzy of splashing.
All that before we even got out of the harbor.
Our big motorized catamaran soon pulled out of the harbor and we were free to wander the decks, munching on appetizers and sipping mai tais and soft drinks. Everyone on board, Morgan included, was pointing and gasping and oohing and ahhing almost nonstop. We were surrounded by whales performing their aquatic ballet.
The naturalist on board spoke over the public address system about the lifecycle of the whales and commented on the behaviors we were seeing. The humpbacks we were seeing had spent their summers off the west coast of North America, anywhere from Northern California to the waters off Alaska, feeding on schools of small fish and krill that they swallow by the ton. In autumn they had started migrating to the waters off Maui, where they spend the winter months giving birth to and caring for their calves, or mating. Some had traveled the 3500 miles between their feeding and breeding grounds in as little as 30 days!
On that first whalewatch trip, the whale activity seemed to die down as the sun fell towards the horizon. There were fewer breaches and tail slaps, and many more fluke up dives.
Researchers are able to track individual whales because each has unique markings on their tail flukes, which they typically raise out of the water – and hold in perfect position for photographing – just before they make a deep dive. Researchers and volunteers from the Pacific Whale Foundation count whales and photograph as many flukes as they can every year, and share the information with researchers working on the West Coast of North America to track the humpack population’s health.
The captain motored the boat slowly, often changing direction to either avoid humpbacks that had surfaced nearby, or to check out behavior happening nearby. At one point the captain stopped the boat and let us drift while the crew lowered a hydrophone and we eavesdropped on the singers.
While that first whalewatch was beautiful against the sunset backdrop, the whalewatch we took a few days later out of Lahaina was even more exciting. We were on another of the Pacific Whale Foundation’s boats, and had barely cleared the harbor when a mother whale surfaced nearby and started slapping her tail down on the water. The slaps rang out like cannon shots. The display went on for several minutes, giving us a good chance to get lots of photos. I had to admire the strength and endurance of the whale as she raised her tail – which measured at least 15 feet wide, and must have weighed at least a ton – and brought it down with a majestic splash again and again.
We also saw more close-up breaches, including one male who breached 23 times in a row – the naturalist narrating our journey and answering questions over the public address system said she and the rest of the crew couldn’t remember ever seeing such a persistent breacher!
Morgan gave up trying to be blasé as he and I passed the camera and the binoculars back and forth. We ended up being very glad we had brought extra memory cards. You can see more of our photos taken on our two whalewatch trips at http://picasaweb.google.com/BoomersParents/MauiFebruary2008
I highly recommend that you go whalewatching with the Pacific Whale Foundation next time you are in Maui during whale season. Their snorkeling trip to Molokini and Turtle Arches was also a lot of fun. Purchasing a membership gets you discounts on boat tours and merchandise from their wonderful shop in Maalea. Check out their web site, where you can do everything from reading whalewatch logs to ordering T-shirts to making advance reservations for tours, at http://www.pacificwhale.org/
Two plus years of marriage have taught me not to rise to the bait. My inner schoolteacher – or maybe she’s my inner encyclopedia fact-checker, I’m not sure – clamped her lips shut on the outgraged “Whales aren’t fish!” that she wanted to shoot back. And as far as seen one, seen 'em all…he was entitled to a bit of cynicism, since we hadn't seen a single whale on our previous attempt at whalewatching last summer.
The whalewatching part of our trip began officially on Thursday evening. While I was diving Molokini and Turtle Arches, Morgan had remained behind in California, slaving away for his corporate masters for a few more days. He finally flew to Maui after work on Wednesday and slept in Thursday morning while I went on yet another dive excursion. And so our sunset cruise aboard Ocean Voyager, a whalewatch boat run by The Pacific Whale Foundation out of Maalea harbor, was Morgan’s first taste of the humpbacks I’d been raving about on the phone every night when I called him.
I had our binoculars around my neck, and he carried our Nikon D200 with a 70-300 mm zoom lens. We boarded the big boat and took spots in the almost bleacher-like seats on the bow, and as we watched the ocean on the other side of the breakwater that forms the tiny harbor, a whale breached just a couple of hundred feet away.
