The Polynesian adventure

SHOW ME THE DRAGONS

Big Island Divers

They look like dragons, I suppose. Dragons created for a Mardi Gras parade. Although they have the requisite mouth full of flesh-ripping teeth, they’d get laughed out of Camelot by even the foppiest of knights. The ladies in waiting, though, might like to have them around as a curiosity. If they could only be found.

That’s the problem with dragons, both imagined and real: They’re pretty hard to find. They like to hide out in dark lairs and don’t care too much for the spotlight. So like most intelligent people, when we divers want to see dragons (of the dragon-moray-eel variety), we hire experts.

We’re moored at a site called Pine Trees, our first Kona dive. Word has rippled from divemaster to divemaster that there’s a dragon moray holed up here. During the brief, we’re all shown photos of the mythical beast. One of the divers comments, “With colors like that they should be pretty easy to spot. Just look for a splotchy, multicolored, slithering crayon with teeth.”

If we find the dragon moray eel on this dive, we won’t have a long queue for a look at this rare creature. PADI 5-star Big Island Divers’ custom dive boats carry a maximum of eight divers, keeping the dives intimate and the sites mercifully uncrowded. We’re all a curious lot, though, and dive sites off Kona aren’t one-trick ponies. I’m sure there’ll be other distractions.

We would-be blue-water dragon-slayers giant-stride into the magic kingdom. While the divemaster trolls for the prime suspect, I fin around the site, instantly distracted by another dragon: a dragon wrasse. This bouncy, jittery, green-and-white nonstop juvenile of the rockmover wrasse flits over the seafloor like a leaf being tossed in a tempest. I follow the bob-and-weave movements for a while until another movement catches my eye: a whitespotted moray poking its head from a hole in a mound of star coral.

Just then, the divemaster gives us a “heads up” ting on his tank. I fin back to the boat and, right there, almost straight down from the swim step, is the shy eel. Its tooth-filled jaws give it a fierce aspect despite the gaudy appearance, and it’s surprisingly small, especially since we’ve all imagined a much bigger (fire-breathing?) beast. The sight of it mesmerizes us nonetheless; we know we’ll all be bragging about this moment, reading our logbooks aloud to envious divers back home.

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