One More Day Then Home

All is well now. The grand Poobah of the Internet has blessed the Alter Ego free of badware. Bless you back Oh Great One.

At the beach now.

In front of me there’s a Gecko doing push ups on the trunk of a palm tree (did you know many species are bushes?). Supposedly to create a draft beneath itself to cool off. Why the effort — there’s a perfectly cool ocean not twenty feet away. Skitter down the tree, find yourself an inch or two of still water in the tide pool and chill out.

It worked for us after an hour in the sun. Not in the tide pool but just a short walk beyond it, in a bay that Happy Wife discovered swimming with green turtles. She said the bay was a “cleaning station”, a place where the turtles come to have tiny fish pick accumulated nits and lice from their shells. I wasn’t in the water long when I spotted one. I gulped twenty seconds of air and flippered down to have a closer look. This turtle had wedged itself in a triangular formation of rocks, probably to prevent the push ‘n pull of the current — less strong down there but still a factor — from sloshing it about. Sure enough, working like a busy pit crew a small school of parasitic fish were sucking bits of something from its shell. I had hovered long enough to be noticed by the turtle, who shot me a furtive look as if to say, “Buzz off, willya.” I was out of air so I complied.

When Happy wife got out of the water she saw she had lost her ankle bracelet. See V-day photo below. Like so much other treasure in the ocean, lost forever.

Back on the beach now and will you look at this, two whales close offshore! Moving left to right. More in the far distance, off Molokai’s north shore; even from here I can see the splash from their breech. Must be ten miles or more. The two that are close, right out in front of us now, I see their (hump) backs break the surface then disappear, then re-appear further along. Happy Wife says, “Watch, if we’re lucky we’ll see ’em breech”. I look but then lose patience. Plenty of people around me are looking though, scanning the vast blue plane of water with binoculars.

V-day @ Merriman’s with Happy Wife: