A Return to the Sea

   I am pleased to announce that I have all but completed my rehabilitation from the knee injury.  The exact nature of this trauma will apparently remain a mystery, the party line at Kaiser Permanente cleaving to the lines of we don't have anyone competent to look at your knee and if its getting better, who cares?

   Despite the stunning lack of orthopedic healthcare on the Big island, I have gone from wading with the Ironmen to swimming with one fin, swimming carefully with Sandra,  and yesterday, swimming solo in a mild

swell on the Ironman side of the pier with both fins, diving seven feet or so. And I did all this with out any

If  I'm swimming With One Fin Why Aren't I Going In Circles?

apparent problems.  Which is to say, this morning I was able to walk from the bedroom to the dining table, where resides the computer, without any obvious discomfort.  O the joys of getting old.

    As you in the Pacific Northwest are hunkering down in the wind and rain, the climate here is damn near iddyllic.  Low 80s, low humidity and soft breezes.  Yesterday, after dropping Sandra off at the church to work on the upcoming rummage sale, I made it down to the pier where there was a crowd from a cruise ship, the third one in so many days.  I actually enjoy the cruisers, who provide the opportunity for first class people watching and occasionally some good conversation.  The down side is that the boats that ferry them from their floating hotel to our village, dock against the pier directly over the portion of reef that I find most productive.  So it goes.

    After unwrapping my ace bandage and placing my cane atop the cubbies, I went carefully down into the ocean.  The word on the street is that a big swell is on the way, but the splash was still mild and the water pretty clear.  And it was cool.  It seems like the coral here is going to be spared the devastation of last summer, when persistent hot water lead to coral bleaching and so much coral death. 
  
    In the wake of the Ironman, there were very few people in the water.  One can only assume that the cruise directors, for whatever reason, advise their charges not to swim at the pier.  Perhaps they are  concerned that these uninitiated cruisers might get run down by one of the tenders as they ply rapidly

Not My Worst Picture of a Day Octopus, Kailua Kona 2016

between the ship and the pier, thus creating one hell of a conflict of interest for the parent company.

   I swam out to the last swim buoy, seeing a pleasant variety of usual suspects, but nothing special, until a ghostly iridescence caught my eye.  Yes, about eight feet down was an octopus!  I watched him for several minutes as he flashed light blue patterns associated with a variety of postures and textures.  I dove him twice, hoping for a picture, but each time he turned a dark chocolate brown and receded into a cavity in the coral head.  Trustingly, he emerged both times I resumed my position on the surface, his eyes perched like a couple of ping pong balls atop his pyramidal body.  What a good octopus!

   As I prepared to swim away,  I sang him the doxology through my snorkel, dove down and swam slowly over his refuge.  I'm certain that as I passed above him he gave me a wink.   Praise Octopus the Holy Ghost!

    Checking my watch, I noted that it was time to head for the beach, lest my beloved languish overtime among the rummage in that sweltering tent.  On my way in, I encountered a rather small boy, pale as a happy octopus, he was wearing a mask and snorkel but no fins.  I looked at him and he looked back at me and waved.

    We were a fair ways out, near the fourth swim buoy, a distance that these days I would not go without my flippers. I had to think back almost sixty years to the time when my parents turned me loose off Newport Beach, California with a three foot air mattress to surf the waves.  I must assume that at the age of eight  (I was in the third grade) they must have thought I was a pretty good swimmer.  I have no recollection of them standing on the beach poised to swim to my rescue.  In my years of swimming these waters I had not encountered an independent child this far out.  I suppose this is because the local children, who are excellent swimmers, graduate from playing on the beach to hunting fish with spears with no fish watching in between.  I Taking measure of the situation, I looked around and no matter how hard I searched the bay, there was no adult to be seen.  This young trout and I were out by there pretty much by ourselves.

    And so I engaged him in a bit of an inquisition.  My first friendly inquiry, along the lines of are you seeing any good fish, revealed that he spoke English as a second language, possibly a dialect of French.  The obvious conclusion was that he was the son of an Ironman.   A couple more questions revealed that there was a mother who had gone for a longer swim and that she would return at some future moment and they would swim in together.

Kailua Bay Never Disappoints, Just Ask the Ironkid!

   I suggested that he was pretty far out and perhaps he would like to swim with me back towards the beach?  Maybe we would see a good fish on the way in.  He was having none of it, though.  Although he was having the tiniest bit of trouble treading water without fins while conversing in a second language, I decided it was safe to leave him.  It was either that or stay with the Ironkid and leave poor honey languishing in the sweltering tent.  Such are the decisions we face in the land of the Macadamia nut. 

    As I prepared to swim away, I said, "See a good fish."  He smiled and said, "Thank you very much."

   On the way in, I saw  a large peppered moray hunting  and a stout moray poking his head out of a coral near the first buoy.  As I looked back, I'm sure I saw the Ironkid swimming in with an adult.  At least I hope that was what I saw.

   Fifteen minutes later, showered and changed, my knee wrapped and walking along with my bamboo cane, I came across two young ladies under our signature banyan tree.  They were wearing attractive summer dresses and standing near a rack of brochures.  At first I thought they might be advertising cell phones or Direct TV, but no, they were Jehovah's Witnesses.  As I am no longer a practicing anesthesiologist, hence not faced with their deadly proscription against blood transfusion, I have a friendlier view of the Witnesses.

    And these ladies in their nice dresses were friendly in return.  They asked if I'd had a good swim to which I replied, "Marvelous!.  I saw an octopus."  Lo and behold, one of them had grown up at Alii Villas in the eighties.  Her family moved away just a few years before Sandra and assumed residence there.  We had a nice chat and she revealed that as a child she would swim in the fishpond (This is our name for the tiny bay bounded by a lava tube where one enters the ocean at Kona Makai...given the right circumstances it can be terrifying spot.) and there were invariably two octopi living in the lava tube. She would dive down and say hi to them and they would respond in kind. Such as sweet childhood memory.

   It is sad, but with all the spear fishing now practiced off Kona MakaiQue triste!  But thankfully there are still a few octopus out in our ocean for us to befriend and children coming along to keep them company.
, the likelihood that there is a friendly octopus living in the fishpond is way less that zero. 

   Until we meet again may you have warm breezes and gorgeous fish.  And may you walk hand in hand into the sea with a friendly octopus.

jeff

Just in case you thought we were kidding, as it were, about the guy and his goat.