D-Rock's Blog

2010-06-06T01:12:00.000-07:00

Unless your acquaintances consist of only me and Kim Jong Il, I'm probably not the friendliest person you know. I don't really care for handshakes, I really only begrudgingly (and occasionally at that) hug the closest people to me, and please, for the love of Allah, don't kiss me. I find a slight head nod and a healthy respect for the personal bubble to be a pretty good greeting. But I hate to come off like some villain, a misanthrope, a monster from 300. I really don't dislike anyone, and I never say bad things about other people, unless they're French or underachieving Major League Baseball players. But sometimes, every now and then, I do let a little sarcasm slip.

It wasn't the fault of the surprisingly gorgeous chick directing traffic that we were all crawling along like none of us needed to get home and take a leak. But as I sat still in traffic, something about her perpetual smile and arm waving me forward made me stare right at her and snap, "Really? I was going to put it in reverse so I could idle in line for 30 minutes again." But I guess pretty girls are used to dealing with jerks, because she just went on smiling and directing, like a potential Miss America that just needed to practice on her wave. Or maybe smiling is an unavoidable expression for someone making a hard hat and fluorescent vest look good, and earning $45/hr for it. Come to think of it, maybe the traffic was her fault.

I leave you with a traffic-related joke you can tell to your passengers, if it looks like a delay is not already causing them enough pain:

A driver is stuck in a traffic jam on the highway. Nothing is moving. Suddenly a man knocks on his window.

The driver rolls down his window and asks, "What's happening?"

"Terrorists have kidnapped the president and first lady. They're asking for a $10 million ransom. Otherwise they are going to douse them with gasoline and set them on fire. We are going from car to car, taking up a collection."

The driver asks, "How much is everyone giving, on average?"

"About a gallon."

My New Hobby

2010-03-03T18:26:00.000-08:00

Football's done, baseball is just getting started, and all this wind and cold has really hampered my diving, so I've been needing a hobby. I tried crocheting, but the old ladies down at the center were intimidating with their advanced triple butterfly loop stitches. Plus you had to get there real early or all the good thimbles were gone. I thought I might just try to build some model cars, but after being closed up in my house with two and a quarter tubes of Testor's model glue I decided to switch to model rockets, which just ended in a broken window and an arson charge. So I went to Sports Authority to pick out a good activity. Roller blades were 50% off, but the thought of 12 year old girls showing me up or guys hitting on me compelled me to leave with nothing.
I was having a hard time coming up with things to do, so I really had to think about my best assets. That sure took a long time, but I realized my best attributes (besides holding my breath and/or destroying things) are 1.) I own a truck, and 2.) I like dirt. That, combined with the fact that most of the dirt we used to own has slid down a cliff, logically led me to the sport of dirt hoarding, very popular in Kazakhstan.
If it doesn't sound exciting to you, then you've never driven a truck with a payload of twice it's rated capacity down the freeway. What's even more harrowing is navigating the ungenerous alleyway where my most fertile dirt collecting grounds are found. A moped could definitely fit down the alley. Two could even go in opposite directions- provided that they were jousting and one would be knocked down to leave room for the other to pass. So maneuvering the F-150 with a veritable boatload of dirt in the bed is a slip of the hand away from turning into a monster truck rally scene, with street-side chainlink fences getting trampled like a Walmart greeter on Black Friday. And if that doesn't sound cool, consider that after loading half of Nuuanu into the bed, my truck becomes a low-rider.

One key tool to hoarding dirt is a wheelbarrow. Now, most people know what a wheelbarrow is, but few know exactly where the word is derived from. What it is, you see, is a barrow with wheels. That should pretty well clear it up for most of you, but some may not be familiar with the exact definition of a barrow. A barrow, as near as I can tell from my personal use, is an item which, despite having only a few of the most rudimentary mechanical parts, will break on a regular basis. "Regular basis" is of course defined as inopportune times, like when it's filled with 200 pounds of dirt, or when your shin is just about to come into contact with it if it stops it's forward movement. Given these definitions, it's a wonder that Ford hasn't come out with a whole line of them.

So far we have talked only about obtaining dirt, a barrel of fun indeed, but just getting it isn't the end of the dirt party! It's barely the beginning. It's only just started once you have driven your truck home, scraped the sagging bumper up the driveway, and loaded a wheelbarrow full of dirt. At that point, the world is in the palm of your hand. There are any number of things you could do with a truck load of dirt. Like what, you ask?
Well, statistics show that 71% of Americans have a neighbor with an annoying little dog. How much would you love to just wheel right up to it and with a tip of your barrow drown out its noise with 4 cubic feet of soil?

Sometimes you just smile from the joy of digging (called digger's high), but that's not the case here. Standing on a pomeranian just feels like floating on a cloud. Or, if you really want to feel like you're flying, why not catch some sweet air by building a ramp:

Or, just leave the dirt out and wait for the rain, at which point some of mud's natural denizens will undoubtedly spring up:

Whatever you decide, there is really only one thing you can't do with dirt, and that is build a yard out of it. I know you want to, but first you must realistically calculate the amount of dirt you will need. In order to do this, estimate the number of truckloads you will need, raise that number to the third power, multiply by 5, and then go look up more pictures of mud wrestling, because by the time you ever finished building a yard a new geological era will have dawned and you will find your new yard under sea level or in the middle of a volcano anyway. Trust me, I've seen it happen:

That's about the same amount of dirt as you would find in the entire state of Iowa, and it's nowhere near a yard yet. Anyway, enjoy your digging, because eventually will come clean up. It's best done with a broom with a complete handle. Here is what it would look like if you somehow broke your broom handle in half:

The wheelbarrow has clearly been setting a bad example to the rest of the garden tools.

