Monday morning we slept in a little and recovered from our huge day yesterday at Volcanos National Park. We knew that we had scheduled an evening swim with manta rays tonight, so the goal for the day was to snorkel closer to our home base and enjoy the Kona area. After breakfast and packing up our beach bag and cooler, we headed back to what we thought was Two-Step beach but when we got there, it was closed! It seemed really odd that it would be closed so we did some research online and quickly realized that we had not actually been snorkeling at Two-Step! That beach was about 15 more minutes down the road! We excitedly kept going and couldn’t wait to try a new spot!
The side road and small parking lot for Two-Step is tiny, so we used our newly-purchased America the Beautiful pass to park next door at the Puuhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park! We grabbed all of our things from the trunk and walked to the lava beach. There is very little sand at Two-Step. It is mostly made up of smooth lava rock and people find little flat areas to put their towels and stuff while they’re snorkeling. We chose a spot and immediately got suited up for our first snorkel adventure.
The reason why Honaunau Bay is nicknamed Two-Step is because there are literally two steps in the lava rock where people enter and exit the water. These steps are more like benches — they’re large enough that two to three people can sit side-by-side. We were able to walk right up, put our masks on, and sit down onto the bench and enter the water. We had our wetsuit jackets on because the water was about 75 degrees, which is cold-ish for us!
The snorkeling was amazing! And immediately so much better than our first day. The water was a little choppy still, but the visibility was crystal clear and there were tons of fish. Up close to the shore are shallow coral areas, perfect for watching fish. We saw many schools of fish here, and some healthy coral in around 10-15 feet of water. On the south side of the bay were some small canyons created by ancient lava flows running into the bay. We had the most fun snorkeling here because of the deep drop offs.
After two rounds of snorkeling and some snacks, we headed back to the condo for a break and some dinner before we needed to head out for the manta ray excursion. We stopped along the way for some Hawaiian shaved ice — which was yummy but not fantastic. I kind of like the snow cones in NC better! Back at the condo, we thought we’d have a couple of hours or so but in reality we didn’t have much time. Just enough to change and eat! We headed south again and to the marina for our 7pm night snorkel. It turned out that we got there fairly early and had time to walk to the water and see the sunset before getting outfitted with our gear.
The group was only about 10 people and the boat also wasn’t very big. It was more of an inflated raft-boat type of vehicle. The water was incredibly choppy and we bounced our way only about 10 mins offshore before we needed to jump in. One by one we jumped in and swam out to the surf board that they had for us to hang onto. By the time Owen and I were selected to go out, there were really few spots open. I took one of the last ones on the side and Owen was kind of holding onto the back.
Pretty immediately we had a large manta ray swim right up from the depths and come within inches of our faces. It was surreal! They were massive and that type of ‘swim by’ happened a couple of other times while we hung onto the roped surfboard. But…. we noticed that they tended to swim more frequently to the boats and swimmers nearby that had blue lights on their boards (ours was white.) We often had to hand onto our board with one hand so that we could turn around and look behind us at the rays swimming with the other boats. Unfortunately, this kind of tainted our experience because it felt like we weren’t getting the full experience compared to other swimmers that night. Still, looking back it was truly amazing when you think about having a huge, wild animal swim up to you like that!