Saturday, July 12th

Mike woke up at 6am to see if he could find us a snorkeling cruise out to Molokini Crater. He found one with Pacific Whale Foundation @ 7:45. We got lucky. The boat we were on usually holds 100 ppl, but for whatever reason we only had 22. It made for a great casual trip. When we got to Molokini the water was quite choppy. However, right as we were getting in the water it got much better. It was great. There were tons of fish here, and I even got to see this wicked looking eel. Because the weather had gotten so nice and calm, the captain took us around the back of Molokini as we were leaving the area. He showed us all the damage the military did to it. (Just like they did with Kahoʻolawe). They used it as a bombing target practice because it's silhouette was similar to an aircraft carrier. You can still see bullet holes and other big gouges in the side. You can see normal natural erosion on the other side of it. Big difference. It makes me sick to see what we as a country or maybe just the military are willing to do sometimes. Why would that seem like an OK thing to do? It just truly baffles me.

We headed to another area that the captain called "Dirty Harry Bay" cuz Clint Eastwood has a house right there by the water. It's also called Turtle Arches, cuz there are lots of turtles under these coral arch things. It wasn't the clearest of water, but we did manage to see a couple turtles. There was a whitetip reef shark under an arch that our instructor Steve found by quite the surprise. I didn't validate that myself. I trust that it was there and scared the crap out of him. On our way back into Māʻalaea Harbor, we saw 3-4 turtles surface for air right near the boat. Much better views than our previous turtle exposure. One even stayed up for a LONG time, I think he was hamming it up for all the cameras.

We got back into the harbor, put our stuff into the car, and then ate lunch at Beach Bum's Bar & Grill. Nothing special, but it got the job done.

We left and headed out to West/West Maui in search of the best banana bread on the planet. At least according to the writer of our Maui guide. We stopped at two places in Kahakuloa Town -- Julia's and Lorraine's. We got banana bread at both, and a shave ice from Lorraine's. Julia's was definitely supreme. Definitely the best one we'd had on Maui for sure.

Shortly after Kahakulua we came upon the area where the Nakalele Blowhole is. We noticed a ton of broken car window glass bits all over the ground where you park for it. Not a reassuring thing. We just stayed up on the top there and didn't hike down to the Blowhole. This was already a long day and we were just exhausted. We sat on the cliff area up there and just watched the blowhole going nuts. We definitely got there at a good time of day.

We came back to the condo around 5:30pm. Mike immediately went to sleep, and I started packing and doing general clean-up, then finally went to bed at 7:15pm.