Superdupermoon

If you are reading this in the US, then you have probably been bombarded with overwrought moon-related informational detritus over the past few days due to the simultaneous occurrence of (1) a total lunar eclipse (“blood moon”); (2) the absurdly-named “supermoon”, meaning that a full moon coincides with the moon’s monthly closest approach to Earth; and (3) a so-called “blue moon”, which — though there are varying definitions — is simply the second full moon in a calendar month.

Individually, these events are not rare and carry pretty much zero scientific significance. But when they all happen at the same time then….. they still carry pretty much zero scientific significance. However, NASA and similar space-related organizations love them because it’s easy to get the news and social media all wound up so that everyone is suddenly interested in astronomy and agrees that those organizations need funding increases.

And when I say “wound up”, I mean “wound up”. My friend Michelle Thaller is a NASA spokesperson and frequent (and very ebullient) astronomy talking head on the Discovery Channel and news programs, and she reports with amazement and exhaustion that she did seventy interviews in the 24 hours leading up to the eclipse. I will have to ask her how that is even physically possible.

Totality began at 3 AM in Hawaii, and skies were clear, so we set the alarm to wake us up in the middle of the night and get this picture:

 

Feel free to insert your own lame werewolf joke here.

It was a spectacular sight, nestled in a crystalline sky where, unlike during non-eclipse times, the disk of the full moon did not wash out the many, many stars. We oohed and aahed in genuine delight.  Our oohs and aahs, however, were perhaps a little on the loud side, as a few moments later our next door neighbor’s window opened and he reminded us with understandable peevishness that did we realize it was 3 AM, fer chrissake? Oops… many apologies. I will have to ply him and his wife with malasadas later as a peace offering.

 

Kayaking at the End of the World

That’s “End of the World” as in that part of the Kona coastline, not the apocalypse sort. And we weren’t the ones doing the kayaking. And…oh never mind, you’ll see in a moment.

We are enjoying a brief visit from our friends Laura and Brian, who live in Honolulu and whom we usually stay with for a few days during our sojourns here. This time they came to us on the Big Island. Laura is one of my oldest friends, dating back a terrifying 46 years or so, a nice Jewish girl from Massachusetts who fulfilled the lifetime dream of all nice Jewish girls by marrying a Hawaiian. (For the record, poi is kosher, Kahlua pig isn’t. Not that she cares either way.)

We took them down to End of the World this morning to be appropriately awed by the  gigantic crashing waves there, only to find a disappointingly calm sea. However, those ocean conditions were a lot better received by a large group of kayakers, college students from Georgia who are here on some kind of Outward Bound-type of program. I know this because I felt obliged to buzz them with the drone, which prompted an unexpected visit from their tour leader: he walked over to us from the top of the cliff overlooking the kayakers to gawk at the drone, explain who they were and — to my surprise and delight — ask if he could purchase my drone photos and video footage for their publicity material. Being a nice guy and an idiot, I gave them to him for free. Here are a couple of the shots.

Having acquired that smidgen of good karma, we moved on to our next destination: Naalehu, at 19.07° latitude the southernmost town in the U.S.  It’s a sleepy little place where every single business establishment correctly if rather repetitively advertises itself as the Southernmost ______ In The United States; you can fill in the blank with restaurant, barber shop, gas station, funeral home, or whatever. Our particular target was the Punalu’u bakery, which is the southernmost et cetera et cetera.  I wrote about Naalehu and Punaluu in this blog post two years ago, so you can read it and brush up on the details. (Clicking the link will open the post in a new browser tab so you won’t lose your place here.) Punalu’s big attraction is their malasadas, a jelly-donut-like confection of Portuguese origin that will transport you to heaven both figuratively (because of the taste) and literally (because of the calories and cholesterol).

Having pushed our LDL numbers into a blissfully unhealthy range, we moved on to South Point, the actual physical southernmost point in the U.S. at latitude 18.91°. It’s a windswept volcanic coast of lava cliffs overlooking crystal cerulean waters where you can see the coral reefs all the way to the bottom. The actual location is signified by a navigation marker, as you can see here.

The “windswept” part gave me pause, since my drone gets unhappy when the winds reach about 20 mph (32 kph) and I was a little nervous about the thing blowing out to sea. But it handled the conditions without much difficulty, affording me the shot of the navigation marker and this view of the coastline.

One of the bizarrely popular activities on those cliffs is cliff diving, a sport in which I have no desire to participate. There are several metal ladders drilled into the lava at the top of the cliffs near where the cars are parked, so that those daredevils who do take the plunge — invariably testosterone-besotted young males — can climb back up in safety rather than, um, die.

