A Big Honkin' Honu

Translation; A very large Hawaiian sea turtle

So there I was, sitting on the lanai one morning having coffee and watching the sun's rays peak over the volcano when this turtle came into view. That in itself wasn't that big of a deal because the turtles come in almost every morning to feed on the reefs. They normally are around for a few minutes and then move on to greener pastures or in this case, greener reefs however, this turtle decided to stick around a while and taunt me.

The turtle started on the far reef, about 50 feet off shore and then moved in to the closer reef, about 10 feet off shore and stayed there. The tide was exceptially high this morning, two and a half feet higher than normal according to the weather forecast and the waves were pretty rough. I watched the turtle for more than twenty minutes as he worked along the close reef, occasionally raising his head out of the water to laugh at me. OK, he MIGHT have just been getting air but I would swear I saw him grinning.

I knew that because of the high tide and heavy waves the water would be murky but I couldn't take it any longer. I came to Hawaii with a mission of getting some more turtle shots and I was tired of watching him laugh at me, he was, I know he was, so I grabbed my gear and headed for the water.

Just to give you an idea of how big this turtle was, these shots were taken with a 24mm wide angle lense and have not been cropped. In the top photo I was about 4 feet away from the honu and I guess-timate (it's a Kansas word Tex LOL) he was about 4.5 feet long from head to tail.

I was about six feet away in this second photo.

Of course Cheryl was sitting on the lanai with the P7700 watching me get pounded by the waves while chasing my photographic mission.

She did afterall already have her turtle, complete with "aloha" written on the shell.