It happened in a flash. A huge, dark, submarine-shaped creature broke the surface of the beautiful blue water. It soared into the air at about a 70-degree angle until it’s entire 40-foot-long body except for its tail flukes was visible. Water cascaded from its form, flowing down the beautiful dark creases of its white throat and belly, glittering like icing on the frilly margin of tubercles crenellating its fifteen-foot-long pectoral fins. Then it fell back into the water with a monumental splash, twisting around and landing on its back. White foam spewed thirty feet into the air, and everyone who had been looking in that direction surged to their feet with a gasp and a cry of “Look at that!” or “Over there!” or “Did you see that?!”
Everyone.
Including my supposedly jaded and blasé husband, who had peeled the lens cap off the camera and was holding it up, trained on the now smooth spot in the water where the whale had vanished. Farther out towards the horizon another whale breached, and then off to our left, a few hundred yards from where the first breaching humpback had disappeared, another whale rolled on the surface, smacking its pectoral fins in a frenzy of splashing.
All that before we even got out of the harbor.
Our big motorized catamaran soon pulled out of the harbor and we were free to wander the decks, munching on appetizers and sipping mai tais and soft drinks. Everyone on board, Morgan included, was pointing and gasping and oohing and ahhing almost nonstop. We were surrounded by whales performing their aquatic ballet.
The naturalist on board spoke over the public address system about the lifecycle of the whales and commented on the behaviors we were seeing. The humpbacks we were seeing had spent their summers off the west coast of North America, anywhere from Northern California to the waters off Alaska, feeding on schools of small fish and krill that they swallow by the ton. In autumn they had started migrating to the waters off Maui, where they spend the winter months giving birth to and caring for their calves, or mating. Some had traveled the 3500 miles between their feeding and breeding grounds in as little as 30 days!
On that first whalewatch trip, the whale activity seemed to die down as the sun fell towards the horizon. There were fewer breaches and tail slaps, and many more fluke up dives.
Researchers are able to track individual whales because each has unique markings on their tail flukes, which they typically raise out of the water – and hold in perfect position for photographing – just before they make a deep dive. Researchers and volunteers from the Pacific Whale Foundation count whales and photograph as many flukes as they can every year, and share the information with researchers working on the West Coast of North America to track the humpack population’s health.
The captain motored the boat slowly, often changing direction to either avoid humpbacks that had surfaced nearby, or to check out behavior happening nearby. At one point the captain stopped the boat and let us drift while the crew lowered a hydrophone and we eavesdropped on the singers.
While that first whalewatch was beautiful against the sunset backdrop, the whalewatch we took a few days later out of Lahaina was even more exciting. We were on another of the Pacific Whale Foundation’s boats, and had barely cleared the harbor when a mother whale surfaced nearby and started slapping her tail down on the water. The slaps rang out like cannon shots. The display went on for several minutes, giving us a good chance to get lots of photos. I had to admire the strength and endurance of the whale as she raised her tail – which measured at least 15 feet wide, and must have weighed at least a ton – and brought it down with a majestic splash again and again.
We also saw more close-up breaches, including one male who breached 23 times in a row – the naturalist narrating our journey and answering questions over the public address system said she and the rest of the crew couldn’t remember ever seeing such a persistent breacher!
Morgan gave up trying to be blasé as he and I passed the camera and the binoculars back and forth. We ended up being very glad we had brought extra memory cards. You can see more of our photos taken on our two whalewatch trips at http://picasaweb.google.com/BoomersParents/MauiFebruary2008
I highly recommend that you go whalewatching with the Pacific Whale Foundation next time you are in Maui during whale season. Their snorkeling trip to Molokini and Turtle Arches was also a lot of fun. Purchasing a membership gets you discounts on boat tours and merchandise from their wonderful shop in Maalea. Check out their web site, where you can do everything from reading whalewatch logs to ordering T-shirts to making advance reservations for tours, at http://www.pacificwhale.org/
Monday, May 12, 2008
Hide-and-Seek with an Octopus
[Perhaps you will be relieved to read that this will be the last entry about my diving experiences with the Mike Severns Diving group in Maui in February 2008! I still have to write about some above-the-water whalewatching, though...]
