It was a dark and stormy night, and by stormy I mean clear and warm with billions and billions of stars, but the dark part was pretty true, except for this way cool little flashlights we had strapped to our wrists which was the only way we could see (and by "we" and mean me, Will Davies [road manager-guy] and Jeremy Barron [Peter Breinholt's manager-guy {and ex-Hawaii-inhabitant}] as we made our way down to the churning surf which only made our entrance to the cold, unforgiving sea more difficult than it already was because of our flippers, masks, and snorkels (Will had 50lbs of scuba gear on), not that we minded, of course, because we were about to NIGHT SNORKEL which, you might think, doesn't sound that scary at all, other than it being night, hence the DARK in my afore-mentioned "dark and stormy" (and we've already covered the stormy part, right?), but obviously if you think that then you've never handed yourself over to the ocean at night, because it IS freaky, and by freaky, I mean things come out at night that most certainly aren't there in the day like, well, mega-mondo-killer eels that bite your hand and then swell up in the rock; effectively trapping you underwater as long as it feels like it, and lobsters, which, right, not that scary, but maybe if there was one that mutated by a nuclear power plant, then you'd be sorry, and pokey sea-urchin thingies, and last but not least, unbeknownst to me, turtles also swim around at night, which nearly caused me to wet my suit, if such a thing can be done, when I stumbled across a turtle as I rounded a rock and emitted a quaint little scream that left my lungs and traveled through my throat, my mouth, my mouth-piece, and out the little plastic tube that was my only link to the breathable atmosphere I had so haphazardly abandoned when I began this little night-quest, and the turtle, well, he seemed completely in indifferent to my hyper-ventilated screams as my brain sifted through its catalog of known-sea-creatures and their potential lethalness before finally settling on "turtle", a creature which my brain quickly reminded my body was NON-lethal, and my fear turned to wonder because I'd been wanting to see a turtle the whole trip; in fact, I had been holding Jeremy personally responsible for my turtle-witnessing-requirement, a job which I'm sure he was welcome to be relieved of when I saw the slow, gentle, gliding "Honu" grow tired of my pestering light beam and slip gently off into deeper waters where he must have sensed I would not follow.
Yup. It was cool. I liked it.
