Northwest Jewelry

Yesterday, we took a catamaran ocean trip along the Na Pali coastline.  The trip was 6 hours long and one of the best ocean trips I’ve been on.

Here’s our catamaran:

It’s the Lucky Lady and the tour company is Kauai Sea Tours .  We were real happy with their tour and would recommend them.

We’ve been on quite a few whale-watching tours, both at home (in the Depoe Bay area), in Mexico, and in Hawaii.  But we’ve never seen as many whales as we did this time.  Unfortunately, I’m not quick enough with the camera to get a good picture–this is the closest I got–you can see the blowhole and the top of the whale if you look closely:

We actually saw a double breach–two whales breaching at the same time, and quite a few whale tails.  It was super fantastic–it almost became commonplace to see another whale. 

And we’ve NEVER seen dolphins swimming free in the ocean–we had several groups playing with our boat–they love the wake in the front and back–once again, I’m not too swift with the camera, and this is the closest I got–you can see the dolphin in the water and right after the picture was taken, he came up out of the water (which would have been a much better picture, but oh well).

Here’s a picture of some of the passengers watching for whales.  Note the weather–it’s sunny and warm–it’s only about 8am, so people are still wearing their jackets, but the weather is quite nice.  Also notice the guy in the brown hat over to the right.  That’s the last time you’ll see him standing up, and it was our last time seeing him standing as well–for the rest of the trip, he was laying on a bench with his head in a bucket!  Yes, this was definately a Dramamine trip! 

As we approached the corner of the mountains, the weather turned.  It got very cloudy and windy and the waves were high–water was spraying up onto the boat and I was pretty soaked by the time we rounded the corner .  Here’s a picture of a rainbow in the middle of it–note the weather in this picture and people’s clothing and hair–we all got pretty wet:

Once we rounded the corner, the coastline was just stunning.  I took tons and tons of pictures, but they didn’t turn out too well because my camera was being splattered with salt water–I was trying to dry it with my wet cover-up and so the pictures just weren’t that clear.  But here are a couple of the better ones:

The beach above has buildings on it and people camp on it–the way they get there is by hiking about 8-9 hours! 

Mostly, however, the Na Pali coastline is beautiful rocky cliffs:

It was great to go on this tour–we’ve now either driven or seen by boat about 90% of the island.  We have two days left and then back to 20 degree weather and maybe snow!