Swimming in an Underwater Garden

Aloha

The beaches and forests of Kauai are very beautiful, the island is also known as the Garden Isle. Fred took me snorkeling today and saw the underwater world around Kauai for the first time. The name Garden Isle must also be refering to the sea, because as we snorkelled it felt like we were swimming through a beautiful undersea garden. Corals only grow in warm water, so no coral reefs back home in the UK, except for a few soft corals. The fish here are also very colourful, wrasse, butterfly fish and many more. My relatives are great fish eaters, especially salmon when it swims up river. I don't think even they would eat such beautiful fish  (or maybe they would if they grew bigger). I think they would find them much harder to catch than the salmon which bears catch when the salmon swim up river into shallow water to lay their eggs.

We didn't take any photographs underwater so Ron has allowed me to use this picture below to show you.

(c)  From the book "Swimming with Humuhumu", illustration is by Tammy Yee.

He said that this is the best introduction to Kauai and its underwater world. This is from a book "Swimming with Humuhumu" written by Ron and this beautiful artwork was produced for the book by Tammy Lee. The two children in the picture, Cole and Madison, visit Kauai for the first time and write postcards to their Gramma back home on the mainland. Ron wrote them into this book to help the kids share the wonders of the Hawaiian islands, especially Kauai, with their young readers. The fish on the right is a Humuhumu, (from the title of the book) which is the state fish of Hawaii, so its extra special.

People often think of the land and sea as being seperate, but really islands like Kauai are bits of seabed sticking up above the water. The Hawaiian islands were created as the result of volcano. Now, Ron told me, the land is slowly, oh so slowly sinking into the sea as the old volcano subsides, slipping into earth as has other islands to the north and west. Newer islands, like Hawaii and Oahu, are much more recent volcanoes and eruptions still occur on Hawaii, newest of the main islands.

Aloha, Ed