We bought this gear when we were in Maui for our twenty-fifth anniversary. It’s special because of the lime green flippers. Every day for two weeks, we had a cup of coffee in the condo then headed for the beach. We were on the towels on the sand until it started to get hot, then we’d go in the water to cool off. Snorkeling the shore reef in front of us was the way we cooled off in the water. It was the Pacific Ocean, so eventually we got colder than we wanted to be and headed back to the sand to warm back up again. I tended to stay in the water longer than Judy each time and it turned out that these green fins were a way she could track where I was and confirm that all was still well. I wanted to spend as much time as I could underwater and as little time as possible on the surface. Out there, with other snorkelers also paddling about, those bright green fins were easy for Judy to spot every time I did a flukes-up dive.
We saved them all this time for whenever we went back to Maui. Well, we went to Maui for our twenty-fifth and again for our thirtieth. Since then, priorities have changed and those were our only two trips to Maui. As comfortable as we are now, and as much as we’re enjoying the traveling we’re doing in the van, we’re probably done with Hawaii trips. There is also a good chance that the rubber might have fatigued a little over these last thirty years. If we were to get them out to use them, we might find that they had aged out a long time ago anyway as they disintegrated in our hands.