Mossy Cottage Knits

Snorkeling is the New Knitting

Let’s start with the two short lists.

Short List #1—What Was Not Fun About Maui. Oh, this one’s easy. The food poisoning. Not recommended as a tourist activity.

Short List #2—The Knitting That Got Done: Accidentally dropped six sock stitches off the dpns, shoved the whole shebang back in the bag as is, never looked back. If you’re reading this for knitting content, move along, move along; nothing to see here.

On to The Stupidest Thought In the History of Maui Tourism, courtesy of Me. Friday morning I went on a submarine trip (not TMK; she would rather have been torn slowly apart by a Great White and then flossed out from between his teeth at his leisure). I’d enjoyed my first submariner adventure in Honolulu and wanted to do it again, so I (and 46 other intrepid souls) boated out into the deep blue and watched as the submarine surfaced. I stepped off the boat onto the submarine, grabbed the railing, and thought, “Hey, this boat is all wet!” It was a submarine, people. It had just come up from 130 feet below the surface of the Pacific. I had watched it come up from 130 feet below the surface of the Pacific. And I was surprised that it was wet. Somebody shoot me now.

The boat, the other intrepid souls:

The submarine nearing the surface:

Pop goes the weasel!

This photo shows (a) the underneath of the boat we came out in and (b) the actual colors and contrast to be found in most of the photos. TMK tweaked the rest so you could better see what was out there.

For the most part there were…fish. Imagine ten other pictures that look pretty much like this.

130 feet down, a boat that had been sunk to make an artificial reef…

…and, wait, what’s this? A diver? Okay, not too surprising; people scuba dive all the time. But what’s missing? Look closely. Yep, no scuba equipment. No oxygen, no tanks, no hoses, none of that inconvenient stuff that keeps people, oh, I don’t know, alive? Welcome to the insane world of free diving.

Mr. Macho waved at us for a while and then, when he was good and ready, went up. Good Lord.

Just for grins, a science lesson. The farther down you go in the water, the more of the light spectrum gets filtered out until you are left with only, I believe, ultraviolet light, which affects the color of the things around you. I present an accurate picture of my bright orange shorts, which had turned completely magenta.

The part that was super-fun and borderline addicting? The snorkeling. Oh. My. God. I snorkeled in the Philippines as a child but hadn’t done it since, and was a leetle hesitant, having become a hugely more blobby and uncoordinated 48-year-old, which manifested itself in some spluttering, some hyperventilating, a modicum of petulant whining, and heading back for the safety of shore before I’d made it into two feet of water. But once I developed my sea legs, or sea arms, or sea breathing, or whatever I needed, I was hooked. I think I snorkeled six times in three days, if you count every time I got out of the water, announcing it was the last time I would go in, and five minutes later was snorkeling again. Couldn’t get enough of the fish, the coral, the effortless floating, or the magic of keeping my head in the water without drowning. Not even a bad case of Facemask Suck, an embarrassing malady that leaves the imprint of a face mask all around your face, was enough to stop me.

Me in my (not by choice) pink snorkeling equipment, as I try to get out of relatively quiet surf which was still, however, knocking me forward and then knocking me back, just enough to make things, um, interesting.

Here, the park ranger rescuing me. You can’t tell but I was laughing my arse off. And what did TMK do while someone else helped me out of the water? Took photos. Some white knight! (And do ignore the highly unattractive and unflattering swimming outfit. The bottom is a real swimsuit; the top is something I grabbed out of my suitcase and which grew ten times its size in the water.)

Wednesday, the search for gay whales, TMK conquering pretty much every phobia she’s ever had (except that bird thing), a picture with TMK facing the camera, and something worse than Second Sock Syndrome.

Posted by Ryan at March 24, 2008 11:30 AM