A Spotted Eagle Ray off Maluaka Beach

As if I needed another Siren's call to lure me back to Maui, I discovered a spotted eagle ray off of Maluaka Beach. I had never seen one on any of my frequent trips to the island where, until my late morning stop at Maluaka the day before flying home to Phoenix, I always considered turtles, moray eels, and the occasional barracuda as my most thrilling finds.

My brother-in-law was visiting Maui at the same time and had just told me about the time he and my sister-in-law had swam with several a few hundred feet off of their time-share's beach in Kaanapali. It had been a one-time encounter in the more than twenty years that the couple have been regular visitors to the island.

Just before my own encounter, I had snorkeled for the second time in two days at Ahihi-Kinau Natural Area Reserve in South Maui. The 807 acres of protected ocean off shore from a stark volcanic landscape is closed to motorized boating and to fishing because, as the signs say, "Wildlife Comes First." However one mile of the reserve's coastline is open to swimmers and snorkelers who want to witness the protected reefs.

It's impossible not to be enchanted by the vast seascape of healthy, colorful coral varieties: rice, mounding, finger, and cauliflower, to name a few. If a fish calls Maui home, you can almost count on finding it somewhere in this corner of the island.

I discovered a lone green sea turtle feeding at the sea bottom that last morning at Ahihi-Kinau. Another snorkeler floated nearby as I waited for the turtle to come up for air as the creature usually does after several minutes. The snorkeler said it was the second turtle she'd seen that morning but was disappointed because she'd seen no rays, something other visitors had apparently seen the day before.

One extraordinary find I could report at the reef was a yellow-edged moray, my first, that I had seen two days earlier near where most snorkelers exit and enter the reserve from a rocky beach. Besides being exceptionally large at more than four feet in length, the eel was unintimidated by my presence as it lingered just a few feet below me.

Immediately afterwards, I had tried to visit nearby Maluaka Beach on that first morning in South Maui but couldn't find any parking. My snorkel map called the area Turtle Town, and several boat charters regularly anchor nearby to give passengers a chance to swim with the aquatic reptiles. Two days later, after my second visit to Ahihi-Kinai, I was much luckier finding a parking spot and set my sights on Maluaka's turtles.

Alas, I didn't encounter a single one. However I did identify a lined butterflyfish, a new find for me in this group of colorful and ornate fishes. The lined species is especially large compared to all the others, about the size of a dinner plate.

Just when I had about given up on the idea of finding any turtles, I decided to head back out to an especially pretty area of the reef several hundred feet off shore. While no turtles were present on my first pass through, I thought it couldn't hurt to take another look considering I was in the heart of Turtle Town. I was only back a few seconds when I was thunderstruck by the ray as it glided onto the reef through two raised mounds of coral lying directly in front of me. The fact that the graceful and elegant animal was as big as me was unnerving, especially since I was alone with no other snorkelers in sight.

This wasn't my first sighting of a spotted eagle ray. I've seen a few on Hawaii's Big Island, off the Kohala Coast. There the rays always kept a distance and swam away from me, giving me the impression that they were relatively small and quite timid. Meanwhile the ray in Maui let me swim near it, seemingly unconcerned about my presence, as if I was just another of the many smaller fish trailing in its formidable wake. My humility only heightened my fascination with such an exotic and powerful animal.

In fact the ray soon demonstrated its strength as it approached a mound of coral and chomped at it. I snapped shots with my camera as the ray attacked the mass and swam away. (Any upturned detritus interested the fish that were following.) In these photos I could later see the arms of slate pencil sea urchins protruding from the ray's underside mouth. The blood orange-colored urchin was quite common throughout the area and now suggests to me where a ray might show up for a meal.

I tried recording a video of the spotted eagle ray as it glided through the area but a diminished battery level in my camera prevented any success. Unbelievably I remained alone with the ray throughout my encounter. It felt selfish to have the creature's company all to myself, as if a five minute audience was more than anyone deserved. And I was scared to test the ray's patience against my unbridled enthusiasm.

Awestruck and reverential, I left Maluaka's temple of the sea in the presence of the magnificent Poseidon himself and headed back to shore on cloud nine.