The Polynesian Adventure

Hawaii offers a lifetime of adventure, discovery and exploration

The ocean defines Hawaii. It’s a place where the bedlam of evolution has taken audacious steps, enchanting and astonishing even the most well-traveled diver. It’s a destination where huge schools of dolphins, legions of green sea turtles, manta rays, reef sharks and whales share space with rare dragon morays, Tinker’s butterflyfish and piles of endemic marine life. These critters are lots of things, but they aren’t shy — chances are you’ll see a big chunk of Hawaii’s undersea biodiversity during the span of a single dive.

What’s even more remarkable about Hawaii is that it’s the most remote speck of land on Earth: Its idyllic shores are more than 1,000 miles from any other landmass. It’s an inconspicuous sprinkling of island riches, hidden away in the center of the immense Pacific Ocean.

The amazement factor continues above the surface. When you mention a tropical paradise, the first place that comes to the world’s shared imagination of island perfection is Hawaii. Waterfalls here seem to cascade from only the most cinematic of cliffs. The rainforests are thick with unique flora and fauna, and everything exudes a sense of the exotic. There are deep red-rock canyons, silky red-, green-, black- and white-sand beaches that stretch off to the horizon, volcanoes that flow violently into the sea and acres of freshly hardened lava that look like a desolate black moonscape. There’s also something deeply inspiring about a lifestyle where flip-flops, T-shirts and board shorts are daily attire. It’s an addictive Polynesian world offering a lifetime of adventure, discovery and exploration.

ALL HAIL KONA, THE BIG ISLAND

I’m hiking across a field of black lava at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Off in the distance a roiling, billowing cloud of steam vaults into the sky as a river of lava reaches into the cooling sea. Hawaii is growing right before our eyes, and by the time we reach the shore and the flow, the active Kilauea Caldera will have added several feet of terra firma to the Big Island, the youngster in the Hawaiian Island chain.

Hidden beneath our feet, there was once a road. “No Parking” signs poke out from the lava. This is probably the one place in the world where no one could break such a roadside edict even if they wanted to. There’s no path for us to follow, just the distant violent column of steam and acres and acres of black lava. Up close the lava has a blue sheen and comes in every shape imaginable. My favorite is the soft, sensual folds of pillow lava crinkling beneath our feet. As we get nearer, we can actually feel pockets of heat. “I like to come out here at night,” says my guide, photographer David Fleetham. “That’s when you can really see the fiery glow of the lava.”

We get as close to the flow as possible and work our way upwind. We stay upwind because the popping, hissing steam cloud is filled with tiny droplets of hydrochloric acid and airborne particles of what is the equivalent of glass shards — not generally part of a healthy daily regimen. We’d brought painter’s masks to cover our mouths and noses just in case, but right now the offshore breeze favors us. Before us the earth strains through growing pains. The sight is at once dramatic and fierce, haunting and poetic. I can only imagine what is happening beneath the waves at the spot where two forces of nature collide.

The results of the hot hand of Mother Nature can be seen by divers. The entire seafloor offshore is built on this volcanic substrate, and the dive sites off Kona (as the west side of the island is known) are riddled with arches, lava tubes, striking caverns lit with streaks of light that slip through cracks in the ceiling, and ancient calderas that have been transformed into aquariums of wildly decorated butterflyfish, tangs, angelfish and triggerfish. In the silence of the vast Pacific, the violence that gave birth to this island world has been transformed into a blue wonderland.

Hawaii is also a crossroads. Humpback whales show up every year from November to March, filling the water with otherworldly refrains. Pilot whales, dolphins, mantas and sea turtles come in droves. For divers, Kona is a rite of passage. Almost from the moment one gets a C-card, Kona comes calling, and rightly so: It’s a world all divers should experience. Like the song of the humpback whale, it will not soon be forgotten.

