Jan. 30-Poipu and Salt Pond--


Today we woke up to another absolutely beautiful day!    It even warmed up nicely.  We tried to check the www.kauaiexplorer.com site for surf conditions, but it still wasn't updated by 11 am.  According to tv, it looked like tomorrow should be a good day to head north and actually get some snorkeling in---surge of only 3-4' (which for the north in a protected area like Tunnels, Kee, and Anini is often good).  Sat. we pack up and head to Princeville, so this might be our last day to head south.  So we did.  Probably spent 4 hours in the water between Poipu and Salt Pond.  Even the ride down to Poipu was beautiful!  Loved the clouds again today!

Poipu beach was the most crowded I've even seen it!  But there was still plenty of room in the water.  This time we had a good time snorkeling both sides of the tombula.  In fact, we were able to get pretty far out today---probably could have gone farther, but might have gotten run over by surfers!

Saw lots of cleaning stations -
female adult yellow stripe coris

 male yellow tail coris, black side hawkfish, and a swimming white mouth eel

 rockmover getting cleaned by a cleaner wrasse

peacock grouper

Hawiian Sergeant---usually they're yellow, black, and white.  There were a bunch here with a blue tint.

 Gosline's Fangblenny (?)  I've never seen these guys before.  There were actually 2.  I saw one as it scooted back into a rock, tail first.  So I waited several minutes for it to come back out and another one joined it.  Cool little guys.

There are a LOT of needle fish at Poipu!  This was a fraction of them.

another cleaning station with a lot of yellow fin goatfish.  The reddish yellow fin goatfish aren't as common as the yellow ones.

 brown surgeonfish being cleaned.

 pretty sure this is a filefish, but I've not seen one with spots before.

 Then we headed over to the area by the lifeguard stand.  We're rebuilding the Poipu rock sign.  The fish really like it when rocks are turned!  The barracuda was there again.   Also saw a lot of wrasses and other fish I've already put on here so I'm just adding a few pictures of different fish, but there were lots and lots of fish by the lifeguard station again.  Even saw another eel swimming about---snowflake eel.

 male elegant coris

 light spotted cucumber

After a couple hours of snorkeling and a while sitting on the beach drying in the sun, we headed to Salt Pond.  We haven't had good snorkeling there in years, but we planned to have dinner at the brewery, so we decided to go to Salt pond until after sunset.  The clouds were still putting on quite a show!

 Too bad we don't have cell towers like this back home--then we'd have something green in the winter!

 Today the snorkeling was actually very good at Saltpond!   Here's the area we like to snorkel to the far left of the beach.

looks like the shell of a Banded Urchin.

Actually saw 2 trumpet fish here.  We see lots of coronet fish around Kauai, but not many trumpet fish.

schools of Hawaiian Flagtails

 school of yellow stripe goatfish

Another odd cucumber?

 flounder

Magnificent snake eel.

this is my husband hand next to a sea hare---probably about 8" long.

 saw 2 more smaller ones, too.  Here's one of them face to face.

spotfin scorpionfish?

 I presume this is a leaf scorpionfish

Ken dragged me out about 6 so we could get over to the parking area and watch the sunset.  Not much in the way of colorful clouds, again, but it was a pretty sunset.
With a magenta filter added to this photo

from the camera

We changed into dry clothes and headed off to Kauai Brewery.

my lilikoi brew and our dinners were very good(ahi over rice and veggies for me and pulled pork for Ken, plus chips and salsa to share).

Got back to the condo quite late.  Made up lost time for the bad weather day yesterday!  Now it's time to hit the sack!