Moorish Idols And Triggerfish

I tried something new with the GoPro yesterday when we went snorkeling. In the past, I've husbanded the battery and memory card carefully by turning the camera off or turning off recording when nothing was worth filming. That led to a lot of fussing with the camera underwater.

This time, I turned it on when we got in the water, pressed record and never touched it again. That worked out just fine as the battery and memory card have longer underwater life than I do. No fussing with the thing and when I got back to the hotel room, a quick session with Adobe Premiere got me a clip I could use.

We went north this time to Honolua Bay and Napili. Whether it was the location or the day, the wind was calmer and the water was great, if a bit murky. Turtles were reported by other snorkelers, but we didn't run into any. Napili was particularly good and might be our new favorite spot, though I will always have a fondness for Ulua Beach in the south.

As you can see from the video below, there's still room for improvement. I used my stick with the GoPro which allows you to get the camera closer to the subject, but it shakes pretty badly. Thankfully, YouTube corrects for that at the expense of some clarity. They now make scuba masks with GoPro mounts on top and that seems promising. I might buy one when I get back to San Diego. Freeing up my hands would be great.

The other thing I want to try while we're here is boat snorkeling where they take you out to a reef offshore and let you paddle around there for a while. There are lots of reefs and lots of boats, so now it's a matter of finding a good one. By getting farther offshore, I think you get away from the cloudy water that comes from decaying plant material off the land. We'll see.

In the meantime, enjoy. I shot in HD, so it's best in fullscreen mode.