The Far Atolls:Twenty-five days in the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument

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The divers dangle fifty feet deep in the blue, hanging on a line attached to a float bobbing on the surface. Beneath them a dozen sharks circle; above, two small boats wait. Topside, ship-to-ship radios squawk with concern about the status of the three men slowly ascending from a deep—very deep—rebreather dive at Kamokuokamohoaliʻi, the treacherous maze of coral shoals otherwise known as Maro Reef.

Galapagos sharks patrol the gloom of Kamokuokamohoaliʻi (Maro Reef) in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, part of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.
Lying some 850 miles northwest of Honolulu, Kamokuokamohoaliʻi is the largest coral reef in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. To avoid the bends, the divers must remain underwater another hour—with the sharks. Hawaiians named this mostly submerged atoll for Kamohoaliʻi, the brother of Pele and the shark deity of Hawaiian religion, possibly because of the unusually large population of sharks found here. “Maro Reef is murky and spooky,” says chief scientist Randy Kosaki, watching attentively from one of the boats, “so we don’t like to dive on it.”


The Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, established ten years ago, is a string of low atolls and reefs stretching 1,200 miles northwest of the main Hawaiian Islands. It’s one of the most important and best protected marine reserves in the world. Above, La Perouse Pinnacle, the last vestige of a sinking volcanic island, in Lalo (French Frigate Shoals).
Nonetheless, Kosaki cannot wait to get into the water, not because he’s overly concerned about his divers dangling like human bait but because he doesn’t want to miss out on the sharks. He dons snorkel gear and slides into the water. He first dives to his colleagues and lightens their load by hauling extraneous gear back to the boat. Then he takes another breath and descends to swim with the sharks. At 53 the Native Hawaiian marine biologist has been collecting fish—both alive and at the end of a spear—since the 1970s. Like his younger sister, freediver and champion spearfisher Kimi Werner, Kosaki has a natural grace in the water. He’s tall and lean, and when he’s wearing the type of long-blade fins favored by freedivers, Kosaki looks like an undulating, ten-foot-long sea serpent. About a dozen Galapagos sharks trail him, but as soon as Kosaki turns to face them, even the boldest retreat into the gloom. “These were rather timid,” Kosaki says. “Yesterday they were much friskier.”

It’s that kind of crew I find myself among, out here in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, hundreds of miles from anyone other than scientific divers, coral reef ecologists and avid spearfishers. The sort of folk who, when someone yells “shark!”, they all jump in the water. But even these self-described fish nerds have their limits. “If I see a white shark, I get out of the water,” says Richard Pyle, one of the deep divers and an ichthyologist at Bishop Museum in Honolulu. “If I see a tiger shark, I get my camera.”