I now had their address. I moved on. As I rounded the lagoon of the Hawaiian Hilton Village, I was stopped by the sight of a sea bird diving for fish just feet offshore, near the breakwater. The big bird would fly in a wide circle around the area inside the reef, then tuck its wings and drop like a sleek torpedo head first into the water. A second later, the bird would pop up, swallow its fish meal, then take off and do it again.
Brown boobies love to sit on navigation buoys.
I often see them from my kayak sitting like sentinels on the big red and green seaward markers of the Ala Wai channel. And just yesterday, a friend told me that several of these birds were balancing on the buoy off the Haleiwa Boat Harbor. It was hard to leave this bird during its fishing frenzy, but I had places to go. I stayed as long as I dared, then continued down the beach. When I reached my destination at Kuhio Beach, I found Rob Miller, the lifeguard I was meeting, showing a captured box jellyfish to a crowd of beach-goers.