I was about halfway through the dive on the back wall of Molokini, in 65 feet of water admiring a pair of butterfly fish hovering above a small coral head, when Dan the divemaster caught my eye. He waved me over to a coral bommie where most of the other divers were clustered. The bommie was dome-shaped, maybe six feet across and jutting four feet out from the wall, a lovely mass of plate coral, finger coral, lobe coral, and some wire coral. Deep crevices surrounded the area where the bommie was attached to the wall, and Dan pointed into a vertical crack with his flashlight.
There hung a beautiful bright yellow trumpetfish, about three feet long. These amazing ambush predators can hang nearly motionless in the water, hovering with the motions of tiny fins. They can change color at will and orient themselves any which way, from straight horizontal to a diagonal of ten, twenty, thirty, or forty-five degrees, or hang absolutely straight with tail up and horn-shaped mouth down. I’ve seen them blend into branching coral, tag along with a big predatory trevally almost like a remora, and sway softly in a bed of algae. I nodded appreciatively and gave Dan the OK sign to thank him for pointing it out.
He shook his head, wiggled his fingers, and probed the crevice with his light again.
And there behind the trumpetfish was the bright-red form of one of my all-time favorite underwater playmates, an octopus!
I whooped into my regulator and flashed Dan a double-OK sign, powered up my camera, and finned in for a closer view.
This was a small specimen, a little over a foot long from tentacle tip to the top of its blobby head. Hanging onto the side of a rock with a few tentacles, it peered at me with its intelligent eyes as it wound and unwound the rest of its sucker-studded tentacle tips. Cringing a bit – I’m a novice underwater photographer and don’t know much about the effects of electronic photo flashes on the sensitive eyes of my friends in the deep – I framed a shot and pressed the shutter.
Click, flash. The octopus shrank back deeper into the crevice, paused a moment, then came floating back out towards me. It wrapped a couple of blood-red tentacles around the rock above and pulled itself up, and I went with it, snapping pictures and laughing.
We played hide-and-seek for several minutes, the octopus oozing into a crevice too narrow for my fingers to follow (even had I been foolish enough to want to), then peering back out at me with only its eyes visible. I sank lower in the water and it came out of its hiding place. I finned up until we were eye to eye and popped off another shot, and the octopus stretched its legs behind it and squirted water like a jet through its siphon to swim several feet away, then settled back onto the bommie.
It crawled around the front edge and I slid around the side. It caught sight of me – it’s pretty much impossible to sneak up on something with such a flexible body and amazing eyesight – and oozed into another crevice. Its eyes came out of the crack like independent creatures, and then two tentacles unfurled and grabbed hold of a rock. It pulled itself out of its hidey-hole with a fluid motion, oozed over some open ground, and sank behind a bulge of coral.
I finned closer, suddenly aware that all the other divers in my party had moved on, and waited until the octopus’s eyes appeared above the bulge again. They ducked down and appeared again and again, each time coming a little higher, like a nervous cartoon character’s.
I took one last picture and waved goodbye, and reluctantly finned off towards the bubbles of my other human companions a few yards down the wall.
If I ever find my misplaced CD of photos from the trip, I will post one or two of my octopus photos!
I was about halfway through the dive on the back wall of Molokini, in 65 feet of water admiring a pair of butterfly fish hovering above a small coral head, when Dan the divemaster caught my eye. He waved me over to a coral bommie where most of the other divers were clustered. The bommie was dome-shaped, maybe six feet across and jutting four feet out from the wall, a lovely mass of plate coral, finger coral, lobe coral, and some wire coral. Deep crevices surrounded the area where the bommie was attached to the wall, and Dan pointed into a vertical crack with his flashlight.
