Next-to-last day in Hawai'i

Our last couple days on the island might have played out a little differently had we not lost all of Wednesday afternoon to our flight delay. (Just in case you need the reminder: avoid Go! airlines if you can!) My bride was still justifiably lamenting a lack of beach time on our two trips to Hawai'i in a little more than 5 months, and I had to make that up to her rather than pursuing something else I might have preferred to do. I don't have anything to complain about, though, as these last two days were plenty enjoyable for me. Friday will be a separate post.

We decided that Thursday afternoon would be grandparents' beach time by ourselves, and Friday would be family beach time, with the kids out of school early. We got a later start than we'd planned because the logistics of the day made it easier for us to get the kids from school. Then we suited up and headed on out.

We were trying to decide between the parks at Haleiwa Beach and Waimea Beach.  The former would have offered calmer water than we'd seen on the weekend at Waimea, which can be a bit of a crap shoot for conditions. It would have made for some good snorkeling, though, as there is a lot of coral rock there. But I thought we might go there the following day with the grandchildren, so we headed toward Waimea instead.  The traffic was so much lighter than it had been when we were out on the weekend, and we noticed that there was plenty of parking available at Laniakea Beach, commonly referred to as "Turtle Beach" for the green sea turtles that beach themselves there. We'd visited several times on our previous trip, finally managing to see a turtle on shore, but had never tried to swim there; the surf had always been quite rough, which made the spot popular with surfers, but we had noticed a lot of small rocky areas along with the sandy beach.  But for the first time the traffic was light enough for me to notice a lifeguard station there, so I realized there must have been some satisfactory swimming areas, and we quickly decided to give it a shot. It turns out that a turtle was sunning itself on the shore there, and remained there for the full 90 minutes or so we spent at the beach. We didn't realize that at first; it was hard to tell from the distance where we'd set up our beach blanket. Meanwhile I decided to work my way back toward the lifeguard station, and found a suitable area for swimming where I could enter the water safely and do my first ever bit of snorkeling.  I wasn't very good at it, and after a short while began wading in the surf back toward our blanket.  Suddenly I spotted two turtles in the water about 10 feet away.  Knowing that we're supposed to keep our distance from them, I resisted the temptation to put my mask back on and snorkel toward them, and they soon headed back out further from the shore. But it was very cool being so close to them in the water.

When I got back to my wife, I could tell that the lump on the sand in the other direction was a beached turtle, so we made our way over for a look.  She was considerably larger than the one we'd seen briefly in December.  She'd been there long enough that they'd placed a cordon on the sand to keep folks from approaching too closely, and had identified her and set out her placard. I swam in the area for a while, then walked back to retrieve our phones so we could each grab a couple pictures. I was disappointed I hadn't grabbed the camera bag for one of the few times of the entire vacation. The volunteer there explained that there had been three turtles in the area when this one had beached, but the other two had been spooked off by the people in the water. Perhaps they were the two I'd seen a little while before. After a while we headed back to our blanket so Teri could grab a bit more sun. Then we stopped back in Haleiwa Town for our (second and) last shaved ice of the trip. Yum!