Just after watching the sea turtle swim by for a few minutes Beth and I poked our heads above water to see a cave which had been carved out of the jagged lava rock cliffs right in front of us. Beth had visited this cave before with our friend Trisha, but did not remember that it was this close to the beach. I will admit that I am a little less brave and a lot more cautious than Beth, especially because we are among the 45 million Americans currently without health insurance (go, go, President Obama) but since the water was so calm today I felt perfectly safe swimming towards shore to check it out.
The shape of the cove leading into the cave is such that on a rough day the combination of the waves and rocks hiding just below the surface could be likened to swimming into a blender on the “pulverize” setting, but today, it was set to a nice gentle “stir.” Beth was quite pleased that I would get to experience the cave too, as she thought that it was much further from the beach, and figured that I would never risk swimming into an area that I would typically compare to a kitchen appliance with a rotating blade.
As far as caves go, it is pretty small, but it had a floor covered with nice rounded pebbles that were comfortable to sit on to take a break for a few minutes to catch our breath in preparation for heading back into the open water. It was neat to look at the ocean from within the cliff, a perspective I had never seen before, and might not see again for quite some time.
After ten or fifteen minutes in the cave we decided to continue our reef exploration adventure. Just was we were leaving the rocky cove, a set of waves came in, and the blender decided to speed up from “stir” to “whip,” not a huge deal, but it was just enough to freak us out a little and bang up our knees and skin our elbows on the way out. We had already done and seen quite a lot for what was supposed to be a lazy Sunday morning, but our adventure was not to end there!