January 21 - Maui, Hawaii

This morning we are at anchor at Lahaina, Maui.  

Late morning we headed into town and walked around a bit.  

There were a lot of tour kiosks along the wharf.  At one the boat had just come back from a fishing trip with quite a nice catch.

We then caught a taxi for a half hour drive along the coast to Maalaea Harbor.  While the drive was beautiful the ride was also rather expensive.  When at the harbor we noticed that there was a bus to Lahaina so we will try that on the way back.

We boarded the Pride of Maui for our afternoon of lunch, snorkeling and whale watching.  As usual the coastline was beautiful.  What we didn't remember (so they may be relatively new) are the wind turbines.  

We saw a few whales on our way to the snorkeling spot.  The whales are active and plentiful this time of year.  Mary was pretty disappointed that they didn’t have snuba diving (a cross between snorkeling and scuba diving) on the afternoon cruise but we both went in and had a good time snorkeling.  There were plenty of reef fish and the water was a very comfortable temperature.

After 45 minutes of snorkeling we all re-boarded and had lunch (burgers and salads) while we went looking for whales.  We saw quite a number of whales including whales breaching,

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Video of whale breaching.
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skyhopping,

tail slapping,

lounging at the surface,

and diving.

Magnificent and amazing animals.

We found the bus stop and were able to take the bus back to Lahaina and we then walked a bit more around town.  We stopped for shave ice…

before boarding the tender for the short trip to the ship.  We were both pretty full from the very late lunch and the shave ice so we didn’t bother to go to dinner tonight.  Tonight was the White Extravaganza where everyone puts on white clothes.  We should have checked it out (can be pretty dramatic) but we opted to just stay in our cabin.  At 10:00 the ship set sail for our trip to Kiribati.