Flavor, Thy Name is Manju

2010-02-25T21:33:00.000-08:00

The blog is long overdue for a pastry review. I like to think it's because I've been eating so well. I've even been eating a lot of spinach (Cost-Co jumbo bags- a future blog subject), albeit occasionally deep-fried. In fact, I haven't eaten a Zippy's donut in months! But when I considered which delectable dessert to feature, I realized I have not been suffering from lack of bakery goods. No, if there's one thing I know, it's sweets. And one delicious morsel stands above the rest; a little guy I like to call "taro manju." I call it that because that's how the label at the bakery identifies it.
Now, legend tells that the taro manju was invented by Shaolin monks in the twelfth century AD, after two score years of meditation and opium smoking. However, it featured such explosively delicious sweetness and irresistible flakiness, that it was not refined until the Kung Fu master Bruce Lee used taro manju as his sole source of nourishment. In fact, young Bruce worked as a corporate accountant, where he was paid mainly in manju, and it is from this culinary treasure that he derived his kung fu power.
Just what is this edible vault of wisdom and virtue, you ask? The taro manju is about the size of a ping-pong ball, yet weighs about the same amount as an official PBA bowling ball. And as for the scent, well, the scent is unlike any balls that I know of. It is also noteworthy that the taro manju is, in fact, purple. Purple foods, the royalty of them all, the upper echelon of edible products. The finest grape, the red grape... purple. Blueberries... antioxidants, tartness, and according to Wikipedia a diverse range of micronutrients... in a purple package. Grape nerds... the blue blood of all nerds... purple. And so, too, is the taro manju.
Bite into a taro manju and let the flaky texture of the outer layer satisfy your pallette. Feel your ability to scissor kick increase as you reach the soft center, gooey enough to rival any candy bar Hershey has ever made. Restrain yourself from throwing out a mantis-style chop to the jugular as you imbibe in flavor filling you with a martial aura. Or better yet, don't resist. You could have chosen an azuki manju, or even the lowly custard, but chop away soldier of sundries, battler of the baked goods, for from this day forward you are one with the fourth dimension of taro manju.
So it sounds good, right? You're probably wondering how you can get one yourself. You're probably thinking it's going to be one of those deals where you have to snatch it out of the hand of your dojo master. You could do that, but he'd probably send your eye-socket through the back of your skull with a blazing-tiger-fist-crescent-punch. So it's best just to go to that bakery on the Diamond Head side of Maunakea Street in Chinatown. There, you can unlock the secret of the manju, provided that you bring 90 cents. It's buy 2 get 1 free there, so maybe grab a macaroon and pizza roll while you're at it. That's what Chuck Norris does.

Opening Day

2010-02-21T13:39:00.000-08:00

I discreetly listened as the two men behind me hatched their plan. They spoke only in short, choppy sentences. One rummaged through a dossier of sorts, until locating his target and commenting, "Yep, Pat Bailey, it says. He was having a real nice day until we showed up."

Though they spoke in fragments only because they were shoveling fries and dumping beer down their throat, and their dossier was a roster printed off the internet, not the files of a secret agent, they still heckled that first-base coach like trained mercenaries. Assassins in line with the many that came before them at Les Murakami Stadium. Yep, Opening Day for 'Bows Baseball. Spring is in the air... and so are the batted balls of our opponents. Oregon State won 10-6, smashing a couple homers along the way.

But there were bright spots (in addition to the professional heckling you can expect from the first base lower level) from the team. They did put up 6 runs, four of which came on a Kevin "Big Mac" McDonald grand-slam with two outs in the fourth. Even the pitching staff, a real source of worry, had flashes of greatness. Nate "The Great" Klein wore out the umpires right arm early on, hurling strike after strike past Beaver batters. But eventually he wore down, which is actually the good news. The bad news is, none of the 4 pitchers to follow would last long enough to wear down.

Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan's Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks

Superman, I Feel Ya Brother

2010-02-20T10:47:00.000-08:00

It's not easy being Superman. I would know; I'm pretty much just like him. Sure, I can't fly, I've never thwarted a single villain (let alone Supervillain), and I definitely don't know anything about wearing tights. But more important, what we do share is the same quintessence.

Like Clark Kent, no one knows my most astounding talent. Just as he gets no credit for safeguarding humanity from evil-doers, I never get my props for catching things falling from an overstuffed freezer.

With regularity, left-over lasagna comes shooting out of our Kenmore like a comestible RPG. And with equal regularity, I make one-handed diving grabs sliding across kitchen linoleum that make Jerry Rice look like a Pop Warner flag-football player. I mean, I'm really good at it. Guaranteed, if you set up a video camera in front of my fridge, I would churn out a SportsCenter Top 10 play ever week. It's wizardry, really.

Just this morning I made a save on a bowl of tuna salad coming off the top shelf that would have dropped your jaw and made your head spin. The grab I made combined the most athletic feats from all the major sports. I picked up a finely aged specimen of turkey and rye, not knowing it was the foundation of a structure crowned with an economy-sized bowl of tuna salad. Propelled by refrigerated food's innate desire to careen across the kitchen tile, the bowl of tuna shot from the top shelf and quickly accelerated past the sound barrier. In a Matrix-esque moment of time, silence was heavy as I began my defense of the floor against the bowl with enough tuna salad to resurface the Madison Square Gardens. Still holding the turkey sandwich in my left hand, I made a block with my forearm, causing the flying saucer to skid along it like a track. It was really nothing short of the artistry you might see from the Harlem Globetrotters, but with the added danger of tuna salad. The bowl launched from my arm and hurtled to the ground like a meteor bearing down on Earth. I dropped to a knee, my other leg sprawled improbably forward like a hockey goalie. Maybe even like a hockey goalie mixed with a puma. Yeah, like if a puma was playing hockey goalie, I made the acrobatic move to head off what was going to become a tuna bomb in a matter of milliseconds. With the sweep of a hand that you would swear was that of Willy Mays circa 1957 I swiped the bowl from the air, averting impact by the closest of margins.

Then I put it back on the top shelf and wandered off to eat the sandwich. Someday someone will eat that tuna salad (or throw it away sometime this fall) and assume it has just sat there on that shelf, never blazing through the calm confines of the kitchen at Mach 1, threatening to erupt in what would no doubt become Vesuvius all over again. Never will they know this mild-mannered blogger was receiver of the refrigerator, keeper of the kitchen, All-Star-puma-goalie-fleet-footed-swift-fielding-superhero.

