Skip to main content

Pontooning

Another thing everyone should do while they are in Hawaii:

Rent a pontoon boat and head out to the sandbar in Kaneohe Bay.


The view is just incredible.

Of course, it will rain on you for five or ten minutes. It pretty much does this every day, no matter where you are on the island.

Bring an umbrella.

And don't complain. You're in Hawaii.

But then it clears up quickly and the glorious skies are visible once again.


We had twenty-eight people in our group. The kids all had a blast playing on floats and running around on the sandbar.


Katie swam around with a life jacket that was entirely too big for her.


You have to check the tide charts before you reserve a boat. The sandbar is only exposed when the tide is really low. Some days it is the size of a football field, some days it is a little smaller. If you don't read the charts, you will arrive to find there is no sandbar at all.



This is Coconut Island, although you may know it as "Gilligan's Island". Remember in the opening credits of Gilligan's Island when they showed the USS Minnow beached in a little cove? This is where that scene was filmed. Now it's part of a military base and there's a big, ugly building there. But it's still pretty cool. I saw every episode of Gilligan's Island ever made when I was a kid.

I'll bet my children don't even know who Gilligan was.

Maybe I'll do a unit study on it with them and call it retro-homeschooling day.

It's pretty cool how parts of the sandbar are covered in water that is only ankle deep. It looks like you are just walking out into the ocean.


The teens played ultimate frisbee for quite a while. How many people do you know who can say they played frisbee on a sandbar out in the ocean? I mean, well, I know a lot of people who can say that, but do you?


This is the sandbar!


This is the life!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mammogram

I'm having my annual mammogram today. I always hear about how painful they are, but honestly, I've never thought they are that bad. Not the most comfortable, but not painful either. Every time I have a mammogram, I'm reminded of this story. It won the Erma Bombeck Writing Competition and I still get a kick out of it every time I read it. So I'm posting it here today for your reading pleasure: Erma Bombeck Writing Competition 1st place in Humor Category Winner Leigh Anne Jasheway of Eugene, Oregon "The First Time's Always the Worst" The first mammogram is the worst. Especially when the machine catches on fire. That's what happened to me. The technician, Gail, positioned me exactly as she wanted me (think a really complicated game of Twister - right hand on the blue, left shoulder on the yellow, right breast as far away as humanly possible from the rest of your body). Then she clamped the machine down so tight, I think my breast actually turned inside o...

Ben's Feet

Ben went camping with his youth group this weekend. He said it was the best weekend he's had since we've been in Hawaii, and possibly in his entire life. The one negative part was that he stepped on some coral out in the water and cut his feet up pretty good. He swears it was all dead coral - you shouldn't touch live coral, much less walk on it because it damages the coral. No one ever mentions that it also damages your feet. They just tell you not to damage the coral. Also, coral is a living organism . If you step on live coral and a tiny piece breaks off in the cut, it will continue to grow. Did you see the movie Alien ? If some creature incubates in Ben's feet, then breaks out and eats us all one night, I'm going to be quite miffed. (Make sure you read the inscription on his tee shirt in this picture. It's quite appropriate.)

Luau, Luau

This week we attended our first luau! We went to the luau at the Hale Koa hotel. The grounds were just incredible. There were men playing soft Hawaiian music, the plants and flowers were glorious. There were people in native costumes making headbands out of palm fronds, chopping up fresh coconut for us to taste, handing out flowers for us to put behind our ears and handing out seashell leis to each guest. It was very relaxed and peaceful. This was a Samoan man who kept us entertained during the cocktail hour. He was very funny! Check out those tattoos. He said the tattoos were part of a rite of passage that he had to go through. He said it took fourteen days to complete the tattoo and, yes, it hurt. And yes, everything was tattooed. He demonstrated how to climb a coconut tree using only a bandanna around his feet. They picked people out of the audience and gave them a quick hula lesson. Katie was thrilled to be one of the people chosen and of course it irritated Ben because he thi...