Hanauma Bay

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Some photos from Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve, on the island of Oahu, east of Honolulu. It's a popular spot for snorkeling, which we attempted to learn by doing, with mixed success. We did have the foresight to buy a waterproof single-use camera, which is how I took the photos you see here. The camera supposedly used special film that captured underwater scenes better; I'm still not sure what that meant, since this is the only time I've heard of special underwater film. It's possible our photo processor back at home bungled the job, since even the above-water shots came out an undersea blue sort of color, which I think is the exact opposite effect from what you'd want an undersea camera to do.

This was the second time I'd been to Hanauma Bay. The previous time, when I was about 14, we were visiting relatives who lived nearby at the time. They taught us their little secret about the place, which was that the bay's fish absolutely loved eating frozen peas. We brought several bags of frozen peas and had a great time tossing them in the water, creating a feeding frenzy we were standing right in the middle of. This practice, and any other fish-feeding secrets you might come across, are now highly illegal, and rightly so. So just don't.

Gentle Reader(s) of roughly my parents' age may remember Hanauma Bay as the setting of the 1961 Elvis Presley film "Blue Hawaii":

Since our attempt at snorkeling-by-guessing didn't go so well, most of these photos were taken by sticking the camera underwater and hoping it was pointed at a fish or two. This worked out ok surprisingly often, but not always. I've included a few shots of nothing but blue water, on the idea (or hope) that they might count as cool and abstract rather than crappy. I've studied just enough art theory that I can no longer reliably distinguish between the two, so I figured I'd toss them out there in case it turns out they don't totally suck.