Lessons Learned from Great Fishermen

2010-02-19T12:54:00.000-08:00

I've been privileged to learn the art and skill of fishing from some of the best. Most recently, I learned a lot from Joseba Kerejeta, 2008 World Champion Spearfisherman, who is as much magician as fisherman; he landed fish that most people would never find, let alone catch. I've been at the apprenticeship of fishermen who need a truck not so much to tow their boat, but to haul their tackle boxes; guys with plugs, poppers, prince nymphs, jigs with and without weed-guards, buzzbaits, crankbaits, jerkbaits, softbaits, spoons, spinners, and streamers, each in colors from fire tiger to pumpkinseed with a chartreuse tail. I've been educated by fishermen who ply the Pacific with no less fervor than Ahab himself; although their excursions are certainly more dangerous due to the amount of beer imbibed and the size and sharpness of the teeth on their prehistoric-looking prey. I owe a lot of gratitude to these guys for teaching me so many ways to catch so many types of fish. But never have I learned more about fishing, really fishing, than from the greatest fisherman I ever knew, Frank Orndorff.

Frank Orndorff is my mom's dad, my grandpa. He always told me he never caught a fish in his life, and to the best of my knowledge this was true. In fact, it doesn't surprise me at all, given his methods. Though he certainly never strained to load his tackle onto the boat, it's not that he lacked gear. Looking back on it, the problem is actually that he had a little too much gear for his way of thinking. Which is not to say he wasn't a smart man, but give Orville and Wilbur a Boeing 747 and I doubt they would have the success they had with the Wright Flyer. Had Grandpa stuck with a cane pole and a worm he might have caught a fish, but instead he took his mold-injected, wide-lipped, treble-hooked, #4 crankbait made for cunning sport fishermen with Polarized glasses and breathable jackets bedazzled with sponsor's logos, and suspended it below a bobber, a virtual guarantee not to catch fish. And it's a good thing a fish never bit this little morsel, because the knots binding up his reel were probably twice as strong as the half-hitches he used to secure his lure.

So he doesn't sound like the best fisherman you've ever heard of? Well, that would be true- if we were a bunch of Paleolithic cave-dwellers that needed to catch fish to survive. But in modern times, if you want a fish to eat you need do no more than step to the counter and say "McFish, please." And Frank Orndorff embodied that. Maybe he never caught fish, but he always had food. The night before a fishing trip, when others were oiling the bearings of their reels or honing hook-points, Grandpa packed Twinkies, cherries, and iced tea. And come the next day, when other anglers were still fiddling with line tangles and backlashes, he would be relaxing, a straw hat atop his head, a cushion under the seat of his pants, the smorgasbord in his lap. For him, it was a veritable Carnival cruise aboard that 15' aluminum skiff. Of course, he still made the perfunctory effort of tying that crawdad crankbait on his line, but even had an unsuspecting fish managed to snag itself on it, would he have known what to do? With his hands full of Hershey's chocolate, would he have even cared?

The best fisherman I ever knew passed away about five years ago. Sometimes, as I dream he lives on, under the shade of his straw hat, warmth from the sun alleviating the pain of his old, arthritic joints. Though he wouldn't hesitate to let you know how he felt about the way the bureau was cutting the grass at the park, he never really did complain about pain. So I feel free to murmur and swat at bugs, but I don't gripe about the lack of fish as I make another cast. Dreaming on, Grandpa would be relishing life's simple pleasures- sons and daughters and a porch swing, grandkids and a goldfish pond, a fresh peach in hand. I snap back to reality as my attention is captured by a bird flying across my field of vision. I reminisce about Grandpa's beloved wrens, and more about the comfort and enjoyment he derived from providing a good home for many generations of the little birds. They're always there in the dream, right by the tool shed inexorably linked to my grandpa. Reality hits, and the sun is sinking low, the food has evaporated from the cooler, and I haven't put a fish in it all day- perfect. I finish the last two cherries in my hand and reel in my line, glad to have learned from the great fisherman.

Holidays

2010-02-11T17:03:00.000-08:00

One holiday I always look forward to is Valentine's Day. This may surprise some of you. "But you're single, not romantic, and you never go out," you're thinking. You're thinking, "Why would you like Valentine's Day? You're scrawny, dress, poorly, and your face is repulsive." Woah! Hey! That's crossing the line. Anyway, the reason I like Valentine's Day is the weather is almost always nice. I can think of some great days I've had diving in Waimanalo on Valentine's Day.

There are other holidays that I look forward to also. Memorial Day is a good one. A lot of you don't even know when that is. Unless I tell you it's baitball season, then you think, "Oooohhh, right. I love May." Memorial Day, Cinco de Mayo, ALL of Mayo. May's a good month for diving.

I'll never forget my birthday either. It comes right at the end of summer, when the water's warm, swells are low, and the tradewinds let up. I always have fish to eat on my birthday. My birthday is August 27, so those conditions often hold up right through Labor Day, another great holiday.

New Year's Eve is not necessarily my favorite holiday. It's awfully hard to get to sleep, which is important if you're going to get up New Year's morning to take advantage of the good diving weather. I can't remember how many years in a row I've gone diving Jan. 1. Probably 6 or 7. Some people just dive it every other year to take advantage of the Diamond Head area opening. But it's always a good one for a diver to mark on his or her calendar.

There are a lot more days to mark down, too. Before last week it had been years since I saw a Super Bowl; the weather at that time is just too good. And I hope they never take away Columbus Day! It's a good day for diving. Heck, what am I saying? Kwanza, Yom Kippur, Ramadan... everyday is a good one for diving.

Mike and Derek's Excellent Adventure... Or Bogus Journey

2010-02-09T21:29:00.000-08:00

With my truck intermittently behaving like a mechanical bull, I decided I better go diving one more time before it constantly worked like a mechanical bull and had to go to the mechanic. My longest breath-hold of the day was while pulling my boat back over the H-3. Despite gyrating like a Pentecostal being healed, my truck climbed the mountain and brought us back safely.

