Two-Step Beach Snorkeling at Honaunau Bay

Hella Rottwell at Kealakekua Bay

After a hard week of house hunting in Hawaii Island and finding the perfect home in Kailua Kona, Hella and I decided to take off a day to go snorkeling at Honaunau Bay. Hella Rothwell is the remarkable Hawaii broker who snagged the house away from the thieving hands of some other buyer (see how you get when you’re an agent yourself and buying?) and put us into escrow. It was time to celebrate, and Sunday is often a fairly quiet day real estate-wise for us to take off.

First we drove to Kealakekua Bay down a winding road, Napoopoo, that dropped about 1500 feet in elevation. A toothless native offered us canoes to rent to paddle over to the Captain Cook Monument, and we tried to talk him into taking us himself to no avail. I did not want to paddle all that way and neither did Hella, not even for the kama’aina (discount rate offered to native Hawaiians), which is what he then offered us.

Fortunately, we found a group of guys hanging out at the pavilion, strumming a ukulele, enjoying the aloha, who told us how to find Two-Step Beach for snorkeling at Honaunau Bay. It was a perfect day, few clouds, sapphire sky, gentle breeze. We easily found Honaunau Bay, parked on the side of the road, grabbed our snorkeling gear and headed down to the lava rocks.

As Hella put it, we found a group of snorkelers near our, ahem, age group, nestled on the rocks and joined them. The reason the beach is called two-step is because there are two flat surfaces of rock, one below the other, that provide an easy way to slip into the water. Coming back you can wait for a wave to deposit you on the bottom step. One of the snorkelers suggested if we placed our hands flat, sea urchin would not harm us.

We were off and swimming. I saw yellow butterfly fish, a rainbow runner, chubs, yellowtail coris, sturgeon, parrotfish, a bunch of tang. At one point, I became separated from Hella, snorkeling past the reefs into clear waters, through schools of fish so pretty I wanted to pet them, and that’s when I spotted the reef shark. Oh, you can talk to Hella and she’ll tell you it was a spinning dolphin, but we earlier spotted the spinning dolphins leaping and prancing, and those guys are not necessarily long and slender like a reef shark.

He was lying all by himself on the bottom, twisting his little shark body slowly left and right, and all I could think about was why-oh-why do I have blue fins and please don’t eat me. Please, please don’t eat me. Suddenly his little shark buddies showed up and there were 4 or 5 of them hosting a gab fest about which should try to tear off my ankle and run away with it. Let’s just say I swam like a bat outta hell back to the reef where I found Hella.

Kealakekua Bay and ancient Hawaiian lava wall