Sad, Sad News

First of all, happy New Year 2009 to all, and thanks to the readers who are still checking in here.

I’ll start with the good news: one of my new year’s resolutions is to blog regularly again, I even fixed my blog software so I can approve comments now.

And now the bad news: as I alluded to in a recent post, I have been neglecting this blog because there have been some upheavals in my life. Due to the recent economic situation, at least indirectly, my family and I have had to move away from Kaua’i.

As I detailed in an early post, I had the good fortune of working for a Silicon Valley-based computer company entirely remotely from my home office on Kaua’i. However, when I got hit by a round of lay-offs at my company, I found out how vulnerable and precarious this arrangement was.

I’d rather be living, hiking, and exploring on Kaua’i, but supporting my family is obviously my first priority. So after 9 months of unemployment, I had to face the facts and start looking for work in California. Even then, I feel fortunate to have found a good job in this economy, and so we reluctantly had to go through the long process of moving back to the San Francisco Bay area.

The job market on Kaua’i, and even Hawai’i as a whole, is rather difficult for people in the computer industry. There are precious few computer jobs on Kaua’i, and they’re all with military contractors at PMRF—not my cup of tea. On Oah’u, there are definitely opportunities, but again mostly with the military, and none willing to hire someone off-island. My biggest hope was to work on computers for Aloha Airlines, thinking I could actually commute by plane to HNL for work, but then they went bankrupt. There are a few programming and web development jobs on the neighbor islands, but mostly freelance contracts that do not pay market rates, nor anything near enough to sustain a family.

I also looked into other fields, trying to find something that would let me stay on Kaua’i. But the rest of the job market is hurting as well, and I just didn’t have the qualifications for the few high-paying jobs there are. All of the service jobs are taken by locals, who work 2 or 3 of them to make ends meet. Government jobs and contracts go to the well-established and well-connected. Tourist industry jobs have all disappeared with the downturn—Kauai is being hammered by the drop-off in tourism. Hawaii’s second industry, development and real-estate, has tanked as well—but that’s probably a good thing for preserving the island.

Outside of my field, there is definitely demand for professionals, doctors, nurses, even lawyers maybe, and they always need teachers, but pay is lower than elsewhere, which is why there is a shortage in the first place. The ideal would be some sort of self-employment with clients both local and remote, whether it’s technology, a web-based business, writing, or even new-age spiritual guru. But that takes time to establish, and we were running out of time and options. In the end, we decided we had to move away using our remaining savings so we wouldn’t be forced to sell our house.

The 20-foot Matson Shipping container ready for loading. This was back in October, note the lush green vegetation on Kauai, even before the winter rains.

The same container, delivered 10 days later to the Bay Area, direct via the port of Oakland. Note deciduous tree losing its leaves already.

Moving away has been a long, tiresome and depressing ordeal, having to put so much energy into leaving the place we love and chose to live. After several job interview trips, a house-hunting trip, a month of sorting, selling, tossing, and packing, several weeks of getting our house rented, a few days of loading a 20-foot container to the top, then a few weeks of living in empty houses, another few days of unloading, and finally weeks of unpacking and rearranging our stuff and our lives, we’re finally getting settled.

We still plan to return to Kaua’i, hopefully in the not too distant future. My computer job can be done remotely, once I’ve proven myself to my new company. We kept our house there and hope to move back in someday. In the meantime, California is probably my second favorite place to live in the US. I lived here for a few years before and there is so much to do, especially around the Bay Area, both indoors and out. Here’s what we’ve sampled already:

Museums and dinosaurs, oh my! The new California Academy of Sciences.

Christmas decorations and advertising on San Francisco’s Union Square.

The sun also rises in California.

And there is also fog, lots of it, and you don’t have to drive up to Koke’e to see it.

For all its sprawl and housing creeping up the hills, the Bay Area has a significant amount of parklands and trails.

The ocean is nearby too, here a shorebreak at Pt. Reyes National Seashore. Note the seagull, a species that never got established in Hawai’i.

And then there are mountains, perhaps what we missed the most in Hawai’i. The Sierra Nevada is a true wonderland of trails, backcountry treks, and grandiose vistas. And the cold season isn’t so bad, both my wife and I are avid skiers, so we are actually looking forward to the snow.

Above: lake Tahoe and Mt Tallac with a dusting of snow at Thanksgiving. Right: granite formations at Pinnacles National Monument–I’m looking forward to rock climbing again.

What this means for A Kaua’i Blog: I actually have so many pictures left to publish, I’m going to just keep on blogging, hopefully at least once a week. Some hiking buddies on Kaua’i promised to keep sending me pictures of their adventures, so there should be some fresh photos as well [and if they’re reading this: hey guys, don’t forget to send me some good pics]. In between, I might add a bit more filler in the form of news stories and links to interesting posts in other blogs about Kaua’i, as well as tidbits from California or the mainland that might have some remote connection to Kaua’i.

Without further adieu (nor ado), I will now get on with my favorite topic, namely exploring Kaua’i.

North Shore Kaua’i

Blogs on Kaua’i about Kaua’i are few and far between, so I’m going to try and not let this one die. And now I have one more to add to my blog roll.

North Shore Kaua’i (NSK in their logo) has actually been around for quite a while, but for the longest time, they just had a great design with a few token posts. But over the last two years, after I stopped checking on them, they became very active. A lot of the posts and images are reprinted from news articles, but actually it’s nice to have an editor scanning all the papers and posting the Kaua’i stories for us.