I called Lloyd, a mechanic who I had spoken with the day before about getting my truck fixed. At least that's who I tried to call. The garage I actually called said no one by the name of Lloyd worked there. I wasn't sure how I made this mix-up (I could just be prone to them, like allergies), but no big deal. My car needed to be fixed, and not necessarily by Lloyd, so I asked if I could bring it to whoever I was talking to. We were making progress, until I found out he was all the way down at University. As the crow flies that's not too far, but crows don't sit in traffic. And I would have to pass by quite a number, dozens even, pant loads maybe, of mechanics to get there.

So I opted to call a place in Mapunapuna, which is much nearer and also adjacent to a Wendy's in case the need for a Frosty should arise. They said bring it on in, but not until after 1, because they were about to take lunch (darn that Wendy's!). That was fine though, it fit in our schedule perfectly. Mike and I had to go down to Chinatown to hold a Pizza Lover's Club Meeting anyway, so we would just leave his car at the mechanic's place and take my truck to lunch, then we could swap out after 1. In retrospect, we should have left the broken vehicle and taken the working one.

But at the time it seemed like a good idea. We fortuitously found a parking space where he was able to parallel park right in front of the garage. And our club meeting went well too. It was the cheapest one yet, because we went that (fairly) new bakery on Maunakea Street. Good pizza rolls, excellent taro manju (twice again as good as McDonald's taro pie), only the chrysanthemum juice was a mistake. It wasn't until we were around HCC, where Mike was talking about how he heard of someone getting stabbed in the area that my truck really started hurting.

Where it used to shake, it was now tremoring. Where it used to click, it now banged. Where it used to crawl forward, in now sat immobilized. Mike got out and started to push us off the road. I found it a little difficult to steer my F-150 without power steering, but I decided not to complain when I looked in the rearview and saw Mike's red face gasping for oxygen as he pushed my 4,500 pound truck. I even made some perfunctory effort by cracking the door and kicking along with one leg. Kind of like running out a ground ball even though you know you're out.

We made it to the entrance of a parking lot, which looked like a better place to block than Dillingham Street. Across the river was a street with a mechanic my F-150 had patronized before. But to get to that street would require another foray on Dillingham. Either that or ford the river, but I played Oregon Trail enough as a kid to know the risk in that. We planned to push it, but only made it about far enough to block a couple more lanes of traffic before giving up.

We decided we would just have to try to start it, which was not an easy task. Mike had to bang on the solenoid with the end of a socket wrench while I turned the car over in order to get it to work. Finally it started, and off we shook at 4 mph, to the mechanic or bust.

The voyage was as harrowing as anything Magellan or Capt. Cook ever did, but I was able to pilot my F-150 to that mechanic, fueled largely by my love for its customized dashboard cover that says "Candy & Crystal." I'm not making that up, I'll get a photo of that in the morning and my Yosemite Sam floor mats, too.

Anyway, what's important here is that we made it. I then got to try to imitate every noise and symptom my truck was making. I tried my best to remember them all, even though it was hard to get my mind past the obvious problem of it shaking and going only 4 mph, if it will turn on at all. He said we could leave it, which was fortunate, since it was having a hard time moving, but we had to take the cooler in the back, because it stank from fish.

So Mike, the cooler, and I set off on foot toward Mapunapuna. Right around the corner was a Goodwill store, so I thought maybe I could go in, get some cheap Huffy or some kids bike, and ride to the car. They didn't have any bikes, which was fortunate, because I don't know if I would have been comfortable touching anything in that place anyway. It looked a lot like something Mike and I would cross later in our travels- the Keehi Transfer Station. So I wasn't impressed with this Goodwill store, but when I came out of the store a bus stopped; not even Mike, the cooler, and I could fail to see what an opportunity this was.

It said it was going towards Pearlridge. Mike asked how familiar I was with the bus system. I told him I haven't ridden it in about 6 years. We weren't even sure how much it cost, and by the time I started sorting through my change the bus was already leaving. No problem, we would just get prepared and wait for the next bus.

The next one was Rt. 52- Wahiawa/Circle Island. Mike hurried to get on the bus. I wasn't so sure. We only needed to go a few miles down the Nimitz. A 20-mile trip up the H-2 wasn't really going to aid us in our journey. But Mike just looked at me like he couldn't believe he and the cooler had to travel with someone with so little street smarts as me. "Derek," he instructed, "you can stop wherever you want. Only Express busses use the freeway, this is a regular bus." With that Mike popped his coins into the meter, and I was satisfied with the explanation from the seasoned, street-hardened carrier of the cooler.

We stood on the crowded bus, setting the cooler right in the face of some unfortunate passengers as the bus quickly accelerated. Though we are both too tall to see anything but concrete speeding by out the window, Mike, the prodigy of public transportation, sage of the street, savvily sensed that we were near our street. "Pull the cord," he urged. I wasn't too sure we could stop, it looked like we were on the freeway. "Pull the cord!"

Okay! I reached out and yanked the cord. "Stop requested," informed the automated voice. But the bus driver didn't even flinch, and the concrete kept speeding by faster. "I think we're on the freeway," Mike interposed. Yep, headed non-stop to Wahiawa.

Once we got to Wahiawa, we decided to wait for a hub to maximize our chances of finding a bus back to town. We got our transfers and exited the bus at a Park-And-Ride. A sign showed the routes headed towards Honolulu, and luckily, just then, one of those routes turned the corner.

As we boarded the bus, the driver exclaimed, "Whoa! You can't get on here with that cooler!" We tried to explain that we just got off a bus with the cooler, but he wasn't having it. We sat on the bus stop bench, searching for an idea, when the driver got off the bus and switched with a new driver.

The new driver also was not pleased about the cooler, but after throwing a fit he said we could bring it on, as long as we kept it in our lap. So we sat on a virtually empty bus for 20 miles with a cooler in our lap until we could get off at the first available spot in town, directly across the street from where we got on the first bus.

We decided to quit scheming and just walk. Walk down forgotten bike paths, walk past homeless camps, walk, walk, walk. Until finally we were done walking, finally we could put down the wreaking cooler, finally we could put the key in the ignition of Mike's car, turn it over, and be greeted by... an empty gas light.

Boys Will Be... Menaces

2010-02-04T20:21:00.000-08:00

Listening to the two little demons that dwell next door made me realize that if I ever end up with a child, I hope to have a girl. But it's not just the rambunctious noises, violent acts, and general mischief of the neighbor boys that led me to that conclusion. Those factors just led me to reminiscing about the havoc I created for the first, oh, twenty-six years of my life. But especially the first ten or so.

