Mountain Biking and Dolphins

Monday 3/9/09

What a beautiful day it has been so far. It has been cloudy and rainy for several days now, but last night the almost full moon was off and on visible through the breaking clouds. The rain and wind direction has cleared out of lot of the vog from the volcano so I could see all the was to South Point.

As I was finishing up my morning cup of green tea I saw some fins breaking the surface way out in the bay. I put on my bathing suit, picked up some choice leaves that had fall during the night, grabbed my mask, fins and snorkle and headed out to join them. They were slowly cruising around. One group had three subgroups of two, five, and eights dolphins. There was also another smaller group that was less interested in swimming near me. The third time they came close enough to me one to see them underwater (the visibility is about 40-50 feet) I swam parallel to the group so as not to disturb them. One of the adolescents came over by me so I pulled a leaf out of my shorts and dove down and put the leaf suspended about 10 feet down. The dolphin swam back around and caught the leaf on his flipper. We swam around for a while then he took off to join the others. I was getting pretty cold by then, so headed in toward the beach. On the way in the dolphins came by me one more time, then the took off and headed north along the coast.

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On Sunday I had a fine ride with some of the mountain bikers I met at the Mountain bike clinics put on by Bike Works Kona. Kilua Kona and then drove in light rain to Puu He'ewai, a large cinder cone on the way to Waimea. It was a 2000 foot climb to the top. I didn't have the usual excuse of being the oldest guy, since Fred, a local doctor and one of the origian big island mountain bikers, is a couple of months older than me. Talk about being in great shape and a fine rider, he gives me hope that in a couple of months I'll be charging up those hills. As for now, they were nice enough to wait for me and not make me feel bad about it.




The rain stopped and it cleared out a bit when we got to the top. The views were amazing. I don't think my cell phone pics will do the justice, but here are some photos from the ride.
photo



We had a short break for a power bar, but we were almost 4000 feet high and the wind on our sweat and rain soaked bodies was too cold so we took off down the steep sides of the cindercone. Once again I was the slowest. This time out of caution.


Farther down the cider cone the views were still fine. Lower down we entered into a forest. And as usual Hawaii always has some beautiful flowers growing just about anywere.








A little later we came across a group of horseback riders. That looked like a good way to explore the place, and without having to petal so hard. But of course I do love the excercise.








After we finished the ride and started driving back to Kilua Kona it started to rain hard and gave no indication of letting up, so I went to the movies and saw "Watchmen".

Big Island Blues, NOT

I'm having breakfast at the Coffee Shack looking down at Kealakakua Bay where Captain Cook was slain many years ago. I was pleased to see up on one of their walls they still have a "Petroglif Turtle" sand casting that I made at at Hookena Beach seven years ago.
I've been on the Big Island (Hawaii, the island, not the state) for a little over a week and I feel like I'm settling in. I starting to feel strong from swimming in the ocean a couple of times every day for longer and longer distances and also biking the Hookena access road which is only two miles long, but with almost a thousand feet of climbing.
I'm camping at Hookena on the south Kona Coast. My tent hasn't arrived (long story) so I'm sleeping out under the stars when I can see them and the clouds at the other times.
In the morning I do my yoga type stretching and drink some green tea and hope the dolphins show up, which they haven't except on Sunday when I left the beach early to go to a mountain biking clinic put on by Bike Works Kona bike shop.

The clinic was very good, I learned a lot and had fun doing it. Mountain bikers seem to be a good bunch of people. They held it part of the way up the mountain on a very generous man's property. Then they topped it off by popping open a keg from the Kona Brewing Company and serving us pizza and all sorts of other good food. All with beautiful views and sunshine. The total cost was $10; a lot less that it costs to get a decent lunch around here. I really lucked out.

Seals off Squibnocket Beach

Yesterday afternoon Marianne and I took a walk on Squibnocket Beach. It was cold, gray, and windy, but at least Squibby is somewhat in the lee when it is blowing from the NorthWest.
(a little note: YouTube supports 720p HD video and displays it as long as you put this code in at the end of the link: &fmt=22 or you can click on "watch in high quality" which is located below the video on the right hand side. It is one of those little things that are so easy to overlook. It really does make a lot of difference to see it in "high quality" though it is still not as good as the original footage.)

Happy New Year!

Here we are in another year. It sure is getting off to a cold start here on Martha's Vineyard. It was down in the single digits when the New Year blew in on 50+mph gusts of windblown snow.

Last night we were all set to go out to a couple of New Year's Eve parties. Marianne and I bundled up and took the pot luck goodies she had made out to the car. By then it was about 10 degrees and blowing so hard that there we could see snow drifts in our driveway almost a foot deep. The snow had started out wet and soggy earlier in the day so now there was a lot of ice and snow frozen solidly on the windshield. After scraping away for several minutes and not getting very far we decided that discretion was the better part of valor. So we gave up on the parties and went next door to Jen and Todd's to share some oysters, brie, and champagne. Fell asleep before midnight.

The video above is from our new Flip Video HD. It is a pretty cool gadget. A few months ago Jenny told me about the Flip and I poo pooed it. I figured it was to simple and primitive to be worthwhile. Then when I heard that they came out with a HD version and it had an action mount which you could put on your mountain bike or helmet, I was a lot more interested. Now I am pretty much hooked. It is so easy to carry around in a pocket.

I tried the Flip on my mountain bike using the flip action mount to attach it to my handlebars. The video was pretty shaky when I was on trails, especially since the Flip does not have image stabilization. On the paved roads it wasn't so bad. Where it works best is when it is on a fixed tripod.
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Having looked at how the video looks in this blog (using the preview), I am disappointed. Maybe I should try adding it to YouTube and then putting a link in here to compare how that works. I do know that the video file I uploaded to this blog looked a lot better that it does on the blog. So now I am trying to do the Flip upload to YouTube. It sure seems pretty easy to do. I will say that I have been impressed with how well the Flip makes the technology easy to use.

The clip on YouTube is bigger, but I wouldn't say it was better. The original Flip clip is quite good. Then that get shrunk down by FlipShare for emailing and sending to a website (but it is still pretty good), then when that is sent to the blog or YouTube they shrink it down further and it doesn't look so good anymore. Well, such is life, at least for now.

Now that the new year is here I feel that I had better start doing some serious thinking about what I am going to do this winter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZCLbZFwrAM
this should be regular

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZCLbZFwrAM&&fmt=22
this should be higher definition

So let's put in the link in the Compose window:


guess I have to put this in here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZCLbZFwrAM

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&ap=%2526fmt%3D22

OK now I see the little blue "Preview" in the upper right corner of the Compose window.
Now we can try a 640 by 480 size picture.
This was taken November 14, on a foggy ride through the Peaked Hill Land Bank property. I believe the rock in the distance (my mountain bike leaning up against it will give you an idea of it's size) is called Moshup's pillow.

It is funny how the picture isn't any larger. I like to look at larger pictures.

OK that seems to work. So now I should see how easy it is to put in a photo and see how it looks.

Well that is a photo from my phone taken at Great Rock Bight at 320x240 and put on the blog using the defaults - which is the medium size.

So now let's put in the same size pic using large entry

(That didn't work out very well! It put the new picture all the way at the top left.)

I seem to have trouble starting with a blank. There are so many different options and ways to go. To commit to any one seems to preclude all the rest; so it is easier to do nothing at all.
The problem is that doing nothing is a much of a choise as any of the others, it just doesn't leave much of a paper trail.

Well, I feel like I just have to get going with this blog. So let's get the whining over with and just post this so I no longer have the problem of where to start.