Customer Reviews

Exploring Hanauma Bay (A Kolowalu Book)

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Beautiful full color guide to what you will see while walking around, and swimming in Hanauma Bay. Page after page of quality photographs of the wildlife living within. Suggests several tours for walking, and various snorkeling and scuba abilities. All with appropriate safety cautions sprinkled throughout. If you need to know the differences between a moray and a tang, or even several kinds of tang, this is the book for you. It also serves as a nice momento of a day spent swimming with the fishys!

This guide was extremely helpful in planning several snorkeling trips to Hanauma Bay over the last three years. The ariel views of the bay and the detailed directions for the different levels of abilities were both accurate and informative. I believe this information would prove beneficial to anyone planning on visiting the park, whether they are a swimmer, begginer snorkeler, or advanced scuba diver. Although the park staff stand ready to answer any questions you may have, this book's overview of the bay definitely comes in handy. I especially liked the information on all the wildlife and marine critters that call the bay their home.

I would also suggest getting a hold of two other books to compliment this one: The O`ahu Snorkeler and Shore Divers Guide by Francisco B. DeCarvalho and Hawaii's Fishes by John P. Hoover. Both these books contain information on Hanauma Bay and its inhabitants, as well as covering many of O`ahu's other snorkel and dive sites and would make any diving/snorkeling trip to the bay a success.

This is a great book on Hanauma Bay, and one I often recommend for visitors. It is very different from the other books about Hanauma Bay, in that it is organized as to where you are and what you'll see, as opposed to a grand listing of everything. Are you planning on just walking along the beach? Going out to the deeper water? Wading? These specific ecosystems and habitats have their uniqueness, and this book points them out. Inexpensive, well organized, and with David Schrichte's superb photography (and I mean superb), this book is a great reference to obtain prior to visiting the Bay. Ironically, I also recommend that folks get a copy just for the photos, cutting out what they like for their scrapbooks. Schrichte's photos are much better than you can take with your underwater point-and-shoot camera, and the price is about the same.

This was an excellent book. We went to the Bay to do snorkeling and used this book as a complete and comprehensive reference guide.

Fantastic for anyone interested in the background and issues of Hanauma bay while getting important geology and biology.