The neighbor boys may be a little troublesome, but I've never seen them climb a fence to throw dirt in the neighbor's pool, which I can remember doing on several occasions. Or there was the time on Mother's Day I climbed a different fence and cut down all the neighbor's roses to give to my mom. I can remember breaking two windows with baseballs and a mirror with a football. I used to go out and collect fish and put them in a jar. All I wanted to do was eat Chex and look at my fish, dead or alive.

Of course, now I'm all grown up. Despite the fact that I collect it by the F-150-full, I'm actually pretty stingy with my dirt, so I would never throw it. And I haven't given anyone a flower in three years. No longer do I hurl around projectiles- they don't like that in the sports bars I have traded in for the fields of yesteryear. The fish? Well, that's still a problem of mine.

But that's fine, never did I say I wanted to change my ways. I still want to chase lizards and not cut my hair. I still want to see how many times I can swim across the pool and not do laundry. I still don't mind being a bit of a disaster area, and I don't hold that against anyone, even the neighbor's kids. But don't think I'm contradicting my original point. Who could tolerate me and an accomplice?

Me and Carrot (who was eaten by a cat on Easter), my sister Lauren, Jessica Webber

I just wrote a couple hundred words explaining my point, so according to the old axiom, this photo is about 5 times more instructive. Which is probably about right. Which one of these do you want?

Safety Inspection

2010-01-27T15:30:00.000-08:00

Here I am disarming a bomb.

Before the end of the month my truck is due for safety inspection. There's really nothing safe about my truck, especially since I just spent the whole morning working on it. If there is any safety feature on it, it's that a lot of the time it doesn't work and therefore can't be a menace to the general public on the roadways. The most dangerous thing, according to the safety inspection, is that the horn doesn't work.

I'm not too sure what the horn is even good for. I obviously never use it and I never get in accidents, except when I backed my boat into my sisters car and ripped her license plate in half. Maybe if the horn had worked I could have alerted someone to move the car, even though I never really even saw it. I probably should just honk at regular intervals, maybe every 30 seconds. That's probably what I'll do once I get the horn fixed. I want to mount it (them actually- there's 2 horns, a high and a low note, in order to produce a beautiful symphonic melody much like a choking moose and an angry mallard- ah, the sounds of nature) facing backwards, that way I can alert people who are following me too closely or are about to be inadvertently backed into. Other than that, I'm not sure what the horn is good for. I guess the horn may help prevent an accident, but I usually find the brakes suffice.

The horns actually work. There's a problem somewhere else. The fuse was blown, so it originally looked like an easy fix. But I replaced that and was still no closer to achieving that elusive safety.

The wire coming from the horn is yellow with a green stripe, but it's pretty much the electrical equivalent of Barry Sanders, juking back and forth and impossible to follow under the hood. I did find a yellow wire with green stripe (more or less- all the wires in my truck are actually kind of grayish at this point) ending at a terminal in the fire wall. I checked with my multimeter and found no continuity between it and the horn, which means either that's where the break is, or it's a totally separate wire. After cutting it I found out it's a totally separate wire. Who would have thought such a little wire would go to the distributor? Ironically, in an effort to pass the safety inspection I totally incapacitated my truck. I was able to fix it, although I'm afraid the next big pump is going to break apart my work and kill my truck. If only I had a horn to alert everyone.

See, you can't even tell where I fixed it.

Miracle on Beretania St.

2010-01-16T22:13:00.000-08:00

Today I was blessed by a real, live angel. A hairy, stinky angel walking around Chinatown peddling hot super glue.

For some time now I've been having a problem with the safety of my speargun, an evil mechanism which is basically like a parasite on my gun. From time to time it surreptitiously slides to the safe setting, unbeknownst to me until I sneak up on a nice fish like an 8th degree black belt ninja grand master and then can't pull the trigger (at which point my frustration peaks with a crescendo of profanity through my snorkel). I was slapped in the face with this curse yesterday (which was a tough day of fishing even without gear malfunction), so I finally decided to take matters into my own destructive hands and fix that gun. However, my despair reached rock bottom when I found we were out of Super Glue, which I intended to use to permanently glue the safety off, or more likely, to accidently glue my finger to the safety, so I would always know it's exact position. Dark times indeed.

But today I was walking back to my car across from Aala Park with a bag full of bananas and bitter melon when the heavens parted. I didn't actually see the event when this Saint of Super Glue, Angel of Adhesives, came fluttering down from the clouds. By the time I saw him he was hobbling down the sidewalk looking like a living reminder to get your vaccinations. Then he asked me, with the voice of an angel that has been punched in the throat a few times, if I wanted to buy some super glue for $1. In the store it is $5, he informed me. I was dumbstruck by my coincidental, divinely coincidental even, need for some super glue. Not too dumb to fail to take advantage of the bargain though.

Clearly it is God's will that I buy that stolen glue, fix my gun, and use it to kill fish like a mighty oil spill. I don't plan to disappoint Him.

2010-01-12T19:47:00.000-08:00

I just finished working on my boat ALL DAY, save a couple hours in the morning when it was a little cold for my liking. As you can see, I have masterminded a new electrical system that even Clark Grizwald would be proud of. Of course, he wouldn't be able to understand it, since he doesn't know the simple language of electrical tape wrapping I invented to compensate for the fact that I did the whole thing with only one color of wiring, thereby saving $5.

Right after taking this photo I flipped the whole apparatus over and bolted it down, and amazingly it all worked. Except for the one thing I set out to fix. That's still broken.

The more observant of you may be wondering what those loose wires are hanging out of the side of my electrical box. That, in fact, is the start of my LED lighting system. By leaving them to be free-range wires I'm saving $55 over what may be considered the safer option of waterproof 2-pin receptacles. I'm not one that likes to tell people what to do, but I will suggest you sort of avoid that area of the boat.

I know it all looks great, but it also represents a considerable step forward in safety for me. The only required safety gear I'm missing is a throw-able flotation device and visual signaling device. I might even get those at some point, if I can find a good deal. But I still don't intend to get a fire extinguisher, so just look out for those wires.