There hung a beautiful bright yellow trumpetfish, about three feet long. These amazing ambush predators can hang nearly motionless in the water, hovering with the motions of tiny fins. They can change color at will and orient themselves any which way, from straight horizontal to a diagonal of ten, twenty, thirty, or forty-five degrees, or hang absolutely straight with tail up and horn-shaped mouth down. I’ve seen them blend into branching coral, tag along with a big predatory trevally almost like a remora, and sway softly in a bed of algae. I nodded appreciatively and gave Dan the OK sign to thank him for pointing it out.
He shook his head, wiggled his fingers, and probed the crevice with his light again.
And there behind the trumpetfish was the bright-red form of one of my all-time favorite underwater playmates, an octopus!
I whooped into my regulator and flashed Dan a double-OK sign, powered up my camera, and finned in for a closer view.
This was a small specimen, a little over a foot long from tentacle tip to the top of its blobby head. Hanging onto the side of a rock with a few tentacles, it peered at me with its intelligent eyes as it wound and unwound the rest of its sucker-studded tentacle tips. Cringing a bit – I’m a novice underwater photographer and don’t know much about the effects of electronic photo flashes on the sensitive eyes of my friends in the deep – I framed a shot and pressed the shutter.
Click, flash. The octopus shrank back deeper into the crevice, paused a moment, then came floating back out towards me. It wrapped a couple of blood-red tentacles around the rock above and pulled itself up, and I went with it, snapping pictures and laughing.
We played hide-and-seek for several minutes, the octopus oozing into a crevice too narrow for my fingers to follow (even had I been foolish enough to want to), then peering back out at me with only its eyes visible. I sank lower in the water and it came out of its hiding place. I finned up until we were eye to eye and popped off another shot, and the octopus stretched its legs behind it and squirted water like a jet through its siphon to swim several feet away, then settled back onto the bommie.
It crawled around the front edge and I slid around the side. It caught sight of me – it’s pretty much impossible to sneak up on something with such a flexible body and amazing eyesight – and oozed into another crevice. Its eyes came out of the crack like independent creatures, and then two tentacles unfurled and grabbed hold of a rock. It pulled itself out of its hidey-hole with a fluid motion, oozed over some open ground, and sank behind a bulge of coral.
I finned closer, suddenly aware that all the other divers in my party had moved on, and waited until the octopus’s eyes appeared above the bulge again. They ducked down and appeared again and again, each time coming a little higher, like a nervous cartoon character’s.
I took one last picture and waved goodbye, and reluctantly finned off towards the bubbles of my other human companions a few yards down the wall.
If I ever find my misplaced CD of photos from the trip, I will post one or two of my octopus photos!
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
An Odd Highlight for a Wall Dive: Slipper Lobsters in Action!
[Continuing my diving adventures in February 2008 off Maui with Mike Severns Diving.]
Molokini Crater lies a couple miles southwest of Maui. An extinct vent of the massive Haleakala volcano that comprises about two-thirds of the island of Maui, the crater walls only enclosed three-quarters of a circle that measures about 1800 feet across. The crater formed as hot ash spewed into the air about 230,000 years ago – it was all above water back then – and was pushed by the steady trade winds to form the crater walls, with a permanent gap facing into the steady winds.
Now a good portion of the crescent-moon-shaped crater, the cliffs of which rise only about 160 feet above the surface, is underwater. The submerged rocky walls themselves have been overgrown with corals and sponges and the many lifeforms that live upon them, and the interior of the crater is filled with coral outcroppings and the sand formed by coral’s decay. The interior of the crater has a number of moorings used by both diving and snorkeling boats, but some of the best diving is in the deep water – you don’t hit bottom until about 300 feet – around the curved back side of Molokini.
The wall is nearly vertical. Holes and cracks ranging from fist-sized to twenty feet long run vertically, horizontally, and every degree in between. Surf washes up against the rock in a perpetual tumble of turquoise and white. There are no moorings on this side, so when you’re diving, you gear up, wait for the okay, and jump over the side of the boat when the captain says “Go.” You plunge into deep blue water that’s refreshingly cool after standing in the sun in your thin wetsuit, pop to the surface, give the “OK” sign to the guys still on the boat, and kick away from the boat towards the wall. The other divers make their entries and you all group up on the surface, do one last equipment check, and submerge.
