Close Encounters with Wyland the Artist, Part II 12/29/07

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), we had met Dean Burnell, 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 (that's Dean & Jojo in photo above at left), and suddenly, here he was in Kona, where he now resides! What an amazing coincidence! Masa, Dean & Wyland are in the photo below right.

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, so we headed north. If you come to Big Island, Hawaii during whale season, which is December to March, you'll usually find humpbacks north of the Kona airport, especially up in the Kohala 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 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 spinner dolphins 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. Wyland got in the water and videotaped the net. He said he got some great footage, though I doubt we'll be seeing it on any of his music DVDs!

After Wyland got back in the boat, I spotted a whale breaching. Wyland was eager to go see if we could get some photos of it, but Masa was thinking he wanted to get in the water and photograph the net. 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, 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!

Finally, we spotted it and Masa dropped a line 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 thought Wyland should get in and photograph the mahi mahi on the lines, but he was reluctant to do so, as his brand is built around live animals and preserving the environment. We convinced hims that someday he'd need visual reference of fish like this on a line, perhaps for an overfishing campaign or the like, and he went in for some photos. But I could see his heart wasn't into it.

Wyland was back on the boat pretty quickly after that. We caught two more mahi mahi and packed it in for the day. We headed south to try Turtle Pinnacle one more time. 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!

Kona Sue

http://www/seapics.com

Wyland photos at SeaPics.com

Wyland links:

Wyland.com – official site

The Wyland Foundation – a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting, protecting, and preserving the world's oceans, waterways, and marine life

Wyland Galleries, Big Island, Hawaii

Wyland bio on Wikipedia

Links to stock photos of species mentioned in this blog. Please be patient! 10 seconds to load:

humpback whale
spinner dolphin
mahi mahi
yellow tang