Tag Archives: Kona

Fishermen Catch My Attention

by Woody

As the sun went down and the tide came up, a lone fisherman stood atop the tallest lava rock where earlier in the day there had been an exposed tidal pool.

Now the waves washed over his ankles, salty mist splashed his face, and even from behind you just knew he was smiling. Watching this scene from a third-floor beachside balcony overlooking Lyman’s Bay in Kona on The Big Island of Hawai’i gave me a smile as well.

After a while, I noticed that his long fishing rod was like a giant metronome moving in a 1-to-4 rhythm with the sea – a new cast going out with every fourth wave that washed in.

At Pu’uhonua o Honaunau and Royal Grounds National Historic Park in South Kona … before seeing the lone fisherman in the bay.

Watching someone else fish is sometimes as much fun as fishing and so for half an hour I spectated, but nary a fish did the fisherman reel in. I imagine he did not care; that catching wasn’t the main point anyway; that just being out there in the fresh sea air was medicine for his soul.

And then something happened that was even better medicine…

…a fisherboy, about age eight or so, came and joined the fisherman on the lava rock, ankle-deep in waves, side-by-side in smiles, casting out with his own pole. It was a Norman Rockwell painting brought to life.

The next day, while visiting the Pu’uhonua o Honaunau and Royal Grounds National Historic Park in South Kona, another angler caught my attention.

The most impressive artifact on the 180-acre grounds, once believed to possess spiritual powers, is “The Great Wall” built more than 400 years ago. Measuring 12 feet high and nearly two feet thick, its workmanship is remarkable. Even without mortar, the lava stones remain perfectly in place with the wall sides rising flat and true and its top edges as square as a brownie pan.

Running 950 feet long in an L shape, The Great Wall divides the Pu’uhonua – meaning “Place of Refuge” – from the rest of the grounds. Lawbreakers, even ones sentenced to death, who managed to flee by foot or swim along the coast to the Place of Refuge would be absolved of their crimes by a priest. Most fugitives did not make it, however, for the distances could be great, the currents strong, the waves angry as they crashed on a beach made treacherous with lava stones sharp as razors.

It was in these waters, on the north edge of the Royal Grounds, that The Great Wall was overshadowed by a small fishing skiff. With a single motor at the stern and a weathered one-person cabin at the bow, it bounced up and down on rough water while chugging towards the shelter of the bay.

I find watching someone performing excellence in most anything to be a thrill, and this lone fisherman thrilled me now. Reaching the shallows near shore, he hopped out into waist-deep water, waded up a cement loading ramp, and jogged away.

In a flash, he was back – backing a pickup truck and boat trailer down the long, narrow ramp with surprising speed. Indeed, with little margin for error and without pause, he guided the trailer into the water and halfway under the skiff. It was poetry in motion. Like watching someone parallel park into a space that seems much too tight.

Wading waist deep again, the solitaire fisherman pushed the skiff fully onto the trailer and secured it before climbing into his truck and driving off. In all, arrival to departure, perhaps six minutes passed.

I don’t know if the fish were biting, but I’m guessing he caught the limit.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

A Waterfall Seen, A Fall Averted

by Woody

“When in Rome…” when one is in Hawai’i means attending a luau.

The hour drive north from Kona along the coast was spectacular and the traditional feast at the famous Mauna Kea Beach Hotel did not disappoint either.

A whole pig – slow-roasted for most of the day after being stuffed with steaming lava stones, then wrapped in wet banana leaves and buried over koa wood embers in a sandpit – took center stage on a buffet table fit for a king.

After dinner, on a raised outdoor stage, a history lesson of the island’s royalty was performed. This included reenacted battles and courtships, warriors blowing thunderous notes on conch shells, and hula dancers turning their hips into rhythmic earthquakes. It was a Broadway Show under the stars.

A luau sunset at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel.

And yet the highlight of the evening was neither music nor dance, food nor mai tai, but rather the ocean backdrop as the sun melted into the horizon with the lava beach so near one could hear the crashing waves.

