Maui Ocean Center and Whale Day Festival

Sophia and Sawyer walked away with lots of candy from the Whale Day parade.

Whales are a big deal here on Maui.  We are right in the heart of Whale season, which brings Maui a lot of its tourists.  The season runs from December till March and during that time the waters just off the shore are full of whales.  If you sit and watch the water for a minute or two, more often than not you will see at least one whale sprouting water or flapping its tail.

Saturday was World Whale Day and they celebrated here in Kihei with a parade and a Whale festival.  The parade turned out to be better than I expected.  They had a good amount of floats mixed in with the usual marching bands, police cars, and other parade entries.  We found a good spot along the parade route that didn’t have many people, so the kids did really well in the candy department!

After the parade they had a whale festival to promote the safe treatment of whales and the environment.  They had lots of crafts, music, food, and games for the kids.

We were planning on continuing our whale themed weekend with a whale watch on Sunday morning, but the threat of rain made us change our plans.  We decided to do one of the few indoor tourist things on the island – the Maui Ocean Center.

The ocean center is really just a fancy way to say aquarium.  It was kind of small, but the quality was really good.  The kids are starting to get old enough where they are interested in learning about these kind of things instead of just looking at the pretty fish.  The highlight of the aquarium was the shark tunnel.  Even though it was crowded, it was cool seeing the different kinds of sharks and sting rays swimming right above your head.