Hawaii 2010 - Part 2b: MORE Snorkeling & Scuba!

These are pictures from one of the afternoon dive/snorkels we did. It was a little bit rougher this afternoon - but I had a mission to try and go back to where we had dived earlier in the day to see if I could locate the blue-spotted urchin (Astropyga radiata) I had seen on our morning swim (in reading online I've also seen these referred to as Fire Urchins). Of course, on the morning dive I did not have a camera with me - and I saw this crazy urchin that was about 8-10" in diameter and when we got home and identified it in Anna's crustacean & echinoderms book it turned out that it was SUPER rare to see them. Shoot! I swam back with the camera in the afternoon - but of course it was gone. Dang! It was still a lovely snorkel though and I saw plenty of other beautiful fish!

I got this photo of a Blue-Spotted Urchin from the Society of Woman Geographers website. You can see how amazing & unusual it looked!

Taken by Idell Conaway in 2005.

Me at the start of the swim - great shot of the palm trees lining the beach!

Blue box fish! My favorite fish of the trip - he was so cute & square!

Anna blew the picture up a bit for me so I had a better picture of him - check out his spots!

This flounder was so neat! I love how you can see the turquoise paisely-like pattern on his back.

This is one of my favorite pictures from this set - I just love the colors and texture.

Anna took this shot of me at the surface from about 40 feet underwater - I tried to give her a nice silhouette to work with. =)

Mom with the dive flag!

A cushion star!