The weather drives me. Weekends of clouds keep me low, kayaking the coast, why climb a mountain to be in the clouds? My friend Nate says you just got to go… you never really know what the weather will be like the next day. And it’s true. But this weekend was starting blue sky and the forecast was good. So pauhana work on Friday early and off we went! Through the muskeg was easy, then the route I’d targeted ended in a steep wall. We backtracked and tried a different route. Ended up camping in the woods because we just didn’t [View Full Entry]

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...the final approach. [View Full Entry]

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There are three options for getting to Kalaupapa: 1) fly 2) hike the trail 3) ride a mule down the trail. The hike is... strenuous. 1600 feet. 26 switchbacks. If you do the hike switchback number 18 is reputed to be about halfway. Takes about 1 hour and 15 minutes. Flying in is a bit of an adventure - note the breaking wave at the end of the runway in the last photo, and yes that is the direction into which the planes normally take off. But the views are spectacular and the town and history are amazing. There is a [View Full Entry]

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Flipped the kayak, swam to shore... well, yeah, but that was in July of 1985. Yesterday I walked the same shore and 'relived' the event. The hike was easy enough - six hours, blue sky, blue water, puffy white clouds and Kona winds. The kayak story goes like this... When I lived on Maui in 1985 my friend Mark had a 2 person Nautiraid folding kayak. We'd used it for a year or so to explore the coast of Maui. It had a danforth anchor and we'd kayak out to a stretch of remote coast, drop the anchor 20 or 30 [View Full Entry]

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The north shore of Molokai. Blue sky. Blue water. Green cliffs. Windy, I forgot how windy it is here, how it can wake you in the night, how the coconut palms are always fighting the wind, looking tattered and tired. Occassionally the wind lets up, then the constant background sound is the crashing of north shore waves. [View Full Entry]

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This place is way more developed than I thought it would be. Lots of tourists. Continuous restaurants and hotels on the beach. [View Full Entry]

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I spent two days kayaking around Ko Mak (Koh Maak). Total of about 7 hours in the kayak. Most of the island is flat with sand beach, wooded rocky shoreline or mangrove. The western end is steep cliffs with a few small pocket beaches but this was only an hour or so. Winds were out of the north to west both days and were strong enough to be a consideration when route planning. The south side of the island was flat seas although due to the irregular shape of the island there were some areas where the wind was in my [View Full Entry]

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Squealing pigs flash by... on the back of a Honda! Dang! That's good! Live pigs! Not easy to get them up there I bet. Side by side... How do they do it??? Train them from when they are wee little porkers? Sure, that's it... pig training school....teach them to jump up on the board spanning the back seat, lie down, roll on their backs, extend fore legs and distend rear legs, then you just tie them down... No problem, pigs are smart, the right motivation I suppose they learn fast. Or, you could just feed them a bunch of marijuana the [View Full Entry]

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Angkor, Tikal, Chitzen-Itza, Machu Picchu - every time I am in one of these hewed stone wonderlands I think of all the toil and suffering it must have taken to build them. ‘Life was short, brutal and miserable” comes to mind, a quote from a world systems theory prof at Hopkins. There aught to be a prominent plaque or sign estimating the number of people it took to construct the site, the estimated time it took and a discussion of the living and dying conditions. Folks walk around amazed but I think the pain and suffering that was required to construct [View Full Entry]

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"You just had an adventure and didn't know it." That was Jimmy D. piloting the 'Gyre' against the outgoing tide in the narrow entrance to Secret Bay in southeast Alaska. The fathometer had gone to 6 feet, expected by the captain but not normally a desirable situation in a $250,000 vessel with lives at stake - but a great captain with local knowledge, and the right conditions, doable and realistic. Every day in Laos unsuspecting travelers have this sort of adventure without really appreciating it... white-water rafting in a steel hulled boat 50 feet long, 5 feet wide. Sluicing between e [View Full Entry]

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