Saturday, Mar. 22, 2008

MONK SEAL SIGHTING!

Thursday I had Honu duty in the morning. When I arrived there were hardly any people on the beach and there were no turtles. That's a first for me. There has always been at least one turtle when I arrived. So I set up the signs and got everything ready for the day. After a while the other volunteer arrived and said, "isn't is great, there's a monk seal over there". Sure enough, way past the rocks on the sandy section of the beach, there was a seal basking in the overcast sun. Authorities had already been alerted because the area was roped off with red tape.

It pretty much just laid there, like a rock, and after the first look, was pretty boring. That very day I had decided that I didn't need my long lens because the short lens was adequate for shooting turtles. So of course, that's the day the monk seal shows up! Finally, after a couple of hours, I could see that it was moving around, so I grabbed my camera and ran over and got a few images with it moving a little.

Last week when I was on honu duty, there were 8 honu on the beach at once. This image shows a cluster of 4 of them. That's the most I've ever seen at once on the beach.

When I left the beach for home, I stopped in Haleiwa for a shave ice. When I parked, I saw this woodie car and just had to get a shot of it. It was a big hit, everyone stopped to look and admire it.

That same afternoon I was supposed to meet Leah at her place and we were going together to have dinner with one of the church families. As I've mentioned before, traffic is just plain nasty during rush hour. I was slightly ahead of the heavy rush hour, but traffic was pretty slow nonetheless. I saw this rainbow and for once I had my camera handy, so I was able to get a few images of it.

Then, as I was sitting in traffic, I decided to experiment to show the busy road. One section of the H1 is 6 lanes wide each way, and at this point, all 12 lanes were full of slow moving traffic. Yikes!

The next day, Friday, I decided to finally take that ride up along the leeward coast. That's the dryer side of the island, so it isn't as lush and pretty as the rest of Oahu. The road runs parallel to the ocean, so you can see the beaches most of the way. Besides being not as pretty, this is the area where so many homeless people live. There were actually areas where there were small communes of homeless--tent cities.

As an aside, one day I was at Ala Moana Beach in Honolulu and I had just come out of the rest room. There was a homeless woman a few feet away. She appeared to have all her earthly goods piled into a shopping cart--all, that is, except for the clothes on her back and her cell phone, which she was very busy having a conversation on. I don't know, but does that seem strange to anyone else besides me????

Anyway, the next two images are on the Mauka (mountain) side of the road. Very beautiful

One nice thing about the leeward side is that if you want to spend the day on an isolated, or almost isolated beach, that's the place to go. I didn't see any surfers during my ride because the waves are practically non-existant here, at least in the winter.

So I followed this road to the end, which meets with the beginning of the walking trail heading out to Kaena point. According to the guide books, the hike is a little shorter than the one I took from the other side, but I wasn't going to try it. I'll take the word of the author on that.

Aloha