a wilderness journal: Queen Emma's Bath, Kaua'i

(I am still catching up on blog posts from late 2018 and early 2019…the next couple pertain to a trip to Kaua’i in November 2018.)

Fishes in Queen Emma's Bath.

A few years ago, I went with the family to the Big Island, my first visit to Hawaii in many years. Over the course of a week and a half we circumnavigated the island, snorkeling, hiking, and exploring. Three years later during the same fall season, we decided to do a similar trip to the Garden Island, which like the Big Island in 2015, was a new destination for all of us.

One location on the north shore of Kaua’i that piqued my interest before arriving was Queen Emma’s Bath in the Princeville area. This landmark is a large pool set within black basalt at the end of a short trail on a section of coastline exposed to the north Pacific. The first time visited, we were quickly in the thick of a very muddy trail that descends from the parking area to the shore. I was completely unprepared for this sort of hiking, carrying an unwieldy bag and trying to walk on slippery mud in sandals. Once we made it down the slope of red mud and out onto the ledges of basalt, a gorgeous view of the northern shore of the island opened up with the coastlines of Hanalei and Napali in view to the west.

Large swells were crashing on the rocks and made the pool at least a little unsafe for swimming so we just explored the higher rocks along the shore. Water running off the coastal slope created a sort wetland where sedges and other plants grew where sediment collected in the volcanic rock, black tadpoles rested atop the orange silt, and a few light blue damselflies danced about.

Turtles just offshore of Princeville, Kaua'i.

I returned alone to Queen Emma’s two days later better prepared for the trail with sturdier footware and a backpack. However, it had probably had become even worse by this point. Down at the coast the swells had decreased markedly allowing safer access to the intertidal and snorkeling pools.

At the bottom of the trail I first turned east, away from Queen Emma’s Bath, and explored a large shallow pool that I had to myself for the next hour and a half. A ledge of higher basalt protected the pool from the open ocean where waves still hit, but with much less force than a few days before.

Green sea turtles were hanging out offshore of the pool, at times coming right up next to the edge of the basalt ledge. I counted at least five turtles, in a range of sizes. With my phone in hand to photograph them, suddenly a spotted octopus scampered onto the exposed rocks right in front of me! Perhaps its sudden appearance was due to escaping a predator, or it decided to abandon some hiding place because of the turtles swimming nearby. Since my phone was in hand and ready to go, I had the chance to capture a few photographs during the few seconds this normally shy creature was out in the open.

A surprise visit from an octopus!

Near the mouth of the large pool where it connected with the ocean, there were excellent populations of macroalgae. Tufts of bright green Chaetomorpha with individual cells evident to the naked eye were attached to the exposed rocks, and there were carpets of the red alga Pterocladia with its orderly pinnate branching. Other algae thrived submerged in thes shallow pool including the tropical green seaweeds Caulerpa, Halimeda, and Bryposis. I initially mistook one lightly calcified green seaweed, Neomeris, for a benthic invertebrate. There were several species of fish inhabiting the pool, most skittish.

After my more solitary exploration of the first pool, I walked over to Queen Emma’s bath where there was a rather large crowd of people and many were using the pool not for snorkeling, but to jump off the basalt rocks. I snorkeled briefly in the pool anyway, but it didn’t have the best water quality. I then found two smaller undisturbed pools further to the west in which to snorkel. The second of these two smaller pools had lush cover of Sargassum seaweeds and several species of soft corals/ zooanthids. The pools were just large enough for a snorkeler or two and just deep enough to make a bit of a dive under the surface.

One of my small snorkeling pools.

After briefly snorkeling, I explored the exposed intertidal too in this area. It did not disappoint either. There were helmet urchins, Colobocentrotus atratus, pressed to the more wave swept rocks, and underneath a ledge, a small population of tiny red sea grapes, which turned out to be a small species of Botryocladia, one of my favorite genera of red algae!