Diving with Turtles and Corie on Maui's West Side
Mala Pier The sun was out and the wind was light as usual on Maui's west side. This bode well for a couple of scuba dives that I had planned to show off a bit of the Hawaiian underwater world to my friend Corie. The first spot we hit up was the wreckage of the old Mala pier, just north of Lahaina. This has always been one of my favorite sites to dive for underwater photography. The water here is almost always clear, the wreckage covered in beautiful coral, and charismatic megafauna abounds. Bleached Coral Head Imagine my surprise when I drop down and the first thing I see isn't clouds of fish, or turtles, or beautiful colors....it is a big vibrant white coral. It had almost entirely bleached. There has been a lot of news surrounding Maui lately with the increase in water temperature leading to mass bleaching events around the island. This happens whenever something like increased water temperature, sedimentation, acidification stresses the coral causing it ...