Describing the sea’s deep shades of blue and bluer, and the warm oranges and golds of the finger-painted kaleidoscope-colored sky with scattered clouds slowly turning to streaks of flame, is like trying to describe Monet’s “San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk.” Words fail greatly.

The sunset was all the more personally special because this hotel, these grounds, this paradisial ocean view was perhaps my mom’s favorite place on earth. She vacationed here many, many times, including not long before she died 30 years ago. It is hard to believe today, April 29, would have been her 90th birthday.

As you can imagine, as I gazed at the sundown scene the salty ocean mist was not the only thing moistening my cheeks.Akaka Falls

“When in Rome…” also meant visiting Akaka Falls State Park near Hilo. At 442 feet Akaka Falls falls far shy of Yosemite Falls’ 2,425 feet, and yet its breathtaking-ness measures up fully for it is tucked inside a lush rainforest filled with wild orchids, draping ferns, towering bamboo, all with a soundtrack featuring a symphony of songbirds.

The short hike to the lookout point view of the Falls is undemanding with a paved path and stairs, and yet this site provided a challenge for some – and provided an additional memorable sight for me. Two men were struggling to carry a wheelchair with a pre-teen boy in it down a section of steps when a stranger heading the opposite way, having seen the Falls already, reversed course and paused to help them…

…and then patiently waited to assist them on their return trip up the path.

That kindness on the Akaka Falls stairs brought me full circle to the luau. Leaving the grounds, an elderly gentleman was ascending a long outdoor cement stairway and path when a woman behind him touched his shoulder to tell him his shoe was untied. It was a trip, fall and broken bone waiting to happen.

The man waved her away, not rudely but not politely either, and proceeded on. Her worry rising with each of his next few steps, the lady Samaritan pardoned him again and offered to retie his shoe for him. This time he smiled and accepted her help.

I smiled, too, for this woman’s kindness reminded me of my mom who did a similar thing once at the Mauna Kea. Sharing a dinner table with a very elderly couple, and seeing the husband stranger struggle with his knife, my mom cut his steak into bite sizes as nonchalantly as a mother helpfully retying a young child’s undone shoelace.

To be continued…

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

Ocean Rescue Rescues Memories

by Woody

A big-wave warning was issued at Magic Sands Beach, as previously mentioned here about my recent trip to The Big Island of Hawai’i, and a strong rip current carried a swimmer further and further from shore.

The lifeguard on duty, sitting in a towering chair, called out with a bullhorn for the man to come back in. Either the command was ignored, or the swimmer was unable to heed it, and he was pulled deeper out to sea.

Before tense seconds could add up to a New York minute, the lifeguard – imagine David Hasselhoff in the old TV show “Baywatch” and you have an accurate portrait – flew down from his perch, ran and dove into the surf, and swam like he was challenging for an Olympic gold medal.

David Hasselhoff as Mitch Buchannon in “Baywatch.”

“Baywatch” originally aired from 1989 to 1999, but my mind raced all the way back to “Quarrywatch” in the 1940s starring my dad as the fictional Mitch Buchannon in red swim trunks.

During summers in high school through medical school, Pop was a lifeguard at Muzzy’s Lake, a flooded rock quarry in Urbana, Ohio. He started out earning fifty cents an hour.

“That beat the heck out the twenty-five cents an hour I made at my first summer job when I was fourteen, pumping gas at Blue Synoco,” Pop, now 95, recalls vividly. “Gas was sixteen cents a gallon – I remember that because most customers bought a dollar’s worth which was six-plus gallons.”

At Muzzy’s he eventually worked up to one dollar an hour and notes: “That was good money!”

He earned it. One single summer, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Pop made 46 saves. Understand, Muzzy’s attracted upwards of a thousand people a day on weekends. Combine those crowds with a gently sloping bottom that in one blind step dropped off suddenly from friendly chest-deep water to 30-plus feet and you had the deadly ingredients for drowning.

Once, far outside the buoys marking off the swimming area, a car rolled off a towering bluff at the far end of the quarry and plummeted into deep, deep water. As it sank, Pop – an intercollegiate swimmer – raced freestyle to the crash site and dived down to the ear-popping cold depths in hopes of rescuing anyone trapped inside. It took three lung-burning tries before he finally located the car.

