Whale watching tour

We started with breakfast at the hotel. Then we drove down to Lahaina area to catch our whale watching trip. The first we drove around the area to see how it was doing after the fire two years ago it's still pretty desolate there are large areas that have not recovered yet. In some places there was nothing but burned-out lots with no buildings on them. But in other places the fire didn't touch anything, so they were still good. It also looks like they are working quite feverishly to get the damaged areas back up and running.

I wasn't sure how the whale watching trip was going to go, because at first the guy in the shop was kind of rude to us. When we asked why it said to be prepared to go barefoot his answer was “because everything's more fun barefoot “. And the way he said it was like “what are you stupid?”. All we wanted to know was what was the reason for it and if we could wear water shoes, Some of us have very white feet and were afraid of getting sunburn on them. However, once they took us to the boat everything got much better.

We met our captain, Jack and the marine biologist, Jess. When I asked them if I could at least wear my socks they said “sure, do you want your shoes?” I told them I was just worried about getting sunburned and they were very cool about it-Captain Jack said, “yeah you don't want sunburn on your feet”, thank you! We then went out looking for whales.

At first, I was excited to see a water spout off in the distance and we headed that way. But then the captain noticed another whale and followed where he was going. He had a suspicion and he was right, there was a “whale fight” going on. About 8 to 10 males were battling each other to mate with a female who they were all following. The law says we can't get closer to 100 yards before putting the boat into neutral and that's what Captain Jack did. However, the whales don't seem to care about that law, and they swim much closer to our boat than 100 yards. This was a really cool experience as we watched them swim all over the place battling each other, occasionally you would just see one whale come out of the water sideways, which meant that another whale had gone underneath him and bumped him up. We must have followed these whales for an hour, one of the most amazing things I've ever done. I think we were very lucky to come upon this on our first whale watching trip.

After this great experience we had an early dinner at the Aloha Mixed Plate which is right there by the water I thought my food was really good and they had a pretty good guy playing music for us. Pretty much a great day in Lahaina, I'm glad the area is still able to operate despite all the damage. After that we drove the shoreline for a bit and ended up at a blow-hole GuideAlong told us about. This was kind of a let-down, as it wasn't really "blowing'much. But it was a nice drive and good way to end the day before heading back to the hotel.