The boat “stays live,” motoring and drifting along, keeping our bubbles in sight as we descend to eighty feet. Over the rumble of the motor, which cuts in and out as Andy maneuvers the boat to stay within easy pick-up distance at the end of our dive, I hear the low, elongated moans and whoops of a nearby male humpback. Glancing down to the sandy bottom some 220 feet below me, I watch a white tip reef shark working its way along the crater wall until it vanishes into the murky blue.
I glide along the wall, admiring the coral formations that jut from the underlying rock and playing hide-and-seek with the fish and moray eels tucked into their sheltering crevices. I keep an eye on the other divers strung like a line before and behind me, and we point out to each other particularly beautiful or interesting sights: a pair of fountain shrimp advertising their cleaning services, a bright yellow trumpetfish that must be three feet long hanging suspended dead-center in a vertical crack, a yellow-margin moray eel ribboning its way from hiding spot to hiding spot through stubby branches of finger coral. I check my depth gauge with near paranoid frequency, knowing how easy it is to lose track of one’s depth on a wall with visibility at 200 feet like this. And I spin around like an underwater dervish to stare out at the deep blue water, hoping for another glimpse of a white tip reef shark, or a passing humpback, or – that Holy grail of all divers – a whale shark.
Turning back from one of these perusals of the deep, I notice one of my fellow divers hovering to my left and maybe fifteen feet above me, semaphoring his long arms wildly over his head to get my attention. I make eye contact and decide he’s not out of air or in some other emergency situation. I start running through my catalog of hand signals for cool critters he might have seen: the waving fingers of an octopus, the hand-on-head-like-a-dorsal-fin that signifies shark, the little pinky wave that says shrimp, the flapping arms that mimic the majestic wings of a manta ray.
Shaking his head emphatically, he points with both hands to something on the wall just beneath him. I fin over and up, scanning the wall curiously, and am totally WOWWED by the vision of two slipper lobsters – the animal in it’s entirety looks just like the meaty tail of the succulent Maine lobsters I grew up on – tearing apart and devouring a red slate pencil sea urchin.
I whoop through my regulator and give my fellow diver the double-OK signs that are the diver equivalent of a surfer’s “awesome, dude!” I snap a couple of pictures and watch in awe as these two slipper lobsters, the urchin trapped between them, take turns reaching nasty-looking pincers into the center of its underside – which is facing up and out towards us, the way the lobsters are holding it – and yank out chunks of meat. The meat vanishes beneath the raised carapace of the lobster, and then the voracious claw is back for more.
While it’s true I feel a twinge of pain and sadness for the sea urchin, this is at the heart of my love of wildlife watching: not just seeing an animal and making a note in a guidebook about the place and date where I encountered it, but really seeing it in action, exhibiting a natural behavior, giving me a glimpse of how it lives its life.
The encounter brought up far more questions than it answered…Had one or both lobsters come upon the urchin hale and hearty and wrestled it into its present predicament? Or had they found the urchin lying upside down, perhaps already partially eaten by some other predator? Were these two lobsters competing? Cooperating?
I’ve seen hundreds of slipper lobsters and other crustaceans all over the world. While some have been bizarrely, almost frighteningly large, I've never considered one to be the highlight of a dive before! Seeing these slipper lobsters in action gave me a whole new perspective and reminded me how little I know about even the simplest organisms I share the planet with.
Molokini Crater lies a couple miles southwest of Maui. An extinct vent of the massive Haleakala volcano that comprises about two-thirds of the island of Maui, the crater walls only enclosed three-quarters of a circle that measures about 1800 feet across. The crater formed as hot ash spewed into the air about 230,000 years ago – it was all above water back then – and was pushed by the steady trade winds to form the crater walls, with a permanent gap facing into the steady winds.
Now a good portion of the crescent-moon-shaped crater, the cliffs of which rise only about 160 feet above the surface, is underwater. The submerged rocky walls themselves have been overgrown with corals and sponges and the many lifeforms that live upon them, and the interior of the crater is filled with coral outcroppings and the sand formed by coral’s decay. The interior of the crater has a number of moorings used by both diving and snorkeling boats, but some of the best diving is in the deep water – you don’t hit bottom until about 300 feet – around the curved back side of Molokini.
