So today our first full day on Ahe we all started by cleaning up and fixing the things that broke in yesterday’s high winds (since the boat is so small and there are so many of us we clean a lot) Lucky for all us cleaning, after half an hour a guy we met yesterday drove up and invited us to come with a bunch of them spear fishing and snorkeling. We told him “just a minute” and took about ten but that just how it is with a big family and on the islands everyone is super laid back and don’t really have schedules so they didn’t mind. Then we zipped off in their flat bottom boat. A lot of people around here have flat bottom boats because they have such a low draft and they can glide over most of the rocks and coral heads just below the surface. But even still they had someone standing on the front of the boat pointing out all the thousands and thousands (like for real) of floats that had either crab traps of oyster farms attached to them.
On the other side of the lagoon they showed us their fish traps, that looked like giant wire fence funnels so the fish could swim in and not out. They emptied them out (about 25 medium fish) and took two sharks out of the trap that had come for the fish. Then they took us to “the pass” to spear fish.
At the pass where tons of super colorful fish. It was really hard to ask what I could shoot since he would just list colors of fish I could kill. “You can shoot de: Red one with yellow stripe, da green one, da black one de brown one and de blue one” Kind of sounded like “You can eat all the fish”. So I dove in and snuck up and shot a black fish, but when I brought it to him he said “oh not that kind of black one” great…
Other than a turtle and a lot of sharks they didn’t see the fish they were looking for so we drove to a new spot with lots of coral and a even more fish. To be honest I didn’t really try to hit any at the next place since I had no clue what was good to shoot so I just snorkeled. The fish and the reef were amazing and super colorful! One lady was swimming around with a big knife and she would go down and get clams which we would eat, very fresh (raw) I guess that’s how they do it here. After they caught 12 fish (one of them was half as big as a mini shark) we drove back to the boat. On the way Dad, Alyssa and Teyahna wore rain ponchos because the wind would blow the waves from the front of the boat into our faces.
At our boat they insisted on giving us 5 of the fish they caught and probably would have given us more if we didn’t insist our freezer was too small to fit all of them. They I helped them clean and gut the fish in their boat and we packages them up in Ziploc bags for the freezer.
Once they left I was going to take Alyssa, Mom and Zack to a beach that we were told was the best on the island. Everyone wanted to come but since mom had been on the boat all day she said just her Zack and Alyssa and they would be quick (of course I went to drive since they can’t). There was tons of coral reefs in the middle of the lagoon sometimes pocking up and other times a few feet or inches below the water so the whole way there I had to weave around the ones that would pop up in front of us. With the sun hitting the water I could see the dark spots in the water to avoid. After snorkeling and a shark “following” mom because they could “smell her fear” I drove back, but we had to go really slow since the sun was down and we could only see the water 10 feet ahead. Then we had a dinner with some very fresh fish.
