Close Encounters with Wyland the Artist, Part II

After a marathon day with Wyland, the Artist, where we boated, swam and snorkeled all day, followed by an artist’s reception at Wyland Galleries in the evening, Wyland was up and ready for more the next day! Wyland is a machine!

It appeared his gallery reception had gone well, and Masa and I had a good time, too. Besides the awesome original Wyland art we received (see Wyland Part I blog 12/28/07), we had met Dean Bernal, the Dolphin Whisperer. Dean was famous for his work with dolphins in the Turks & Caicos, where he used to live. For years, I had been selling our SeaPics.com photos of him with JoJo, the sociable Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus (that’s Dean & Jojo in photo at left), and suddenly, here he was in Kona, where he now resides! What an amazing coincidence!

Dean’s story of why he no longer lives in the Turks & Caicos, and how he ended up in Kona, Hawaii is a little long and personal, so I won’t go into detail. I will say, however, that the story involves a stopover in Crete, where sirens sing to you and cure whatever ails you. Enough about that, and on to our adventures with Wyland!

It was Saturday morning, the 29th, and we still wanted to see humpback whales, Megaptera novaeangliae, so we headed north. If you come to Big Island, Hawaii during whale season, which is December to March, you’ll usually find majority of migrated humpback whales north of the Kona airport, especially up in the Kohala Coast region. Humpback whales breed here in winter after their long migration from Alaska.

As we headed north, Wyland said he wanted to stop and check out Turtle Pinnacle, one of Kona’s better known dive sites. SeaPics.com has many photos of green sea turtles, Chelonia mydas, being cleaned by yellow tang and other reef fish, and most of them are from this spot. We have so many of these nice shots that divers visiting Kona tend to think sea turtles are always getting cleaned somewhere, waiting to be photographed. Well, the key to getting these great shots is to be at Turtle Pinnacle, a time-honored cleaning station. If you look for this anywhere else, you’ll likely be disappointed.

The water was kind of rough, but we stopped at Turtle Pinnacle for Wyland to work his magic and find some sea turtles. Strangely, though, it didn’t happen. We searched for sea turtles for about 45 minutes, but never found any. Hmm, it seemed the Wyland magic was wearing off!

We continued north, convinced we’d see some long-snouted spinner dolphins, Stenella longirostris, around the airport. Nada. We wondered where all the marine life had gone.

As we searched the area, we stumbled upon a huge fishing net drifting in the ocean. The net was so large, we couldn’t even attempt to retrieve it. Like an iceberg, the tip of it was at the surface, and the rest of it hung down, down, down, fading into the blue.

A drifting net like this is certainly a danger to marine life. On the other hand, it’s also a refuge for thousands of other species. There were countless fish using this net as a floating reef, as were the sea plants and tiny crustaceans attached to it. When small fish and inverts gather, big fish follows. Any decent size, floating objects are great fishing spot! Usually you can expect big games like yellowfin
tunas, Thunnus albacares, wahoo, Pacific kingfish or ono, Acanthocybium solandri, and dolphinfish, dorado or mahi mahi, Coryphaena hippurus, as well as off shore sharks like oceanic whitetip sharks, Carcharhinus longimanus.

Masa dropped a jig to see what's down there, and his lure was immediately hit by a fish! He caught a rainbow runners, Elagatis bipinnulatus. Rainbow runner is one of jack or trevally speceis and belongs to the Family Carangidae. Masa said it is underrated but the fish is very tasty when prepared correctly. Everytime he dropped a jig, he caught one. All sizes are pretty big for rainbow runners. After we saved some for our dinner, Masa & Wyland decided to get in the water and see what was really happening down there around the net. After a dive, Masa came back to the surface and excitedly said there were hundreds of rainbow runners, Elagatis bipinnulatus, and whitespotted filefish, Cantherhines dumerilii, and mahi mahi near the surface, and then, deep under all the fish there were a dozen wahoo hanging around. Wyland videotaped and Masa photographed those shooling fish (see Masa's picture - Wyland and hundreds of fish). Wyland said he got some great footage and we may see it in his music DVDs!

After Wyland got back in the boat, I spotted a breaching humpback whale in a distance. Wyland was eager to go see if we could get some photos of it, but Masa was thinking he wanted to stay a bit longer in the water and photograph the net. To Masa, finding this size of floating net and the amount of marine life around this humongous net was very rare and significant event, and he must document that thoroughly as a marine wildlife photographer. It's certainly one of the greatest opportunity of this kind of subject.

Wyland suggested we leave Masa at the net, check out the whales, and then come back for Masa later. Strangely, Masa was not eager to go along with this plan. It seems being left drifting with a net in the middle of the ocean was not Masa’s idea of a good way to spend the day. I admit, I could see the logic in his reasoning. Wyland promised we’d quickly return to the net and Masa, but we thought it better to all depart together to look for the whales, which is what we did.

Well, the Wyland magic was definitely on hiatus, as we didn’t saw a humpback whale the rest of the day. After looking long and hard, we decided to go back to the floating net and do some fishing. But now that net was playing hard-to-find. We went up and down the coast, looking for it. It’s a really good thing we didn’t leave Masa out there, drifting with the net, as we might never have found him again!

After half an hour or more, finally, we spotted it and this time, Masa put out a couple of trolling gears and caught a mahi mahi right away. When you catch a mahi mahi, it’s common to leave the first one on the hook for a while, as strangely, the other mahi mahi will congregate around it. This happened in textbook fashion, and within minutes we had our second mahi mahi. We caught two more mahi mahi and packed it in for the day.

We headed south to try Turtle Pinnacle one more time at Wyland's request. Masa free-dived over the pinnucle and confirmed there were no turtles. Despite Masa's scouting report, Wyland decided to go for scuba diving, so we let him go solo. While Wyland was diving, we swam and snorkeled around there for at least an hour, but never did see a turtle. Too bad for Wyland; at least we live here, so we’ll see the turtles another day!