One of the main interests on the blog seems to be surfing, which is after all one of the appeals of Kauai’s North Shore. As a result, NSK has live weather and surf reports on their homepage, something I’ve been meaning to do myself. Better yet, on their daily surf report page, they have a “live” map of surf conditions. I love maps of all kinds, and I hadn’t seen this one before:

Source: oceansafety.soest.hawaii.edu (updated as conditions change, click for larger image)

The image above is created by the Hawaiian Lifeguard Association and SOEST, the school of ocean and earth sciences and technology at the University of Hawaii. I have embedded the live map, which they say it is updated as conditions changes. See their website for details and disclaimers.

In any case look for the NSK logo and their link in my blogroll to the right.

Hiatus

As you can probably see, this blog has been interrupted for a little while. There have been some changes in my life, and on top of that, I was having technical difficulties and couldn’t post or approve comments.

Thank you to those writing comments of appreciation, especially those who wondered where I was.

I hope to get back to writing one of these days.

For now, I’ll leave you with a picture of a beautiful waterfall that shall remain unnamed.

Wailua River Mouth

Speaking of scooping, I saw and odd sight at Wailua beach last week and went home to get my camera. I parked between the two bridges and walked across the road next to the one-lane bridge:

Is that another courageous surfer trying to stop a super Caterpillar from invading Kauai? And just what exactly is that excavator doing on the beach? Perhaps a little context will help:

After a day of rain, and with more in the forecast, the county (or maybe the state, I’m not sure) dredges out the mouth of the Wailua river to keep the water from rising inland.

Most rivers in Hawaii still have a natural outflow to the ocean, and the beach sand acts as a natural dam that creates a wide lagoon inland. And right now at the beginning of summer, ocean currents and wave action deposit more sand on the beach, which is why most of the beaches are wider in the summer. But that creates problems when there are out-of-season rain-storms as we’ve had.

But what about the surfers?

When the lagoon is breached, the strong flow of water creates standing waves coveted by the surfers—the mythical infinite wave. Because these waves are usually too small for surfing, body-boarders flock to the site to jump in and try to ride one until the sands shift and the wave forms elsewhere. From what I could see, the waves weren’t very convincing and none of them had long rides. I’ve heard of surfers digging the channel themselves to drain the lagoons at the smaller river-mouths, trying to create their own wave. I don’t recommend the practice, because storm runoff and standing lagoon water have high levels of bacteria and pollutants.

It looks like the body-boarders weren’t the only ones having fun. Who would not want to play with such an enormous sand toy—and get to dig real channels with it? When he was done with the channel, he spent some time flattening out the piles of sand, so the beach looked natural again.

After watching them for a while, I found another spot to view the river and noticed that there were two channels for the river to flow in. I had assumed that the sand had blocked the river almost completely, as happens on the smaller rivers, and the excavator had to create or enlarge it. But the natural channel is the one on the right, and they doubled the outflow of the river by creating a second channel through the sandbar.

It’s a good thing too, because we had over an inch of rain a few days later.

While I was down by the bridge, I saw this strange sign warning paddlers about dangers under the bridge. I think that the old reinforced concrete on the bridge was flaking a bit and pieces would fall off. That would explain the stucco coating you see here, to protect the remaining concrete from the salt spray. But why then did they leave the sign?

Not to fear, the bridge was recently tested and still found to be very solid. Originally a railway bridge for sugar cane hauling trains, it will be retrofitted with two lanes of traffic and the future bicycle path.

Moving around a little, I found another little strip of land that is seldom seen. This triangular area is hidden between the access to the one-lane bridge, the river, and the Aloha Beach Hotel. I had never noticed the nice little grove of palm trees here. Off to the left in the distance are the ruins of the Hikina a ka la heiau and Hauola, the place of refuge, at the edge of Lydgate park.

The only reason I took this picture is because this is undoubtedly where the future bike path will go, when they managed to connect downtown Kapaa to Lydgate park. So this is the “before” picture, and I’m anxiously awaiting the chance to take the “after” picture.

I Got Scooped

While I strive to be a source of information about the Kalalau trail, I wasn’t able to hike it this year and see the repairs that were reportedly done in the dangerous-looking sections. Another resident, Arius Hopman, hikes the trail more regularly and has finally taken photos, and Juan posted them on Island Breath. Arius is a landscape photographer with a beautiful gallery in Hanapepe (or a gallery made beautiful by his works I should say), his works are also on his website. I don’t know him, but I have seen him at his gallery on Friday Art Night.

While I’m not going to take back all my doubts about the solidity of the work, I do admit the trail looks better. For someone like me who has only been hiking on it for the past 5 years and got used to the roughness, the repaired parts look like a sidewalk now, for better or for worse. It should make it easier for people with a fear of heights to hike past without being paralyzed by the void.

One image shows a “trail puka” (hole, pronounced poo-ka), an “erosion hole in the trail from goats, runoff and hikers who get pushed off the trail by encroaching brush.” They are prevalent in the third mile leaving Hanakapi’ai and in the ninth mile, on some of the steep little valleys leading up to Red Hill. To me, these are the critical maintenance spots because they can easily cause ankle injuries or worse on a steep slope. Plus once the hole starts, erosion just keeps making it larger until it cuts the trail and a bypass is created, causing more erosion. These areas should be high priority for maintenance because the holes are difficult to repair, yet easily and cheaply prevented by cutting the brush.