Return from Paradise

[robby]

Kauai was fantastic. I loved the red dirt and all the wild chickens wandering everywhere. I stayed in Princeville, and went diving almost everyday. I explored underwater lava tubes offshore; some of the passages were narrow, then opened up into huge dark caverns that framed the blue ocean above and outside. The water temperature was about 82 degrees, and my maximum dive depth was 55 feet. The colors are distorted when you dive deeper than 60 feet, as the water filters out the red light. The best place was off Ka beach, at the end of the road, on the north end of the island. There is a calm lagoon, sheltered from the ocean by a rock barrier. The lagoon is teeming with fish, but if you swim out to the rock barrier, and walk across it to the ocean, you see schools of fish without beginning or end, schools of porpoises, and huge green sea turtles. The turtles feed on the algae growing underwater on the rocks.
I was hanging out with a large turtle for a while. It was about 5 feet long and came from underneath for air. I was with it on the surface, three feet away, while it took in air, and during the process it was looking at me. We spun lazily, in slow circles together for a few minutes, and then it dropped down into one of those endless schools of fish, and out to sea.