About a third of the booths had some sort of energy bar or energy drink that they were selling. Hobbit was trying them all. We got to one booth and the person handed each of us a sample of their new energy drink. I sucked mine down and it didn't taste too bad - like a piece of watermelon flavored candy. Hobbit was smart and asked, "What's in this stuff?"
The person handing out samples said, "A bunch of great stuff - guarine, taurine and as much caffeine as two cups of coffee!"
Hobbit set hers down. I regretted drinking mine - I'm pretty sensitive to caffeine and I didn't get to sleep until nearly 3am that evening.
After that, we went to the triathlon memorabilia store and I bought myself a "Kona Ironman 2005" cycling jersey to motivate me to do cycling in the winter months. We had left the condo around 8am and we finally made it to the SCUBA store around Noon. We got our tanks and went diving.
The beach at Milepost 4 is almost completely covered in bowling ball sized, razor sharp lava rocks. There is an eight foot wide "channel" that is cleared of rocks that runs from the beach out to the 20' deep water. The floor of the channel is white sand, amidst all the black lava, so it's pretty easy to see.
We walked out into the channel until we were chest deep in the water, flopped on our backs and put on our fins. We snorkeled out to the 20' deep water, put our regulators in our mouths and then we submerged into other 20' deep water. Once we got to the bottom, we swam out to the 30' deep water and turned left (South) to dive alongside the wall.
Sea slugs are a football shaped, slime covered animal that sits on the bottom of the reef. They move very slowly, sucking up sand and filtering it in their stomachs to get nutrients and then pooping out the sand. Their slime coating picks up a thick coat of sand. They look like football shaped rocks and they're the same color as the sand
If you run your finger along the side of a sea slug, you will wipe off the coat of sand, revealing their green/brown skin underneath. Local divemasters like to pickup the sea slugs and write ALOHA on them and put them down where divers will see them.
I spotted one of these and pointed it out to Hobbit. She looked over and saw what she thought was a rock with ALOHA scratched into it. The sea slug then squeezed out a bunch of digested sand. Hobbit looked startled, then puzzled, then finger spelled to me, ROCK POOPED.
We worked our way along the reef at around 30' underwater. We saw a bunch of Sea Turtles, Moorish Idols and lots of different corals. We spent almost an hour underwater - we came up, ate lunch, refilled our tanks and headed out again.
In the afternoon, the wind and surf picked up. Hobbit got ahead of me when we went in the water. We were getting surged back and forth in the surf and Hobbit wanted us to submerge in 12' of water and swim out to the reef at 20-30'. I agreed, forgetting that I'd left my (nonfunctional) compass at home. Once we got down underwater, Hobbit gave me the sign for, "Which Way Do We Go?"
I gave her the sign for, "This Way" but I couldn't remember the sign for "I Hope This Is The Correct Direction."
The surge was churning up a lot of sand off the bottom, making the water milky white and murky. Hobbit led the way, but she kept veering off course and I'd have to catch up to her, tug on her fin and point her in the proper direction.
We swam for about 10 minutes and the water didn't get deeper - in fact, it got a bit shallower. We were getting surged back and forth across the bottom that was made of sharp lava rock and even sharper coral. I gave Hobbit the sign for, "Wait Here. I Will Go Up and Look Around." I slowly surfaced, spinning in a circle to look around and make certain there was nothing overhead.
Once I surfaced, I could see 3-4 foot waves and surfers ... definitely a bad sign. Hobbit had navigated us in a big U shape, over to the next beach which was for surfers and not SCUBA divers. The lesson learned here is that you should surface swim out to about 20 feet, then drop down - you avoid getting surged into rocks while you are 10' underwater and you don't get lost as easily.
I turned around and found the direction that we needed to go, submerged and took the lead to get us pointed in the right direction. I got us to the coral ledges and we poked around in the 8-10' diameter lava tubes until we got down to 1/3 of a tank of air. We swam back toward the beach and did our safety stop - that's where we spend 3-5 minutes at a depth of 15 feet in order to offgas Nitrogen buildup. Instead of just sitting in place, we headed in to the beach. I gave the signal to start going up, then I spun in a circle as I started swimming upwards. As I spun, I saw a boat right above our heads - it had driven in just above our heads and we hadn't heard it because of the surf noise. I grabbed Hobbit's fin (she was headed up, right under the boat) and tugged on it, pointing up at the boat with my other hand.
