Scaling The Depths

Click on the image below. It shows the magnitude of the deepest known place in the oceans, the Mariana Trench of the South Pacific, to scale. It's amazing to think of how much of our biosphere is below the surface of the oceans. Something like 97% of all habitable volume on the Earth is underwater.

Pretty deep for a Friday, I know.

Air, Water, & Fun

We got an inflatable peanut-shaped pool, filled it up with air and water and the kids did the rest!

Olympic Size

I had a boss once who was from England. Ok, let me preface this by saying I love England. But they do some strange things. Ever try to eat a pork pie? And why is your whole yard called a garden? Bonnet? No, it's a hood.

And I won't even get into the proper pronunciation of aluminum.

So, anyhow. I was invited to my boss' house for a summer pool party. He talked about this pool party for two months. Reminded all of us to bring our swimming suits, towels, and beverages probably a dozen times. He told us nobody in the UK has a pool. Extremely rare. The fact that he had a pool at his rental house just made him feel like royalty in America.

So, the big day finally came. Having grown up in and around pools, I was sort of excited, but perhaps not sure about seeing all my co-workers in Speedos.

As I entered his back yard (sorry, garden), I saw a small kiddie pool there. But where was the POOL pool? I asked him "Where is the grown-up pool?"

"Grown-up pool?" He said with surprise.

OMG. It hit me like a ton of bricks. This WAS his pool.

For two months he had been living under the delusion that he had a real swimming pool! I guess he had never seen an actual example before.

You should have seen us taking turns "swimming" in the pool.

Pipeline

It takes a bull-sized set of cajones to climb on a board and just paddle into one of Banzai Pipeline's world-famous left-breaking curls. That's one heck of a big dose of wave energy right there. And this is a small example. They regularly top 25 feet in height.

Pipeline is known for it's perfectly shaped tubes of water that come in like clockwork, as if made by a machine. It's bottom loaded with three seperate reefs and some very jagged lava spires under the surface though; Pipeline kills more surfers than any other wave.

Pipeline is known for breaking close to shore, just a couple hundred yards out. Consequently it has a wicked rip current, so you'd better know what you're doing. Tourists taking pictures at the shore, knee-deep, get sucked in to their deaths on a regular basis.

This is just one of many well-known surfing beaches on the North Shore of Oahu. Listing them sounds more like a Beach Boys song than a geography lesson: Pipeline, Sunset Beach, Waimea Bay, and Makaha off to the west. Epic wave breaks, all of them.

Once you graduate from Pipeline, you can try mighty Waimea. It starts breaking at 25 feet and if there is a winter storm in the Aleutians, will quickly surge to 50, 60, 70 feet or more.

At that point, cajones are no longer necessary, All you need is a good dose of insanity.

If you haven't seen Riding Giants, you really need to. It will amaze you and scare the bejeezus out of you, all at once.