Sports on TV

2010-01-11T18:51:00.000-08:00

Lately there has been some great action in the sports world. Baseball has elected, and more enjoyably denied, players to the Hall of Fame, the NFL is a month away from crowning a champion, and NBA players are entertaining us with their shooting- not just on the court either! (By the way, I think a fair punishment for Gilbert Arenas is to make him wear these uniforms:

) So why, with so many events showcasing million dollar men with face-melting speed and chemically-enhanced power, is ESPN and FoxSports still boring us with Poker and NASCAR?

I'm not going to debate whether these are sports or not. This isn't vocabulary class. I don't care. The fact is, they will make you drowsy. In 37 states you cannot, by law, watch Poker and operate heavy machinery at the same time. Same goes for the other events/sports that sometimes slip in, like darts, bowling, ice skating, track and field (I mean, come on), and I'm sure there's a few others I'm missing here, but that doesn't mean they don't suck and I don't loathe them, it's just that I can't recollect them at present.

I've heard it argued that sure, poker doesn't require a conditioned body, but it takes fatiguing mental focus. Well, so does accounting. Maybe we should film a CPA and watch him for a few hours on ESPN. The World Series of Accounting- a new Olympic sport by that logic. For that matter, getting high and playing Pac-Man on your Sega is a sport. So many corners, so many ghosts, so little brain power.

What people want to see, I've come to realize, are giant people smashing into each other, or if not that, at least throwing something really hard at others. So there it is right there; that's the recipe you have to follow if you intend to entertain me, Poker. It's simple. Maybe every time you want to draw a card, you have to get it from Brock Lesnar.

Maybe, NASCAR, instead of driving in a circle for seven mind-numbing hours you can do ANYTHING else. ANYTHING! Even post-game press conferences, complete with coach meltdowns and star player tantrums, are more interesting than NASCAR. Watching Bob Ross paint is infinitely more interesting than NASCAR. The greatest NASCAR movie of all-time, Talladega Nights, ended in a foot race! That's how you do it. But first take some steroids or something, because Will Ferrell and Borat didn't exactly light up the radar gun with their speed.

In conclusion, here's a simple test so ESPN knows what is acceptable to put on TV. If the "athletes" you are showcasing would get fired for bringing a gun to work, then that's not a sport. Case closed.

Seven Stages of Grief

2010-01-07T17:00:00.000-08:00

When affected with bad news- lay-offs, illness, football playoff loss- it is common to feel tremendous grief. Trust me, I know; my boat recently sank. Everyone deals with this kind of stress differently- alcohol, drugs, late night 1-900 calls, jaywalking, human trafficking, grand theft auto, lawlessness. Some people might try to avoid this and call a therapist. I, personally, have always been a do-it-yourself kind of guy. If you're like me, you hate calling for help. Fortunately, there is something called the "Seven Stages of Grief" to help us understand the emotional roller coaster that follows your loss. Now, I should mention I'm not a licensed psychologist, but like I said, my precious, precious boat sank, so I'm pretty sure I know the stages.

Contrary to popular belief, the first stage isn't panic. That's the second stage. The first stage, as many of you should know, is to admit you have a problem. Be brave! Take a stand and say, "Hi, my name is _____, and I have a problem!" This should actually be quite easy, but there are several excellent indicators of a problem in case of ambiguity. If, while at the helm, you are wondering who has the right of way, you or that snapper on your starboard side, that's an indicator that something is amiss. If your anchor line, no longer under tension from a floating boat, is gleefully dancing around in the surge like a cockerspaniel off its leash, that's a sign of a problem. If normally you enter your boat like a bull walrus attempting to board a lifted Ford F-Superduty, but now you smoothly descend into your captain's chair- problemo, pilikia, big trouble. Congratulations, now that you've calmly identified your problem, it's time to kick it into Stage 2.

Begin panicking. At this point, panic is the only emotion that will motivate you to collect the twenty objects floating away in twenty different directions, eighteen of them defying long-standing laws of physics in an effort to elude you. A calm and sensible mind will see an entire ocean-going vessel headed for the abyss and forget about the $3 water bottle headed down-wind at 5 kts. But by panicking you can channel the energy of a hallucinogenic mongoose and retrieve that water bottle, as well as the spare wesuit, gas tank, two coolers, and dry boxes full of valuables (veritable modern day treasure chests!) setting sail for exotic corners of the earth. After all, these provisions will be essential for your next stage, which is to concoct knuckle-headed schemes to retrieve your boat.

Hopefully you've been concocting far-fetched ideas since the first moment of crisis, greatly overestimating your ingenuity as well as your raw strenth. Now, at Stage 3, you get to cling like a refugee to the raft of wreckage you just collected and lay out the details for the brilliant idea you've schemed up to save the day. I personally was inspired with an epiphany from the heavens to make a floating pulley out of a cooler, a gas tank, and miles of rope swinging in the current like the arms of anemones attempting to snag some shipwreck survivors. It would have worked too, if only we had one more person, a carabiner, and there was no such thing as gravity. In the end, if you ever hope to move to Stage 4, you will need to cease with your inane efforts and call someone who knows what they're doing. But don't rush this! As you all know, it is important to futilely toil at length before even considering looking for help. Yes, you face insurmountable odds and certain failure. But that didn't stop them from making laws banning cell phone use while driving, and it shouldn't stop you from tying knots you just invented to produce a bridle so that the extreme force you're imagining your biceps producing will be evenly distributed on the boat's transom. Of course, inevitably you will have to seek help from someone who knows what he's doing.

