Saturday, February 27, 2016

Awesome Stuff from Waimea Bay

Crazy week at work and I didn't do much worth reporting on (ok, TQ and I did make it to a fun slideshow presentation about a boat trip on a section of the Peruvian Amazon that Old Salt Blogger Rick Spilman took with his lovely wife Karen and his lovely and adventurous mom, another excellent talk, thanks Rick!) but I did enjoy a very special online treat on Thursday, when the waves in Waimea Bay were not too big, not too small, but juuuust right for the Quiksilver In Memory of Eddie Aikau big-wave surfing invitational to GO!

I couldn't watch much but I did indulge myself during a busy day with an occasional break to watch the live stream at worldsurfleague.com. So amazing being able to watch even a little bit live from my desk in Manhattan! 


Awesome rides

Awesome wipeouts!

 And here's more of that wild jetski stampede that was briefly shown on the highlight reel! (sorry non-Facebookers, cannot find the video itself anywhere outside of FB), Now, I know we kayakers tend to dislike jetskis, but these guys? Wow. These are the lifeguards and safety staff for the event, and it's amazing what they do out there. And that is a MONSTER wave. Nothing but respect!

Snippets of that same video plus iinterviews with the riders here.

Special mahalo to Terry Marie at Hawaiian Ocean Adventures for posting the first thing I saw on FB about the Eddie being on! I think she'd posted it was looking good the night before and I saw that early on in the day here in NYC.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Sounds like a full week. I'm just amazed that there are still non-facebookers. Seems like everyone would have been feeling lonely at least one night sometime in the last 8 years and decided to start an account, even if they never used it.

bonnie said...

Yeah, you know it was a rough week when one of the 2 high points was actually getting to watch something online at your desk!

I have a few friends who just don't do the whole social media thing, so when I run across something like this where I just can't find it outside, I'm imagining them wanting to look and not being able to and I feel bad about it. I actually resisted for a loooong time myself, even when all of my boat blogging friends were having fun and telling me I should join, but then when my 25th high school reunion was coming up and they were using a Facebook page to plan, I gave in. I have mostly resisted the rest, though, although I did recently sign up for Pinterest just to look at something. FB and my blog are about as much as I can keep track of!

LauraEhlers said...

Love seeing these videos! The only surfing I saw, as a kid, was on Wide World of Sports - and they only seemed to broadcast these monster waves!Consequently, I really expected ALL ocean waves to be this big!!

bonnie said...

Ha! Nobody would ever just go to the beach for fun, it would be too scary!

I actually had a lovely dream about watching big surf in Hawaii last night (although the surf-watching was brief and was bookended by the usual access issues my dreams about beaches in Hawaii always seem to feature - like I know the beach is nearby but I'm trapped in a mazelike hotel lobby) after showing TQ all of these videos.