break number two

pics from earlier...
a navigational heiau (sacred place)

working on building polynesian voyaging canoes

hapuna beach sunset


so at the end of chuck's marine ecosystems class we got to have 4 days off. woohoooo! friday night, we celebrated st patty's with some green russians and baileys. i spent saturday with dad and ian kayaking across kealekekua bay (again.. i know, so unfortunate ;) ) and snorkelling. i'm gonna be a fish in my next life... so mesmerizing just to watch the fish swim around and interact. that night, i got to meet up with grammy and grampy also for dinner, so that was pretty great that we all got to enjoy a dinner together. some delicious mango ice cream was enjoyed. later on, i met up with 4 of my friends and we took our newly rented pontiac grand prix and headed down to a county park south of kona to camp. we came down there to find a huge party going on, but were kind of wary of crashing it because the area is known for being mostly locals who are sometimes unhappy with tourists taking over their park. as we sat on the rocks away from the party and chilled on our own for a while, i got a pele kiss ( scrape on the lava) and had to put some iodine on it. haha, i subsequently christened our beautiful white car by pouring half the bottle on the bumper. luckily the soon to come torrential downpour washed most of the iodine off. later in the evening, the party began to die down and we went on over. everybody welcomed us in and it turnned out that it was a 1st birthday party.. a baby luau... which is a very big occasion. basically the entire village was there. i didnt realize this was basically the last surviving fishing village in hawaii. they insisted on feeding us... we ate black rock crab.. raw fish.. poi.. pork and beans.. sooo much, and chilled with them late into the night ( haha more like morning....) they insisted on feeding us breakfast too in the morning. on our later travels around the area throughout the next few days, we actually ran into some of the villagers several times and they insisted that the 'new yorkers' come back and visit again. the next day we headed on down to south point to check out green sands beach. walking out along the rough roads, we found ourselves battling with the mud and lets just say the mud won, and we have lots of clothes to wash. the beach wasnt like vividly green, but i mean when you picked up a handful of sand, it was full of green olivine crystals, a particular mineral that sometimes crystallizes out of cooler magma. pretty sweet... we tried to head down south on the island but found the roads to be flooded from the rains. we ended up eating at the southernmost bar/restaurant in the us for dinner and then headed back up to deserted south point for our very own little campsite. the sunrise was pretty amazing. that morning, we stopped by a little fruit stand for a snack and got hte word from the lady running it that the county beach downthe road was pretty great so we headed down to ho'okena. needless to say, it was beautiful. black sand. clear water. sun. not many people. we ended up camping there too.. but again collapsed our tents at sunrise since we technically didnt have a camping permit. whatev.. we just ended up sleeping on our towels on the beach for the morning. cant get enough ocean swimming.
that afternoon, i ended up meeting up again with gram and gramp despite the fact that my phone battery died and gulp, i had to get in touch with them nevertheless. pretty great break i gotta say! hehe not much of a break.. lots of fun though:)
we spent the last few days doing some work designing a trail up on this cinder cone, pu'u wa'a wa'a up on hualalai, the volcano west of kona on the island. theres a lot of native plants that have been outplanted there since the area was fenced off from the feral animals, so we're working on a hiking trail to go through the area. yesterday was actually a pretty hard day.. we ended up helping these guys from purdue planting koa saplings for a nursery project looking at different ways of propagating this particular tree. we planted 330 trees to be exact. and its not so easy when you have to start by laying out the plots in 2 foot deep crazy african grass. but they fed us beer and ice cream after.
so now, finally its the weekend again :)

