Friday was going to be a beautiful day. Eric and I could tell when we woke up at 5:30 AM (so we could make the drive from Haliimaile to Kihei). As the alarm went off, I remember thinking: since this vacation started, I have not been able to sleep in. In fact, I haven't been able to sleep in once in the past 6 weeks or so. Some vacation.

In Kihei, we met up with a bunch of other divers who had bought themselves seats on the Sea Diver II, part of Ed Robinson's Diving Adventures' fleet. After signing in, we all jumped aboard and headed out to Molokini Crater for some dives. You'll have to go to Eric's Kona site for the underwater pictures.

After returning and setting foot on solid land, Eric and I had burgers for lunch in downtown Kihei. We were living it up.

In the afternoon, we met up with another underwater photographer, David Fleetham. He took us out to one of the state beaches where we kayaked out to a dive site and dove directly off the kayak. Because he only had two kayaks, he and Eric went and dove together while I lay on the beach and absorbed ultraviolet rays. Because of my chronic lack of sleep, any time I lay motionless, I start to slip into the world of the unconscious.

Long story short, I fell asleep medium-rare and woke up well-done.

But the story doesn't end there.

After Eric and Dave returned from their excursion, Dave and I swapped equipment and I jumped in the kayak and followed Eric back out to their previous dive site. Along the way, we passed by several fisherman, some large sea turtles, and a nude beach with a bunch of nude men (I now understood why Dave and Eric took so long to return). We arrived at the dive site and Eric and I strapped on our gear, a task made much more difficult when you're seated in a kayak that can capsize the second it feels like it. After sucessfully gearing up, we dove for about an hour. And, for the first time in my short diving career (35 dives or so), I was able to spot some scorpion fish. Two scorpion fish, in fact. Running low on air, we returned to the surface. It was nearing dusk and the sun was making preparations for its trip around the other side of the world.

If you thought gearing up in a kayak was difficult, it's even harder gearing down. Gearing up is easy because you basically throw everything in the water, jump in, and strap it on. Gearing down is not easy because after removing your gear, not only do you have to get in your kayak, but after doing so, you must haul your equipment in as well, all without capsizing.

Tiger sharks love to eat sea turtles. We should have known that with so many sea turtles around, there were bound to be some predators lurking about. With the upper half of my body leaning way out on one side of the kayak and my two legs sticking out the other acting as counterweights, I managed to finally lug Dave's tank and BCD into the kayak and proceeded to strap them in. Attempting to secure Dave's equipment, I let some air out of his BCD to allow the straps to get all the way around, an obviously stupid move in retrospect.

And that's when it struck.

It had picked the perfect moment, seeming to know when I was at my weakest. I was off-balance as I was strapping the gear in, after having just let air out of Dave's BCD. I looked up at Eric to see how he was faring with his equipment and noticed his attention eerily directed at something in the water. Judging by the diameter of his pupils, it must have been something very large.

The shark caught the front of my kayak with its snout and hit with such force that I flew straight into the air and landed almost twenty feet from my original position. As I splashed down, I saw Dave's BCD, tank and two dive computers included, land lifelessly into the water and disappear below the surface, slowly making its way down to the bottom of the ocean. My kayak had been overturned.

Aware that there was a big fish with sharp teeth over three times my height hunting under the onus of hunger in the waters around me, I frantically began to swim toward the kayak, scenes from the movie "Jaws" fast-forwarding through my mind like a DVD on ritalin.

And that's when it struck again. I watched in horror as a monstrous, silvery-gray shape emerged from the water and with deathly precision, opened its mouth and in a flash, disappeared, taking the back end of my kayak with it. With the oar lying across its midpoint, it must have resembled a sea turtle, confusing the tiger shark.

Eric and I managed to make it to the nude beach without incident, although our adrenal glands had pretty much run out of adrenaline at this point.

And that's what really happened. That's how I lost over $1,500 of Dave Fleetham's diving equipment.

Downtrodden and humbled by the experience, we headed back to Haliimaile. Some vacation this was turning out to be.

Here are some photographs from today I had taken with my CoolPix and Eric's D30.

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