You can tell from the photos that outside of the cliffs themselves the terrain is rolling grassland. Indeed, as you navigate the one-and-a-half lane road south from Naalehu for 12 miles to reach South Point, you pass a number of cattle farms that look like they’d be right at home in the higher elevation cattle ranches on the northern part of the island, or for that matter in Wyoming.

The wind is pretty constant, the trade winds rounding the point as they blow from the northeast. And so it is not at all surprising that the region takes advantage of that with a wind farm, dramatically situated on a ridge as though commanding the seas whilst harnessing the breeze.

 It was about an hour trip home from South Point, where we crashed for a few hours before continuing in the sacred tradition of Eating Too Much While On Vacation. Dinner was at Annie’s, a cheery low-key place overlooking the ocean and billing itself as proffering the best hamburgers on the island. Make a note of that if you come here: they make a pretty strong case for the claim.

 

 

Crashing Waves

The Big Island is built out of three active volcanoes (Kilauea, Mauna Loa, and Hualalai), one dormant one (Mauna Kea), and one extinct one (Kohala). The Kona coast lies in the shadow of two of the active ones: Mauna Loa and Hualalai. Most of the Kona district, in fact, sits on the slope of Hualalai, which last erupted 200 years ago and is waiting patiently to play serious havoc with the local real estate market at some time in the indefinite future.

So as you would imagine, lava rock is not exactly a scarce commodity around here; as you’ve seen from my previous photos, most of the coastline is lava rock in various degrees of pulverization. One of the most dramatic illustrations of that feature is a locale called “End of the World”, a line of lava cliffs pummeled by high surf that puts one to mind of what the beaches might look like in Mordor. Here are a couple of photos to give you the idea. (The first is from the drone, directly offshore, and the second is taken from a hillside a few hundred meters down the coast.)

Not your ideal swimming locale, a rather obvious fact that does not prevent the occasional idiot from going mano a mano again Darwin and losing. (Two years ago, just around the time we moved into the house, one of these benighted daredevils jumped into the water from the top of the cliffs and — surprise! — was unable to figure out a way back up.  A helicopter was dispatched but was too late to save him.)

So although I am not even remotely tempted to perform that particular stunt, it is an ideal venue to snag some dramatic aerial footage via drone, so here is a short video of our visit yesterday. (Stick around till the end of it: there was a sightseeing boat about a mile offshore that I was able to catch up to and play peekaboo with.)

We went back again today. The surf was far calmer than yesterday, but we don’t need the drama to have a nice end to the day here: a Hawaiian sunset will do nicely. So here it is:

Fish Poop Beach

… is not the name of my new emo band, though perhaps it should be. It is, rather, the answer to the question that I was puzzling over in my previous post, namely: where do the Big Island’s white sand beaches come from? And the answer is: fish poop. Parrotfish poop, to be specific.

(Photo from Waikiki aquarium, not me)

Yes, really. This guy and his cousins eat coral and excrete prodigious quantities of white sand. You can actually hear them in action when you’re snorkeling: a ubiquitous crunching, crackling sound. (You’ve got to have really good teeth to eat coral.) And you  also frequently see them, um, producing the end product: a granular white stream from their posterior. I have seen that countless times and never made the connection, for which I doubt anyone would blame me.

I was quite inebriated with this outré new knowledge, and so immediately attempted to show off by interrogating our weekend visitor, the daughter of some old friends who is here with her husband and children. “Hey Johanna,” I  crowed, “you know where all this white sand comes from?” Unfortunately in my excitement I had momentarily forgotten the critical fact that Johanna has a PhD in Science and Public Policy relating to….. coral reefs. She looked at me contemptuously and said, “Parrotfish poop. Have you forgotten what I do for a living?” Damn.

Despite my humiliation, we enjoyed an outing to one of the few Parrotfish Poop beaches on the Big Island, a nearby scenic venue variously called White Sand, Magic Sands, and Disappearing Sands. The latter two monikers stem from the historical propensity of this particular beach to  disappear for a while every year or so. Some fluke of the local topography makes it particularly susceptible to being washed away by storm surges. You can see it happening on a very small scale on the seaward side of the surf in this aerial shot, light brown clouds of sand being stirred up and carried away behind the waves.

I of course took the photo with my new drone, whilst flying up and down the coastline surrounding the beach. So I’ll close with this four-minute video of that flight, which though not much of a cinematic achievement will give you a pretty good sense of the environs:

 

 

 

 

“Da Drone, Boss, Da Drone!”

We arrived on the Big Island yesterday afternoon, about 30 hours ago as I type this, and though we are still coping with East Coast-to-Hawaii jet lag — I woke up at 4 AM today — we have nonetheless settled right in to our tropical home away from home. And it feels like that, too, i.e., the home part: this place is real easy to get used to, doubly so since this is our third winter here. Our goal has now become convincing all of our family and friends to move here so we can stay for good.

