I should have known it was going to be one of those days
It was a bad omen when I went out to load the rental van this morning as we got ready to start the day. I inadvertently walked into the hatch back lift gate and banged my head on a sharp corner and it knocked me senseless. I staggered, dropped what was in my hands, and I hit the sidewalk.
It started bleeding pretty bad. I felt my head and there was a rather ugly gash and my hands were bloody. Not a good start for the day. I was going to put a picture of the wound on this blog, but good taste and decency overruled so I will leave it to your imagination.
We press on into the Pacific
We hatched an idea (mostly my idea) to rent a boat to tour the coast of the Big Island. We wanted to do something special and the other options seemed kinda lame. Plus we had two little kids that would not enjoy something like a luau.
So I arranged to charter a boat that we could use on our own for a half day trip up and down the coast. We could snorkel, swim, sight see, look for dolphins and whales, and fish if we wanted to.
We decided our destination would be the Captain Cook monument in a bay, down the coast a ways, then work our way back to the dock. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
The guy at the rental place looked at my bloody head and was concerned. When I explained what happened, he said "you should get that looked at. If you want to cancel the trip I understand, that looks bad." But I said no, I'm fine, it's merely a flesh wound.
A Boat Ride turns disastrous
Only, well ... things turned out a lot different than we thought. The boat rental was decent enough, but the weather after all these storms was still a little rough. It was more windy than we thought and there were some pretty good ocean swells. And our boat was not the biggest in the world.
We set out full of excitement, and sailed out of the harbor into the ocean. Immediately we began to bob up and down rather violently with the choppy ocean. There were a lot of white caps.
We pressed on, but soon realized it was going to be like this all the way down to our destination. The wind in our face made for slow going, and the waves were splashing into the boat getting us all pretty wet. Fortunately it was a hot day.
Fiona is not fond of this kind of recreation. She would rather not risk being out in the ocean with choppy waves and difficult conditions. I heard her mutter "I knew it was going to be like this ..." The kids were not terribly fond of it either, nor was Beka.
I tried to put a game face on it (I was the skipper after all) and said things like "isn't this great! Look at that view! What an adventure!"
It soon became apparent that we would not make it to our destination in any kind of time to enjoy it and make the return trip. It was too slow going and there was too much big water.
Jake was helping me navigate and we decided to pull into an "inlet" and just moor up to a buoy and have lunch and swim and snorkel.
The only problem was that the GPS that the rental guys provided was very unreliable and stopped working at the worst possible time. It was very hard to figure out where we were. And the inlet was full of turbulent waves crashing onto the rocks.
Unbelievably, we were actually able to locate the buoy. It was not easy because it was submerged, which they instructed us was the case. "All you have to do is dive down and hook up a rope to it!", they said.
Yeah right. We spent a bunch of time trying to locate the thing and once we did, the waves and current moved us immediately and we couldn't get to it. The GPS coordinates were fairly accurate, but the GPS device didn't work right. We had to "re-find" the buoy over and over again. The batteries went dead in the GPS and we had to replace them right in the middle of crunch time.
After a spell of this nonsense, everyone in the boat was getting less enthusiastic about the whole idea. So Jake said, "I'll just jump in and find it!" But this turned out to be a lot harder than it sounds.
He swam around but was fighting intense currents and waves and big water. I was trying to pilot the boat under very difficult circumstances. Beka was trying to shout out the GPS coordinates.
Fiona was trying to hold onto both the kids which was very challenging. She also began to shout - "We're getting too close to the rocks!" Beka kept shouting out numbers and Jake kept trying to swim around but was getting exhausted and the rope were were going to tie to the buoy was getting wrapped up in the motor.
This whole thing was going badly. Beka started to have a panic attack, fearing her husband was going to chopped to bits by the propeller. I'm not making this up, because Beka actually said "I'm having a panic attack!"
We were oh so close to lashing the boat to the buoy but Jake was losing steam and Beka was losing her mind and Fiona was losing patience and getting really pissed off and just wanted to bail out of the whole thing (pardon the pun, we were taking on water). Yoppie was getting sick. On a happy note, Gabby thought Jake was trying to find her a turtle ...
I kept trying to rally the troops but they wouldn't have it. Jake was so exhausted he could hardly get back in the boat. We had to call off the effort. What was the use anyway? The water was so violent that we would not have enjoyed it there. Snorkeling? No way!
We were able to haul Jake back in the boat after his heroic efforts of the last twenty minutes and he began uncontrollably vomiting violently over the side.
We were still without GPS but we could certainly see where the shore was and it was close and the waves were crashing big time on the rocks. Time to get out of there!
Only there wasn't anywhere to "take a break". We still had to figure out something; the ocean is unrelenting. I was able to pilot the boat out into the open sea, which was still pretty darn choppy.
We were bobbing up and down like a cork in a washing machine.
We tried to gobble down some lunch but everybody was sick and exhausted - and sunburned. I again tried to suggest another alternative, but by this time we had been out there for three hours and everybody just wanted to go home. Thoughts of peacefully paddling around with the little fishies and snorkeling were long gone.
We were relieved to still be alive and we headed back to the harbor, while was still a long way off. By the time we got back everyone had recovered their will to live.
When we returned the boat, the guy asked how things went.
"Great!" I said. "Unforgettable!"
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