Some of the fish along the Kona Coast were fairly rare. One of the smallest but most beautiful fish in the islands, common along this stretch and uncommon elsewhere, was the Hawaiian cleaner wrasse. With their bright blue tails and long black stripes from their eyes to their tails, they looked like someone dipped the front half of them in neon yellow paint. Like other cleaner wrasses, they eased in and out of the open mouths and gills of larger fish that could easily snap them up. This cooperative relationship (“reciprocal altruism”) benefits both the cleaner, who gets a meal from bits of food and algae, and the cleanee, who is rid of harmful bacterial growth. I once burned a whole tank hovering at thirty feet, watching a cleaner wrasse and a banded shrimp servicing large grouper patiently waiting in line at a ‘cleaning station.’
All of the coral reefs rimming the Big Island are relatively young compared to other Hawaiian Islands and much more so than some of massive reefs throughout the south Pacific. The young Big Island reefs tend to be less productive with more corals than filter-feeding animals. But along the leeward Kona Coast, the sheltered reefs were more expansive and diverse than wave-pounded Hilo and Puna. Light-gray finger corals were thicker and brighter, grayish-brown plate corals extended eight feet across where not shattered by poorly placed boat anchors. Encrusting and false brain corals painted vertical walls burnt orange and rusty red, like a quiet Arizona mesa at sunset. White lace corals formed small heads and intricate branches resembling fine Victorian hand fans. Kona reefs, at least fifteen years ago, were vibrant and bursting with life.
Hilo was my home while I lived on the Big Island, but the Kona Coast was where I left my heart. After the first taste of their sun-soaked Kona corals, I did all I could to get over the island to snorkel or dive. Many formative moments of my early ocean journeys took place on the leeward west coast of the Big Island, most ending in stunning sunsets.
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We bounced on gentle chop on Kailua Bay. There was an hour of light left and we wanted to get in a quick warm-up dive. I had been working all day helping a friend who was repaying me with an evening on his boat. It had been a hot day and the water felt exquisite on my shoulders and neck. Our dive buoy bobbed in the deepening reddish-gold as we dipped beneath the shimmering surface.
North of Kailua-Kona there were phenomenal walls dives with reef zonation patterns stacked close together. Similar life forms still occurred in similar regimes, but since the reef was compressed horizontally, a wide spectrum could be observed by simply moving up and down. I found a sheer face loaded with finger corals and butterflyfish at twenty feet that morphed to encrusting corals and huge parrotfish at fifty.
I hovered, watching the dwindling light change complexion on the brownish-orange wall. If the sky is right, you can look back to the east at sunset and watch the simultaneous rising of the shadow of the Earth on the horizon. What I had never realized until that day, is that if you are under water as the sun sets and the ocean is right, you can witness night emerge from the deep.
Waning sunbeams drew horizontal across the mirror as darkness crawled up the face in a well-defined band, engulfing the deepest red. I crept ever-shallower, following the sunset up the wall, forced to the surface by the rotation of the planet. The last hints of light lingered in wispy clouds as we motored to Honokōhau Bay, an eminently calm spot with excellent night diving.
We tied to a fixed buoy to avoid anchoring on the live reef. Our lights cut the water like spelunkers descending into a massive cavern. Even in the crystal clear water of the leeward Big Island, visibility at night was forty feet at best. We dropped down to an expansive black flat that formed the base of the bay’s floor. There is something inherently disquieting about being in the water at night that has to do with either sensory deprivation or the realization that some of the larger ocean animals capable of inflicting harm are most active at night.
A school of small squid flickered like moths in and out of our beams as we adjusted to the pressure at sixty feet. A moderately-sized octopus (“takū”) moved quickly along a row of boulders at the edge of the flat. It would seem difficult to describe anything with eight arms covered with suction cups as graceful. But this animal, slinking in and out of the rocks, coordinating all of its limbs in a seamless, flowing manner was nothing short of it. Cephalopods are thought to be particularly intelligent. Among other reasons, this probably has something to do with the neural processing required to integrate the motion of all those arms. I’m not sure whether the octopus I saw combing through van-sized stones was brilliant or not, but its motion clearly was.
I followed it along the rocks, until loosing it in a room-sized cave. I approached the enclosure tentatively, recalling the night dive at Onekāhakaha when the massive moray buzzed me. The entire ceiling was coated with circular orangish cups with feathery tentacles wafting the water for zooplankton. The smooth calices into which the corals retracted during the day were fully open, revealing active tentacles. I kneeled at the mouth, lighting up the dense colony while taking care that my exhaled air bubbles didn’t collect under the ceiling where they could harm the animals. Another, larger species soon came on the scene, also pursuing the aggregated zooplankton.
A school of a dozen giant manta rays soon surrounded me as I moved back onto the sand flat. Like swans flying effortlessly in slow motion, the mattress-sized rays cruised through the night, banking with mouths agape. Their backs were black and dotted with off-white spots. Their bellies were stark white, their wing tips sharply pointed, and their thin black tails trailed perfectly symmetrical bodies.
They swam directly at me, filter feeding. My dive light bore through gaping mouths and gill arches, illuminating the particulate snow swirling behind them like the effluent flow from a jet engine. Their mass and alien-like feeding appearance should have been daunting. But they passed on all sides of me, harmlessly grazing like a herd of elk moving down a mountainside in the Montana Missions, gliding elegantly and massively in the warm, dark, water.
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I settled down the sloping reef through bright parrotfish. An offshore flow nudged me from the abrupt meeting of land and sea further down the Kona coast. I rocked along, inching through vivid corals on narrow reef benches rimming a deep channel cut from the volcano. A black chasm emerged on a sudden, shear face, fifty feet down – an ancient artery from a still-beating heart. It was eerie, like an image that appears in a troubled dream.
There was no life inside the lava tube, though I could see only a few feet in. The current sea floor was the fault along which a huge chunk of the Big Island slid back to the ocean. The tube had extended further, but was shaved clean as the rock calved off violently in a massive motion that triggered tsunami on the other islands. I stared into the void as the current sifted out the steep gorge. It was every bit as powerful an image of the islands’ rise and fall as lava scorching the sea.
Kealakekua Bay was a profound, striking blue. The marine life was brighter and bigger than anywhere else I found in the islands. The surface was calm, with soft, clear water and an omniscient overhead sun that fueled huge coral heads along steep shelves. The steep channel extended down the scoured fault, flushing deep currents in and out with a cool, nutrient-rich tidal rhythm underlying warm, calm surface layers of rich life.
A winding road fell from the highway at the town of Captain Cook, switching back past large fenced homes interspersed with cafes and shanties. The bay seemed larger through each break in the coffee trees, tucked against the steep volcano where the ancients buried royalty in cavernous lava tubes shaved off above the sea.
I had launched with one of my best friends on the southern rim of the horseshoe bay at mid-day and paddled the mile or