Thankfully, it was empty.

When a tow truck arrived at the scene, Pop dove down, down, down a fourth time to attach a chain so the car could be pulled out. It was a “Baywatch”-like episode in real life. Indeed, in photographs during his final years lifeguarding at Muzzy’s Pop seems chiseled from quarried stone at 6-foot-3 and 205 pounds and comes into black-and-white focus like Mitch Buchannon with a crew cut instead of longish curls.

In more than half a dozen summers in the tower chair, Pop – and his best friend and co-lifeguard, Dunny – had only one death occur during their Quarry Watch. A young boy, with a congenital heart problem it turned out, quietly sunk down underwater. There was no splashing, no struggle, no telltale sign of trouble for a lifeguard to see.

Meanwhile, the boy’s parents were not keeping a watchful eye and eventually sounded the alarm too late. Their son tragically drowned in less than three-feet of water that he could stand up in.

Happily, the Magic Sands Beach lifeguard towed the struggling swimmer to shore with the aid of a small torpedo-shaped buoy.

Isn’t it funny that traveling on vacation not only creates new memories, it can also rekindle old ones.

To be continued…

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

A Small Pleasure on The Big Island

by Woody

Third try was the charm indeed.

Early in the pandemic, seemingly a decade ago, my wife and I had a long-planned trip to Hawai’i – my first ever – cancelled. A year later, after arrangements were again all made, a tsunami-sized COVID-19 surge forced a second postponement.

At long last, we recently made it to The Big Island, to Kona, to Lyman’s Bay where we stayed in a lovely one-bedroom retreat with a postcard view of the ocean brought to life.

We filled the week with sightseeing and snorkeling, with a day hike to Akaka Falls and an evening luau under a sky as pink as the inside of a conk shell, yet one of the biggest highlights was our tiny third-floor balcony. It was here where we started each morning by watching surfers carve their moves into the waves like hands writing script in invisible ink on the water’s surface. Evening happy hours were spent similarly.

A song lyric from The Beach Boys – “Catch a wave, you’ll be sitting on top of the world” – played in my mental jukebox as the wave dancers lined up, usually no less than two dozen of them, waiting and positioning to catch their next turn on top of the world.

While the surfers in this corner of paradise were nearly all adults – perhaps paddling out before going in late to the office; or diving in in the early evening on the way home after a full workday – they came into focus like school kids at play during recess.

One morning, when there was a “Big Wave Warning” all day for swimmers and snorkelers at nearby Magic Sands Beach just a mile south, the number of surfers in Lyman’s Bay swelled twofold to catch waves that were nearly triple the size of the previous few days’ head-high curls. Even super-sized, the waves broke as if in slow motion, gently almost, left-to-right looking on from the beach, and maintained their form so long they could be ridden for what seemed like a full minute.

Our final evening on our beatific balcony in Kona, the waves were so ginormous, and the Monet-painted sunset so impossibly gorgeous, that in addition to surfers lining up out on the water, runners and walkers and cyclists stopped en masse along the narrow-but-well-trafficked beachside road to gaze. Some cars even pulled over and parked, their occupants joining the entranced crowd.

After the sun melted fully into the horizon, the spectators gradually resumed their runs and strolls and rides. In turn, the brotherhood of surfers likewise grew smaller and smaller as one after another grabbed his or her final ride, happy and tired and probably looking forward to coming out again tomorrow morning, or next evening, or the upcoming weekend.

Eventually, there were only three surfers remaining in the bay, in the water, in the deepening darkness.

“That’s his last one,” my wife or I would say when one of these night riders caught a wave—

—but each time that surfer would paddle back out.

The longer this stubbornness against the dark went on and on, the brighter my already bright mood became until it shone like the rising moon. No matter their ages, I realized, these three men were at heart still boys at play.

It was as if they were shooting baskets in the driveway, or practicing skateboarding tricks in the street, and their mothers had just called them in for dinner on a warm midsummer’s night and they shouted back: “Just five more minutes, pleeeease!”

Or, in this case, “Just one more wave!”

To be continued…

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com