The wall is nearly vertical. Holes and cracks ranging from fist-sized to twenty feet long run vertically, horizontally, and every degree in between. Surf washes up against the rock in a perpetual tumble of turquoise and white. There are no moorings on this side, so when you’re diving, you gear up, wait for the okay, and jump over the side of the boat when the captain says “Go.” You plunge into deep blue water that’s refreshingly cool after standing in the sun in your thin wetsuit, pop to the surface, give the “OK” sign to the guys still on the boat, and kick away from the boat towards the wall. The other divers make their entries and you all group up on the surface, do one last equipment check, and submerge.
The boat “stays live,” motoring and drifting along, keeping our bubbles in sight as we descend to eighty feet. Over the rumble of the motor, which cuts in and out as Andy maneuvers the boat to stay within easy pick-up distance at the end of our dive, I hear the low, elongated moans and whoops of a nearby male humpback. Glancing down to the sandy bottom some 220 feet below me, I watch a white tip reef shark working its way along the crater wall until it vanishes into the murky blue.
I glide along the wall, admiring the coral formations that jut from the underlying rock and playing hide-and-seek with the fish and moray eels tucked into their sheltering crevices. I keep an eye on the other divers strung like a line before and behind me, and we point out to each other particularly beautiful or interesting sights: a pair of fountain shrimp advertising their cleaning services, a bright yellow trumpetfish that must be three feet long hanging suspended dead-center in a vertical crack, a yellow-margin moray eel ribboning its way from hiding spot to hiding spot through stubby branches of finger coral. I check my depth gauge with near paranoid frequency, knowing how easy it is to lose track of one’s depth on a wall with visibility at 200 feet like this. And I spin around like an underwater dervish to stare out at the deep blue water, hoping for another glimpse of a white tip reef shark, or a passing humpback, or – that Holy grail of all divers – a whale shark.
Turning back from one of these perusals of the deep, I notice one of my fellow divers hovering to my left and maybe fifteen feet above me, semaphoring his long arms wildly over his head to get my attention. I make eye contact and decide he’s not out of air or in some other emergency situation. I start running through my catalog of hand signals for cool critters he might have seen: the waving fingers of an octopus, the hand-on-head-like-a-dorsal-fin that signifies shark, the little pinky wave that says shrimp, the flapping arms that mimic the majestic wings of a manta ray.
Shaking his head emphatically, he points with both hands to something on the wall just beneath him. I fin over and up, scanning the wall curiously, and am totally WOWWED by the vision of two slipper lobsters – the animal in it’s entirety looks just like the meaty tail of the succulent Maine lobsters I grew up on – tearing apart and devouring a red slate pencil sea urchin.
I whoop through my regulator and give my fellow diver the double-OK signs that are the diver equivalent of a surfer’s “awesome, dude!” I snap a couple of pictures and watch in awe as these two slipper lobsters, the urchin trapped between them, take turns reaching nasty-looking pincers into the center of its underside – which is facing up and out towards us, the way the lobsters are holding it – and yank out chunks of meat. The meat vanishes beneath the raised carapace of the lobster, and then the voracious claw is back for more.
While it’s true I feel a twinge of pain and sadness for the sea urchin, this is at the heart of my love of wildlife watching: not just seeing an animal and making a note in a guidebook about the place and date where I encountered it, but really seeing it in action, exhibiting a natural behavior, giving me a glimpse of how it lives its life.
The encounter brought up far more questions than it answered…Had one or both lobsters come upon the urchin hale and hearty and wrestled it into its present predicament? Or had they found the urchin lying upside down, perhaps already partially eaten by some other predator? Were these two lobsters competing? Cooperating?
I’ve seen hundreds of slipper lobsters and other crustaceans all over the world. While some have been bizarrely, almost frighteningly large, I've never considered one to be the highlight of a dive before! Seeing these slipper lobsters in action gave me a whole new perspective and reminded me how little I know about even the simplest organisms I share the planet with.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
