Kona Mantas

Hawaii, USA
It’s only appropriate that divers, come to see one of nature’s wonders, kneel on the shallow bottom off Keahole Point, neoprene supplicants pointing their dive lights up to attract plankton. The mantas glide in from the darkness — some with wingspans of 16 feet — a phantasmagoric morph of fish and bird, inhaling the plankton in great swooping arcs. They approach mouths agape, often scraping, like downy sandpaper, across the top of your head. On a good night there might be a dozen or more, a languorous melee of looping, banking and inhaling, their mushroom-white undersides pinioned, briefly, in your dive light. Kona’s manta dives are famous and thus often crowded, and it doesn’t matter one whit. — Ken McAlpine 
sportdiver.com/hawaii