enjoying the sunset at ho'okena beach

ho'okena sunset

green sands beach

marine ecosystems

so for the last 2 weeks, we've been having our marine ecosystems class. our main professor, chuck, is a biological oceanographer who specializes in using acoustic technology to study marine life. we started out last week with some guest lecturers coming to speak about their own personal research relating to bioacoustics. what a life chuck's grad students have coming out here to do a little work and give a lecture or two.. the first woman we worked with is a marine biologist down at honokohau harbor/ kaloko-honokahau historical park where the state is in the process of expanding the harbor. there they're using hydrophones planted in waterproof casings, rigged with batteries and hard drives or palm pilots, to record the sounds of the bay, most importantly the humpback whales. last year, one of the girls from cornell did her internship down there and monitored the spinner dolphins in the bay as well as the boat traffic. my crew of 3 students actually went out and helped retrieve the hard drive so that we could download this data. to make things especially interesting, all this week and last, we've had a film crew from cornell's lab of ornithology following us around to watch us do acoustics research because they're working on a documentary called 'sounds of the sea'. later in the week, we went up on the west kohala coast to watch humpback whales and simultaneously listen in to the hydrophones placed out in the bays. i never thought i'd actually get tired of watching whales fluke... for friday and saturday, we headed down to kawaihae harbor about 10 miles to the west of us to work on building a canoe. these canoes are very unlike our canoes on the mainland.. these are big double hulled 50 ft long canoes like ancient Hawaiians and Polynesians used to travel between islands. they used no instruments to navigate and instead simply used the stars. in the last 30 years, the canoe tradition has been renewed in Hawai'i and a man named papa mao came over from a small island in micronesia to reteach the hawai'ians celestial navigation. that was controversial in his homeland because the skill is supposed to be something only passed within the family. now, hawai'ians are giving back to papa mao by building him a canoe to take back to his home country and reteach his own people the tradition that he helped to renew in hawaii. western culture is becoming very prevalent in micronesia and so he hopes this will help to renew interest in ancient traditions. however, papa mao is very sick so the canoe must be finished fast. we spent the two days working on papa mao's canoe sanding and painting, and also raising money down at a local grocery store in kona. over the night on friday, we got to stay in a house owned by the canoe club up the coast a bit. ben found a few dead cockroaches and centipedes outside that he used to hide in peoples' clothes and freak them out in the morning. conveniently it was all recoreded on videotape. on saturday night, dad and ian arrived in kona :) i got to have a great big breakfast at hawaiian style cafe with them and go to the beach with them on sunday. it seems crazy that i hadnt seen them for 2 months. this week, we worked on a manta ray tracking project. we split into crews of 3 people and worked 12 hour shifts over a 2 day period on a boat owned by NOAA. i was lucky to be on the first crew where we had to find a ray and tag it so that we could later use hydrophones to follow it using the frequency of its acoustic tag. i volunteered myself to scout out the rays, and after a while, found myself face to face with two 15 ft or so rays. pretty amazing. my lips were definitely quivering around the snorkel. i followed them around until tim, the grad student we were working with, was ready to tag it. unfortunately we lost the signal of the ray soon after, and spent most of the day searching hte coast for our ray. fortunately though, we were entertained by whales breaching right off our bow, and several pods of spinner dolphins, and a beautiful sunset. needless to say, i went straight to sleep after we finished off an entire pizza after getting home.

whoops getting lazy about posting..

so after our amazing and adventurous break, it was nice to get back to a dry, warm house. definitely a great break. we came back though to be thrown straight into preparations to go back to Volcano. This time we were going to be working with some guys at Hawai'i Volcano Observatory, which is part of USGS, and based in the national park. About two weeks ago, there was a decent earthquake near Kilauea Caldera, so they were interested to find out a little more about what was going on under the ground. For 3 days, we did a leveling survey, covering miles of lava flows, to determine how much deformation of the lava had occurred since the last survey last year. The guys figured that the elevation change measured by surveying would probably greater than years past, indicating that new magma was filling up chambers below, and causing the tremors that were felt. While the work was tedious and we were out in the field from basically 730 am to 5pm, it was cool to be a part of the project, and we hope the data'll yield some interesting results.
After that, we dove into our next class 'Biogeochemistry of the Hawaiian Islands', which is taught by the husband of the professor of the first class. Well actually, they're technically not married because they've 'never found the time' with their busy schedules. Their two daughters are the two little girls living out here with us.
We ended the week with a bang by having ourselves a good ole hoedown in the garage. It was Katie's 21st bday, and she likes country music, so we obviously had to celebrate. Everyone, and i mean even the profs and kids, got dressed up. It's pretty funny improvising with not a lot of appropriate clothes... all the more fun though. A lot of us actually have cowboy hats though because we live near this huge ranch, actually it's the biggest in the US apparently.



On Saturday night, a few of us went to see Jake Shimabukuro, a world-renowned ukulele player, play at the local theatre. Man does he play with passion!
This week, we've basically just been going out in the field in the morning and coming back to work on assigments in the afternoon. We're eating more often in the boarding school dining hall, and let me say, the food is definitely starting to get a little old. oh well..
That's basically it for now.. I'm actually working on packing up my bags because 3 of us are moving out of the house and into the little cottage next door. That way, we can be a little noisier when the little kids are asleep :)