So I called Mike Hatcher, unparalleled gun craftsman and second only to Robert Ballard in his wrecked boat expertise. He, of course, had my boat floating and towed back to the dock in the amount of time it took me to recover from being shocked by my submerged battery, which at that point had become a chemistry experiment. The revelation of your boat actually floating, right there, on top of the water, is cause for great euphoria, an indicator that you've arrived at Stage 4. Adding to the excitement of that amazing sight is that in order to revive your drowned motor, you'll need to pull apart its every piece for cleaning. I had always wanted to pull the whole thing apart, carefully separating pieces to preserve gaskets, then prying them apart with a screwdriver when that didn't work, just to see what was inside. Up to this point though I had always refrained, since everytime I worked on my motor I seemed to end up with an extra bolt or nut I couldn't quite place, causing crossed fingers and some of my longest breath holds as I hoped for the motor to start when leaving anchor at a remote corner of the island like Kaena Pt. But now there was no choice but to tear it apart, the sooner the better! The excitement! Until you don't have the right wrench to get the bolts out of the intake manifold, the ones on the starter bracket seem stripped, and the flywheel won't budge, even at the urging of a hammer. Alas, it is time to end that wonderful period of optimism and excitement and move beyond the jubilation of Stage 4 into the despair of Stage 5.

Despite your best eforts, you will fail to fix your boat, because it sunk, as in went under the ocean, a very unnatural place for your motor. Agony and despair are a given at this point. Unfortunately, the more you love your boat, the more it will cripple your life. I am an overprotective parent and my boat is my only child. I moped for days wondering how this could have happened, thinking, "I thought bad things only happened to good people." Eventually it got so bad I decided to call and ask for help; my boat was headed to a mechanic. This was only as a perfunctory exercise, since I was sure if it could be fixed I would have had it fixed by this point. I mean, I had already done everything the Evinrude Shop Manual, common knowledge, and Google could recommend to fix the carburetor and starting system. It turned out it was a bad power pack. I was way off.

Your boat fixed, you finally arrive at Stage 6: the stress and uncertainty of venturing back out in the high seas. Leaving for distant reefs on your resurrected boat is like using a parachute you purchased at a recently deceased sky-divers estate sale. To your ears, every noise from the motor sounds like Uncle Buck's backfiring Mercury coupe, and every ripple looks like a ship-swamping tsunami. But you must press on if you ever hope to reach Stage 7 and end your grief.

In Stage 7, my personal favorite stage, you will finally return to normal. You will once again dedicate all your free time, and most of the time you should be working, to cruising on your boat, searching for fish. You will finally put the ordeal behind you. Although you may still need to call friends for help. After all, you can only eat so many fish yourself.

Fantasy Football

2010-01-04T16:52:00.000-08:00

When I mention fantasy football, which is often, a lot of people say they don't really understand it. They go on to show their ignorance with blithering questions about points, flex positions, the draft, and a lot of other stuff a real fantasy manager has never heard of. Yes, a working knowledge of those subjects will lead to wins, but those can actually hinder your efforts toward fantasy football's real goal, which is to trash talk like a schoolyard bully (you know, "your mama's so fat she had to get baptised at Seaworld" type stuff). In fact, fantasy football is actually the appropriate forum to take it up a notch and use outright slander and libel.

As an example, at the beginning of every season I post a message entitled "Official Press Release" in which I claim my team, The Hawaii Cocksparrers, is the undisputed favorite, then proceed to question the level of sobriety and sexual orientation of every other manager in the league in turn. Then there are 16 or 17 weeks (WEEKS!) of play in which you have to continue. It is a grueling endeavor, and I'm sure that when Lance Armstrong said running a marathon was the hardest thing he ever did, it's only because he has never played fantasy football. Now, in fantasy football, just like life in general, it's best to pick one weak opponent at which to direct the majority of harassment, rather than try to spread it around the whole league. I, for example, chose the father of one of my friend's, a middle aged man in Tennessee who I have never met. Of course, it's easy since he doesn't know a running back from his back flab, he spends most of his time hungover in a gutter after his gay orgies, and his mama's so fat her favorite food is seconds.

Earlier I mentioned that wins can impede your ability to trash talk. I would know, I'm a winner. This year, as you can imagine, I finished first. For the previous three consecutive years the Hawaii Cocksparrers finished third, and we would have placed higher if it weren't for some poor referee calls and sloppy field conditions. But once I finished last, or maybe slightly below that. That year may have in fact been my most successful season of smack talk. Anytime I would win, and I beat my rival twice for my only two wins (I won't say his name here, but by changing only one letter it conveniently becomes Old Man Shitley), it was a huge disgrace for the losing team (Tennessee Tighty Whities, in this case). No matter what he accomplished for the rest of the year, I could always remind him that he lost to the worst team in the league- The Hawaii Cocksparrers.

Which reminds me of one more point. Your team name is very important. I have been banned from espn.com for using the name Cocksparrers. I was able to briefly trick the system by changing to the o to a zero, becoming C0CKSPARRERS. But that's when I got banned. Could I have picked another name? I guess I could have, but my team would have lost all its mana, its mojo, its swagger. I cite the TN Tighty Whities as a perfect example. That's one you can easily repeat in any company- work, school, church- and therefore it's highly inappropriate. Plus Hawaii Cocksparrers is too long to fit on the scoreboard, so it's abbreviated Hawaii Cocks... which I can only imagine brings titillating laughter to the rest of the league, even if all those homos won't directly admit it.

In conclusion, fantasy football is about superior wit and verbal abuse right to the edge of misdemeanor, which is why I am current league champion. That's basically all there is to know. Except for one other thing. Yo mama's so ugly Tiger Woods wouldn't date her!

OCD

2010-01-03T21:33:00.001-08:00

Some people have accused me of being a little bit obsessive compulsive. I'm not too sure if that's true. I cite exhibits A & B, my disorganized hair -do (hair don't) and business receipt filing system (not so much system, as cardboard box) as examples of my ability to deal with adverse situations without anxiety. I've heard of people with OCD that can't drive over bumps without stopping to check if their car is falling apart. And while it may be true that I often think pieces of my truck are falling off, I'm usually right. So I don't think I'm OCD, except in one area in particular.

I'm pretty sure I have Prayer OCD. It stems from childhood, which is a perilous time. As a child your mind is not quite as acute and you don't always fully understand situations around you; all you want to do is eat toaster pizzas and play video games. So in other words, it's like your constantly drunk. Just look at kids- they scream in public, they can't drive, they laugh their grimy little heads off at cartoons. Kids are constantly drunk (this is why kids aren't allowed to drink, they'd be doubly drunk, perhaps a future blog subject), so it's a very dangerous time indeed. Anyway, at some point in my drunken stupor called childhood, some nun or something told me to say a "Hail Mary" every time an ambulance passes. And now I do it every time. I thought about giving it up, but I can't. Maybe I know that sooner or later I'll be the one in the ambulance. Or maybe it's just OCD.