WELCOME TO THE OHANA

Kona Honu Divers
In Hawaiian, ohana means family, and from the moment you board one of Kona Honu’s boats, you become part of owners Glenn and Maggie Anderson’s family.

It’s a happy family. One thing about the dive experience on Kona Honu’s expansive 46-foot boat is that the divemasters and captains love the dive life and truly enjoy sharing the blue wonderlands off Kona. They take care of your gear, swap out your tanks and play cool music between dives.

I was recently with Kona Honu for what they’ve embraced as their signature dive experience: the Manta Ray Night Dive. Although other shops also visit this site, I can see why Kona Honu incorporates it, too:There’s nothing like it in the world.

Several nights a week, just south of the airport at a site called Garden Eel Cove, the Kona Honu dive boat heads out of Honokohau Harbor just as the sun is slipping over the horizon and setting off the daily light show understatedly called “sunset.”

The divemaster sets powerful lights on the seafloor, pointing straight to the surface. Almost as soon as the lights are turned on, clouds of plankton begin swirling in the beams. For mantas, this is akin to ringing a dinner bell, pulling the winged giants to the feast.

Divers form a circle around the main light and soon the beams from their own dive lights fill with manta appetizers. When the mantas make their appearance, they almost seem to materialize from the dark water itself into the very definition of elegance. I’ve been in the water here with as many as 10 mantas, with wingspans from six to 12 feet, watching in awe until dwindling air forced me from the water. The mantas tumble, twirl and loop-the-loop through the mass of plankton, passing so close that you can see every detail of their skin, and even right into their open mouths. Being in the water with these majestic animals reminds me just how lucky I am to be a diver, and how lucky I am to be in one of the world’s ultimate ohanas.

FEELING BLUE

Jack’s Diving Locker
Jack’s Diving Locker has been a Kona institution since 1981, and its owners, Jeff and Teri Leicher, have deep roots in the local dive community. In a world where dive staff are mostly transients, Jack’s staff members tend to become part of the family and stay. And with the amount of repeat business that Jack’s has, their dive family seems to be spanning the globe in growing numbers of acolytes. You’ll probably have a member of the Leicher family on the boat with you; even after 25 years, they still have an obvious love for the eclectic diving off Kona. Which, really, demonstrates why Kona has remained a dive mecca.

Over the years I’ve been on dozens of dives with Jack’s and been endlessly fascinated with Kona’s best sites — Turtle Pinnacle, Suck ’Em Up, Kalokos and Golden Arches, Pyramid Pinnacle, the famed manta night dive and Kaiwi Point. But some of my most indelible memories of Jack’s happen between sites, in the deep, electric-blue waters about a mile offshore. This is treasure-hunt diving. Every time we head off into the blue, everyone on the boat is primed in anticipation of the unexpected. Jeff, his son Kawika and one of the luckiest captains in Hawaii, Greg McLaughlin, seem to have a knack for taking guests to just the right patch of ocean. And this part of the Pacific, for all its vastness, seems particularly crowded with pelagic passers-by.

Nothing can prepare you for the sensation of peering off into the bottomless blue, streaks of sunlight piercing deeply into the 200 feet of viz, and seeing a pod of pilot whales materialize around you. They look you in the eye with a sentience you can feel, then continue on in their relentless search for something only they know. I’ve seen beaked whales and a tiny frogfish known as a sargassumfish that was clinging to a micro-world of shredded nylon rope tangled under some flotsam, and I’ve felt a tingle of apprehension when oceanic whitetips pop in for a look at who’s in their stomping grounds. When the waters fill with a hundred spinner dolphins, clicking and squeaking in a huge cacophony, you can sense the sonar pings as they echo back an image of the awkward visitor in their water.

There’s one particular moment that will resound in your memory: just being in the water and experiencing the ephemeral caress of whalesong as it fills an immense ocean with its lingering lyrics. You’ll never want to return to the boat. But as they say, that’s another Kona day.

By Ty Sawyer