The Story of a Sea Turtle: Snorkeling in Maui

The Makena’s beach is known for having a ton of turtles. There is a portion of it called “turtle town.” We knew this going in and could not wait to see them because I LOVE Sea turtles and Stephen had never seen one before.

The first two days we were like, where are all of the turtles??? We were frantic to find them, and... nothing. Not one. LIARS.

On the third morning we set our alarms for 5:30am (just call us dedicated turtle seekers plus jetlag) and went out onto the beach by 6am because we overhead a woman saying that was when she saw them. There wasn’t a soul on the beach or in the water, I was tired, and I was like, we are dumb and probably going to get eaten by a shark, but we need to see turtles or honeymoon over. Well, we didn't see any turtles. We ate our feelings at the buffet and then went back down to the beach later in the morning. We rented a cabana and dedicated ourselves to that beach for the entire day. hard life and sacrifices.

After another two attempts we had an all is lost moment and decided to just go out sans snorkel gear and gopro and just float around in the water. As we are floating some guy yells to us, like he KNEW, “HEY, there’s a turtle next to you!” And by effing golly, a freaking turtle just pops right up next to us and is all “Looking for me? Muahaha.” Stephen quickly swam to shore to grab our gear (and let me tell you, Stephen is not the best swimmer in the world, I think his long arms confuse him in the water, but man he swam to shore fast for those turtles). I guarded the turtle with my LIFE... aka followed it on my inner tube, which was not hard because it’s a turtle for crying out loud not a sea cheetah. Stephen made it back and we SWAM with that turtle.

Then of course, from that moment on, we didn't go a day without seeing a sh*t ton of turtles. Isn’t that just life though? As soon as you relax and stopping fighting to find something it pops up next to you in the water like no big deal. After our first couple of swims with the turtles, when people would get excited about spotting one we would roll our eyes and be all "Oh, haha, look, another turtle. Whatever."

*For those curious we used a gopro hero 3 for these photos and I edited them in afterlight. You can get the gopro at target too (online here). When Shane bought it, he got it in-store and at the time (two weeks ago) target was giving a $25 gift card with purchase. I don't know if that is still going on, but worth checking out.

It was our first time using a gopro and I couldn't recommend it more, especially that particular version for those of you, like us, who are just wanting to use it recreationally. You can read more of what my brother and I think of it here on instagram

We bought an attachment to it that stuck to that back to make it float in water, and also had a wrist attachment. It's only like $20 and totally worth it. You can get a lot of other cool attachments too. My brother got the extendable pole which is really awesome and I saw a lot of people using it in Maui.

*ALSO it's a lot cheaper to buy your snorkel gear here on the mainland in like target or walmart (which we did) rather than renting them from a shop or resort on the island. To rent them at our resort it was around $20 FOR THE DAY. Ridiculous. We used ours every day, so it's worth it to buy them, in my opinion.