Hanauma Bay - The Toilet Bowl

Note for first-timers or anyone who hasn't read recently - this is Part 3 in a series - actually sort of started at "Maria Burks has the coolest job" but 1st post on Hanauma Bay was "Small Kid Time at Hanauma Bay".

Here are some excellent pix of the Toilet Bowl that I found after a quick Google search last night. Here's a close-up shot - the Toilet Bowl is that hole right at the end of the inlet
Now that you know where it is, here's a wider-angle shot taken as the hole drains as the trough between swells arrived at the inlet -

And then the next swell arrives, and here's the flooding! WHOOOOOOSH!


I looked for these last night as I thought some pix of this area would be helpful as an illustration for my next post - these were better than I'd hoped for! Since there's a pretty good chance I may not get to "Ocean Rules" for a couple of days (got some good weekend plans) I thought it would be fun to just go ahead & post these now - I think I did a pretty good job of describing it, but this makes it a lot easier to visualize, yeah?

Aside from the fact that there are no people in there, this is precisely as I remember it from when I was little.

BTW the rock here is all lava, which weathers away faster in the salt air faster than the waves can erode it, hence the shape of the ledges here. The sand is greenish because there's olivine in it - green volcanic glass that was one of the products of the explosive creation of the crater that became Hanauma Bay. The olivine I knew about; the bit about the weathering is something I've learned while writing this. So far, all of what I've written has been straight out of my own recollections, but I've been checking to make sure that all the "facts" in my head are right - so far my general understanding has been pretty accurate but boy, I've picked up a lot of interesting details too.

Photos courtesy of Trevre Andrews, webmaster for the University of Minnesota Geological Society - thanks!