We have spent the day variously basking on the lanai (known as a patio just about anywhere else) and running various errands, the latter mostly in the form of grocery shopping or buying items that we forgot to bring. Those missing items included hats (I would not recognize Alice without her floppy garden hat) and the wall charger for my camera batteries.

But I did manage to execute a couple of short drone flights so that I can give you a bit of a feel for the environs.  I am still very much learning the fine points of getting good photo and video results from the thing — you know, niceties like steering and camera settings — but nonetheless here is today’s result:

You will notice the ubiquity of lava rock, e.g., the rather uninviting jagged ebon expanse adjacent to the swimming pool at about the one-minute mark in the video. That’s what the whole complex would look like were it not for the intervention of developers. In fact, in significant measure that’s what this whole side of the island would look like.

You’ll note similarly that the shoreline — about 250 meters from our house as the drone flies — is quite rough-looking. It’s that lava again, pretty much up and down the coast. But there are a number of nice beaches, mostly of the black sand variety where the lava has eroded. There’s quite an attractive one just another couple of hundred meters up the coast, just beyond where the video ends. (I started getting some radio interference and so brought the drone home earlier than planned rather than risk losing control.) You can also see that the water is quite clear, with coral reefs visible in the shallows. The snorkeling around here is superb.

About 45 minutes up the coast from here is an enormous, picturesque, and very popular white sand beach called Hapuna. I confess to being puzzled by its geology. Black sand I get; it’s just broken down lava. But where did the white sand come from? Some research is required, but not tonight.

My drone expedition was cut short when the property manager — a cheerful mustachioed man — tootled over in a small vehicle and rather apologetically asked me to knock it off. It’s not forbidden to fly drones in the complex, he allowed, but a couple of the residents were freaking out so would I please stop? So I did. I had in fact canvassed a couple of the neighbors in advance to make sure they were OK with it (they were) but I obviously couldn’t poll everyone and apparently missed the paranoid ones. Jeez, you’d think that they had all received some kind of false alarm on their cell phones about incoming missiles…..

 

Hawaii Sky-O

We return to the Big Island in a couple of days, and will be there and in Honolulu for about a month. Now, reading those words, you may think that our time in Hawaii consists of watching the sunset from our lanai as we sip absurdly sweet drinks with little paper umbrellas in them, or swimming among riotously multicolored fish in an azure tropical lagoon. And you know what? You’re exactly right! HAHAHAHAhahahahahaaheeeeeheeeee…..

Ahem. Sorry. The weather has been miserable in the Washington area for the past few weeks — snow, sleet, and Arctic cold — so I am feeling somewhat uncharitable about the fact that we are able to escape it. Pardon my schadenfreude. I will try and make it up to you with some cool photos. Speaking of which —

I hope that my photo reporting from the islands will have a new flavor this time: an aerial one. In preparation for this trip (and because I succumbed to a spasm of self-indulgence) I have purchased a snazzy drone with which I hope to take a lot of aerial photos and videos. The drone itself, for those of you interested in the details, is a DJi Mavic Pro. You can click the name to see all of its wonderful properties, but two of its most important ones for my purposes are (1) it shoots very high quality, rock-steady 4K video and 12 MP still images; and (2) it weighs only 740 grams (26 ounces) and folds up into a little rectangular brick that fits easily into a backpack. It has a 4-mile (7 km) range and can stay aloft for about 25 minutes.

Here are some shots (4 stills and a video) from its maiden flight, only a few days ago. You can tell at a glance that we are not living in a tropical paradise: this is an area called Kent Narrows, at the upper end of the Chesapeake Bay, where the one-word description of the environs is “icy”.

…And here are three minutes of video from the flight:

Cool, huh?

In the sacred tradition of guys anthropomorphizing their favorite toys, I have christened the drone Deneb, the brightest star in the constellation of Cygnus, the swan. Cygnus flies along the Milky Way during the northern hemisphere summer months, so it’s kind of apt. (Astronomical Fun Fact: Deneb, a.k.a. Alpha Cygni, is also one of the most luminous stars in our galaxy, roughly 100,000 times as luminous as the Sun. If it has planets, you could get a helluva tan.)

My good friend, travel buddy, and “dronemate” Steve, whose own purchase of an identical model filled me with envy and techno-lust and ultimately inspired my own purchase, has in Yoda-like fashion chided me for my attachment to ephemeral physical objects. This from a guy who named his drone “Icarus” and recently installed  a 10-foot-wide 4K video display in his living room that plays a continuous loop of swimming jellyfish.  Steve is my hero but I may have to slap him around a little. (If I can reach him: he’s about 6″ taller than me.)

I seem to be digressing. The point is, we are very excited about our return to Hawaii, so watch this space for some eye-in-the-sky photos and videos over the next several weeks. Aloha!