Queens Bath: Princeville, Kauai

Posted on Saturday, Nov 5, 2011

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Queens Bath is a large and well known tide pool located right in Princeville, where we stayed our first couple days on Kauai. During the winter months massive waves slam into Kauai’s north shore making the Queens Bath area a great location to capture beautiful and often dramatic images. During the calm summer months there is far less drama and far more people hanging out and having fun, as was the case on this day.

The path down to Queens Bath, like many in Hawaii, isn’t marked and doesn’t look like much from the top. It is steep in spots and muddy too. It follows a small stream which eventually flows over a waterfall that was full of people both times we passed by. Not too much farther is the large black lava outcropping that contains Queens Bath. We knew we were in the right area when we reached a wooden sign with slash marks for each of the 29 people who have died at this location.

There are many interesting formations along this section of coast including a number of tide pools so it wasn’t immediately clear to us which one was Queens Bath. We were wandering at the edge of the ocean, observing a group of sea turtles, when we encountered this small pool. It wasn’t Queens Bath but it seemed like a perfect place to stop and play.

Looking at its olivine color it is easy to imagine that the pool’s bottom was slippery—maybe even a little bit slimy—but it was actually neither; it was luxuriously soft. This, along with the pleasantly warm water, made the pool a great place to sit and soak while Lewis stalked the small tropical fish which get washed into it by the occasional large wave that surges up over its edge. If you look closely at the final image, one such fish is swimming rather nonchalantly between Lewis’ hands and my S95 in its underwater housing.

We eventually did make our way to Queens Bath itself. I think it had more swimmers than water in it. More interesting was a nearby group of teenagers who were jumping from the lava cliffs down into the ocean. None of us felt the urge to join in but it was fun to watch them work up the courage to jump.

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©2011 Timothy Linn. All Rights Reserved.

Two-Tiered Pools: Honolua, Maui

Posted on Saturday, Oct 8, 2011

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Oregon is blessed with some outstanding tide pools along its coast. I was curious to discover how similar Hawaiian tide pools would be to their Oregon counterparts. The answer? Not very. We saw no barnacles or mussels; no anemones, chitons, sea stars or kelp. Even the smell we had come to associate with the ocean was absent. For us the primary attraction of these beautiful green pools, juxtaposed against the sapphire blue ocean, was their warmth—and the view!

First time visitors to Hawaii are often surprised by how cool the ocean is here. Lewis would emerge from his snorkeling experiences with chattering teeth, his time in the water limited not by his curiosity but his tolerance for being cold. These shallow tide pools, surrounded by black lava and heated by the sun, provided a respite from the cool ocean temps.

There was decidedly less aquatic life in these pools compared to Oregon but there was life. There were tiny hermit crabs everywhere. They proved endlessly entertaining. There were small tropical fish as well, which Lewis spent hours trying to touch to no avail.

There were bigger crabs too—lots of them. My favorite ones had yellow neon strips down their legs, blue neon leg joints, orange eyes, a white neon stripe across the front of their face, and pink claws. I called them “racing crabs” because their colorful stripes. One of them emerged into the sun long enough for me to grab a shot of it beneath the water. The image does not do it justice; the crab’s colors are apparently out of gamut for computer monitors (and perhaps even the camera).

I’ve seen lots of crab parts on Oregon beaches but I don’t usually encounter live crabs there. Here we saw them all over the place. For having so many legs and other appendages to keep track of they seemed remarkably nimble and swift, not to mention paranoid. I guess you have to be when you are a creature as delicious as a crab. We could never get close to one, at least until I came across this red beauty. I spent five minutes sneaking up on it, amazed that it was standing its ground. Darla finally decided it must be dead. It wasn’t dead though; it was just an empty shell. It didn’t seem like it had been eaten. Had it molted? That was our guess. We went on to find a number of these empty red crab shells on the islands but never once saw a red crab. What we did see were lots of jet black ones skittering around on the black lava. We finally concluded that the red shells must be coming from the black crabs.

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©2011 Timothy Linn. All Rights Reserved.