Hobbit flipped upside down and swam back down to the bottom just as the boat switched on its motors - both propellers spun up to full speed and the boat sped away. We tried surfacing again, this time we made it without getting run over by a boat or encountering surfers. Hobbit and I both got banged around on the rocks as we tried to get out of the water
We took our tanks back to the SCUBA shop and returned them and we rented a Boogie Board and went to the beach next to Milepost 4 and we went body surfing.
We were both wearing our contact lenses, so we wore our swim masks. Hobbit got caught by a wave and it tore her mask off her head - it was a $25 mask that she had only work about 10 times. The surf was churning, making it almost impossible to see underwater. I spent about 10 minutes diving and I found a pair of swim goggles that somebody else had lost - which I gave Hobbit to wear to keep her contacts from getting washed away. After another 10 minutes of diving, I found her swim goggles - just as I grabbed them, I got pounded from behind by a wave which swept my goggles away into the surf.
Luckily for me, another swimmer spotted them and grabbed them and handed them back to me.
After losing our masks, we went home and made ourselves dinner. Since we were leaving the next day, we had to eat all the leftovers that had accumulated over the week - it was a HUGE feast.
When we got to Kailua Kona on Saturday, Oct 15th, many of the triathletes had already been staying here for a week or two.
They would start before first light every morning running, cycling and swimming the routes. On the morning of the triathlon we got up at 5:30 to get to the start area. When we arrived at the start, we found that Ford (the major sponsor of the event) had taken one of their SUVs and floated it in the middle of the harbor on a huge hunk of styrofoam painted to look like a lava rock.
The people in the light green caps in the lower right corner of the picture are the amateur swimmers waiting to start. There were lots of people in sea kayaks who were along the route to provide rescue in case a swimmer got in trouble.
The spectator areas were very crowded. We watched as one fellow climbed over the sea wall ont othe rocks below. Surf in Hawaii comes in "sets" - several minutes of calm followed by 5-6 big waves. I snapped this photo of the man standing on the rocks under the sea wall just after he climbed down. About a minute later, a 3' high wave slammed into the rocks next to him, completely soaking him.
There were over 1,300 people swimming - 300 professionals and then 1,000 amateurs following 15 minutes behind.
This photo is the 1,000 amateurs headed out on their swim segment - they swam for a little over a mile down the coast.
After we watched the swim start, we walked back to our condominium, finished packing and then had a snack and sat on the lanai and watched the swimmers turn around (the turnaround for the swim was about 200 yards offshore from our condo.)
We checked out of our condo and went back to the triathlon transition point to see the first woman to finish the swim and transition to the 100 mile bike ride. This photo is of her starting the cycling portion of the race.
The lead triathlete took about an hour to finish the 2.4 mile swim and we saw him leave on his bike for the 112 mile ride, and we also saw the lead female leave on her bicycle.
We had several hours to wait until the cyclists finished their 100 mile bike ride, so we went to the Kona Coast Macadamia Nut and Candy Factory. We both concluded that it was not worth the drive.
None of the local beaches had showers, and since we had checked out of our condo, we couldn't go swimming at the beach. Finally, I decided to go get a haircut in Kona. Just as I was finishing, Hobbit came dashing in and pulled me outside and yelled, "He's almost here!"
She pulled me 3 blocks downhill to the Triathlon start/finish line about five minutes before the winner crossed the finish line.
We watched the first five people to complete the race - 2.5 mile swim, 100 mile bike ride and 26.2 mile run.
http://www.ironmanlive.com/splash/index.php
The triathletes have to complete the entire thing by midnight. Next time, we are planning to hang out into the evening and cheer on the people who are finishing in the last hour of the race - cheer in the people who are staggering over the finish line mere moments before it's too late.
Next time we visit Hawaii (the big island) we want to go visit the observatory on Mauna Loa and spend more time checking out the volcanoes. We also want to do a lot more SCUBA diving - there's some excellent shore diving on the island.