Southern Okinawa from 1000 feet

Betsy finally found time to deliver Josh's 31st birthday present (only 3 months late). We went flying over the southern half of Okinawa in a small aircraft, provided by Kadena's Aero Club. The 45-minute flight turned into about an hour & included Okinawa from Moon Beach in Onna-son down to the southern tip (both coasts). Josh got to sit up front with the pilot, Brian (who was great!) of the little 4-seater Cessna, which meant that Josh got to take over the controls (up/down & left/right) for about 5-10 min (over the Pacific near Tsuken & Kudaka Islands): Our friend Ana's brother Tito came along (visiting Okinawa & Asia for the first time). The weather was absolutely gorgeous. Aero Club pilot Brian touched the plane down as smoothly as silk on Kadena's runway just after an AV-8B Harrier did so on an adjacent runway: It was so nice we just might go again before we leave & check out the north!

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Promising joy & delivering jellyfish!

We convinced our newly-arrived-in-beautiful-Okinawa friend Ana (a PT coworker of Betsy) to come & experience the majestic Okinawan waters via a snorkeling excursion with us, the vetted pros. But instead of the promised mirth & merriment, we actually delivered rather nasty & painful jellyfish stings.

No, not the small larvae drifting about that we've felt before. These were some large, long-tentacled but extremely-hard-to-see-since-they're-translucent "sea wasp" "Habu-kurage" jellyfish (probably Chiropsalmus quadrigatus, now being renamed Chironex yamaguchii)! That's right, the stinging, get-some-vinegar-or-urine-on-me-pronto kind! Fortunately, there at Sunabe south (aka Water Treatment Plant) dive instructor Scott was nearby with a gallon bottle of vinegar (that'd he'd never before had reason to use) to help ease some of the trauma, after having just warned us & showed us the drying & dying specimens that local boys had removed from the area.

Ana was resilient & willing to continue to pursue her first snorkeling excursion in Okinawa's waters. Despite a 2nd failed nearby attempt, in which only Josh got slightly stung (but NOTHING compared to Ana) & also got a couple of good photos of the evil doers:

We eventually found successful & largely-jellyfish-free waters for some nice snorkeling action a bit further north, from the steps of the Kadena sea wall. The visibility was a bit odd (something, maybe pollution, was floating in the topmost foot of water for some of the time), but Ana claims to have thoroughly enjoyed it (we did, as usual).

We're hoping she has a speedy recovery & joins us again & gets SCUBA certified soon!

Highlights:

Full photo set:

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Snorkeling off the middle of the Sunabe sea wall

2 snorkeling excursions in 1 week & both times with a charged dive camera & memory card? Unprecedented!

It was an overcast day but it was nice enough that the sea wall was pretty crowded. Being a holiday weekend probably factored into the crowd also. Usually does here in Okinawa. If people don't have to work they're out & about, like we are! ;-) Normally we've snorkelled & dived off Sunabe's sea wall at one end or the other (either "Water Treatment Plant" or "Junkyard", now really "Dirt Lot"), but we decided it was time to check out the underwater life thriving around the wall's midsection (several dive shops operate around there & we often see the groups trekking over the wall & across the shallow reef top.

We got a few good shots in: We also captured a bunch of short videos of this excursion (basically, Josh chased a lot of fish & tried to capture the experience for others to appreciate):

** Note: the music wasn't playing quite that loudly & clearly underwater. YouTube has a cool new AudioSwap feature that let us add the sound tracks instead of the silence that we captured. ;-)

Snorkeling at Sunabe

What a lovely day in the gorgeous waters of Okinawa! Josh was lucky enough to have a free day to spend with Jessica, Linda & Susan on a snorkeling excursion near the south end of the Sunabe sea wall in Chatan. There is lots of life in those waters & they saw a nice slice of it!

And they had the dive camera with a charged battery & memory card! The 131 shots he snapped before the battery was exhausted, were cropped, resized & whittled down to a still-plenty 99 shots for your viewing pleasure.

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Some highlights:

Diving @ Sunabe (south end) - 3 photos

On our only dive of the day we remembered a fully charged camera but no memory card, so the internal 10 MB had enough room for only 3 shots, so we had to make them good (well, the best we could given the difficulty of seeing sharpness thru the small viewfinder underwater). In hindsight, we wish we'd reduced the quality/size level per photo & thereby gotten a few more shots in, considering these are not of the greatest focus/sharpness we've gotten. We settled on 3 shell-less mollusks, based on such factors as 1) we could get close & steady ourselves, 2) they did not scurry away when we approached, 3) they're quite beautiful marine creatures that we greatly admire & 4) these were not everyday varieties in dives around here.

This gorgeous white, purple & yellow nudibranch was the best shot we came away with: This white (yes, the green hue was not so much there in real life) marine gastropod mollusk (of undetermined variety) was really cool (those feathery appendages moved): And this gorgeous green & blue nudibranch was much prettier in focus: