Hawaii!

We arrived Sunday Sept 26th to the beautiful island of Oahu. We are staying in a home with some family friends in Kaneohe who were gracious enough to open their house to a couple of starving students :) Dianne and Damon Bell have been wonderful hosts, and have showed us many treasures on this island that we would not have seen had we taken the haole tourist route. They have taken us kayaking out to an island where part of Gilligans Island was filmed! This island is in the bay near their house, we can see it from the door step!


This was the island shown in the distance of the opening credits of the show, and is one of Kaneohe's little gems, locally called Coconut Island.

They also took us kayaking to Kailua beach on another trip, where we got to experience one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. It is consistently rated in the top 10 whenever pretty beaches are rated.




These shots are of Kailua beach, and we paddled out to those two islands in the distance before returning back to the beach to have some lunch.

The wind was blowing fairly hard so when we were paddling out a funny thing happened. Blair and I were in a tandem kayak paddling into the waves and wind towards the twin islands. The the wind blew spray from the bow breaking waves and Blairs' paddle, were enough to get my face wet every few minutes as we pushed out towards the islands. With the wind blowing as it was, (we found out later) that there were many many Jellyfish washing towards shore. As luck would have it, as Blair scooped into the water a Jelly was sitting on the surface. She moved the paddle out of the water to paddle on the other side the Jelly and paddle drops from the blade were airborne. I'd like to brag that we were going too fast, but it was the wind that had gusted just perfectly that blew a load of saltwater and Jellyfish into my face. Next thing I know I have a small Jellyfish stuck across my lips and down my chin. OUCH! I quickly wiped it off and figured out what had happened. Blair was so concerned and apologetic after I told her I had been stung, she even offered to pee on it! (Jokingly of course). As we landed for lunch on the beach we saw many more Jellys being washed ashore and I took a picture of one:

I was a bad engineer and did not put anything in this photo to give a reference of size, but imagine a foxtail-the baseball with the nylon colored tail attached. It was nowhere as big as that, but it is what it felt like when it was strung across my face :) In actuality the bubble head of the Jelly would have fit on a quarter and the tail was maybe two inches long.

More adventures to come!