Kauai: Swimming in the Ocean

It turns out that I have an insatiable love of the ocean, much like I love Lake Superior.  I couldn’t get enough of the Pacific on our trip, and lucky for me, the ocean was around every nook and bend.  It was never far away!

On a couple of other occasions in my life, I had dipped my toes in the ocean.  Each visit to the ocean was cut very short for a different crazy reason each time I managed to get myself to the water.  One of the things I looked forward to most while anticipating this trip was the opportunity to actually swim in the ocean.

Guess what!  The ocean really is salty!  It even tastes salty.  Dr. Peds hates the taste of it, but I love salt!  I wasn’t about to drink it up or anything like that, but the taste didn’t bother me at all.  The most surprising thing to me was when the water evaporated out, your skin was left with granules of salt stuck to it.

My first few attempts at actually entering the ocean to swim were pretty hilarious.  The breaking waves kept knocking me down, and right as I’d start to get up, under I’d go again.  I looked intoxicated when I was just trying to stand up.  Dr. Peds has some pretty funny video coverage on his cell phone.

The first few times the waves really made me panic.  It looks so easy when you watch other people swimming in the ocean!  They just float along with the waves.  The problem was that there were sharp rocks and coral all over underneath the water when you got past the waves breaking right next to the beach, so you had to be so careful where to put your foot, and then if you didn’t catch the wave quite right you could get sloshed over your head.  Eventually I figured it out and learned to relax more and panic less.  By the end of our trip, it was going pretty well.

Our friends had a boogie board with them, so I decided to try it.  Having something to hang onto in the water made things a lot easier.  Dr. Peds came out with me to help me figure out how to ride a wave in.  I couldn’t grab ahold of that board right to save the life of me, and when he finally helped me get up on it the right way I ended up sloshing in like a beached whale.  We laughed and laughed.  Not so coordinated am I!  And I wasn’t even trying to stand up like a surfer or paddle boarder.  All sorts of little kids were sailing in on boogie boards, but it didn’t work out so well for this Mama!  In the process of trying to steer me in the right direction, Dr. Peds scraped his shin on a nasty rock and it’s still healing.  He wandered around the rest of our vacation with a large bandage on his leg, and missed surfing because of it.  Oh, the price you pay when your wife wants to Boogie Board.

On our very last day in Hawaii we borrowed snorkel gear from our friends, who had been snorkeling like crazy almost every day.  I almost didn’t try snorkeling, even though Auntie Dot told me that it was the one thing I definitely should make sure I did while I was in Hawaii.  Dr. Peds had never snorkeled either, and we were completely, utterly amazed when we put those goggles on!  It took me a bit to figure out how to manage the equipment.  It wasn’t hard, but I needed some help from one of our friends to figure out why I was breathing in salt water at first.  Once the goggles were the right size for my pea-sized head and I figured out how to get the right seal on the breathing tube, I was in business.  Still, at first I did a lot of panicking when I put my face under and started breathing through that little tube!  When I figured out I wasn’t going to drown, it was splendid.

I cannot even begin to describe for you the variety of tropical fish zipping around right there in shallow water.  There were schools of striped fish, pencil shaped cornet fish, and big blue fish shaped like discs as big as my gathering drum.  There were fish that were covered in splotches of every bright color in your crayon box.  It was like swimming in an aquarium with fish that were three times as big as they would be in a glass box.  It was a completely different world, and all I had to do was float along and breathe through my little tube.  Looking down sometimes caused me to feel a little disoriented at times, and I’d poke my head up and realize I wasn’t in the same spot I thought I was swimming over.  It would be pretty easy to pass hours away snorkeling.  Dr. Peds and I decided it was one of our favorite things to do.  No wonder our friends had been snorkeling every day.