But my condition isn't manifested by praying too frequently. It's not like I'm down here talking God's ear off. I realized my Prayer OCD when I really started thinking about my two main go-to prayers. Ever since I can remember I have always said a prayer right before bed. I always ask for some good rest, specifically requesting that I may sleep well "tonight and tomorrow morning," as though God wouldn't figure out what I meant if I said, "Bless me with some rest tonight." In fairness to me, it is ambiguous. If I don't add that I want to sleep well in the morning also, God may find it fit to have me wake up at midnight and be peppy like a mongoose on Red Bull. Granted, I'm not the type of person who has ever felt even slightly "peppy" in my life (I'm not sure I've ever even used that word), but it could happen if I didn't ask to sleep well in the early morning hours too. I tried to stop laying out the timeline for my sleep in my prayer, but I couldn't stop. Maybe it's OCD. The other time I always say a prayer is when I go diving. I always ask to be free from any hazard that would cause "death or hospitalization." I'm pretty cool with a little mangling, right up until I have to go to the hospital. I haven't even considered changing this prayer to anything more general or brief, except that sometimes when I don't have anything planned for awhile I leave out the hospitalization part. Maybe I have OCD, but I'm not greedy.

Other than that I don't pray for too much. It just doesn't make too much sense to me. For instance, why would my prayer for the person in the ambulance do him or her any good? Did God plan to let that person die, but since I asked otherwise he reconsidered and decided my plan was better? Sounds unlikely. But, I guess it doesn't hurt to throw your petitions up to The Big Man, as long as you realize he is the creator of the universe not a magical genie or Santa Claus. You know, just throw your worries and cares up to Him. I guess that's why I say my prayers. That or OCD.

2009-08-31T23:20:00.000-07:00

Zorak

2009-05-26T11:39:00.000-07:00

I always see these ads on Facebook trying to get me to "cartoonize" myself. But I already know what cartoon I look like: Zorak. I've known for awhile, and it's never really bothered me. But I'm getting sick and tired of toiling in obscurity while Zorak's getting rich by copying my scrawniness, bad posture, weird looking face, and general disdain.

Color me green and I'm indistinguishable from a giant locust. Think I've got a lawsuit?

Ala Mo Ono

2008-09-18T16:15:00.002-07:00

I’ve still never seen a single ulua around Oahu’s wrecks. I’ve sure heard plenty stories though. I’ve heard about swarms of uluas, big uluas that make their homes in the interiors of these artificial reefs. I’ve heard enough stories to provoke me into searching for these fabled fish. That’s how I ended up on the Sea Tiger one morning. The search for prey is probably the reason the onos were there too.
Scuttled to make an artificial reef, the Sea Tiger sits upright on the sea floor 120’ below the surface. It’s a fairly new “wreck,” and reef life is still working on initiating it into the brotherhood of underwater habitats. It’s a big wreck too. Sometimes on Waikiki’s YO-257 you can see end to end, but the Sea Tiger is a bigger ship in dirtier water. This wreck’s big enough to have two moorings, a feature anyone who has shared a mooring with a SCUBA boat can appreciate. It’s also only a short paddle from a big beach with safe parking and showers in the middle of town. I didn’t know it yet that fall morning, but by that afternoon I added the possibility of an ono-sighting to my list of incentives for diving the Sea Tiger.
Kurt and I launched early from Ala Moana Beach Park in order to beat the SCUBA charters out to the Sea Tiger. Over the flats, past the surfers, and out to the precise spot in the open, blue expanse indicated by Kurt’s GPS. We hoped to arrive before the SCUBA divers in order to search for big game before a wall of bubbles scared it off. I can’t remember now if we succeeded in this goal or not. If so, it wasn’t for long. Boats showed up and left, replaced by new boats, for much of the morning (recreational SCUBA divers are restricted to less than 20 minutes on the wreck due to its depth).
Fish were scarce, but I knew there were opelu kala around. That’s not exactly the fish I had come for, but it is at least the tastiest of all the surgeonfish (which, frankly, is like being the smartest student on the short bus or the sanest patient in the whole asylum). Of course, once I decided to target them, I couldn’t even find opelu kala anymore. I was dropping to about 70 feet and leveling off, leaving me 20-30 feet off the deck, where I patrolled for dinner. After a few of these dives I spotted a legal-sized opelu kala. I descended towards him, of course causing him to flee deeper upon noticing my pursuit. I followed him a short distance, closing in, fully extending the gun, ultimately depressing the trigger. The shaft entered behind one gill, exited just behind the other, and came to a stop stuck in the ship. It wasn’t coming out easily; I would have to head up and come back for it in a few minutes. My next dive I began fiddling with the shaft, trying to close the barb and finesse it out. At 105 feet that quickly got frustrating, so I braced my fins against the deck and YANKED! The shaft pulled free, along with a golf-ball sized chunk of the Sea Tiger. I shrugged it off. Oops, what are you gonna do?
I had had my fill by this point- battling at 105 feet for a fish I would normally pass up at 30 feet. My shooting line was twisted into a natty dread of monofilament, still threaded through an opelu kala at some point, but I just threw it all in a heap into the kayak. I took off my weights and fins and added them to the heap too. I had barely had time to gut the opelu kala when Kurt yelled, “ONOOOOOS!” Without putting back on my fins or weights, I grabbed the handle of my camera housing and slipped back into the water, kicking like a frog, futilely chasing after one of the ocean’s swiftest predators. Kurt grabbed the camera and I returned to the kayak to pull on fins and ready my gun, a stock (one band) Marc Valentin 110 with a reel, at this point accessorized with the opelu kala hopelessly tangled in the shooting line.
Untangling the line was proving to be quite a puzzler. Reviewing the footage, you can at one point see my legs hanging into the water as an ono swims almost under the kayak, prompting yells, wails of impatient agony, from Kurt to hurry me along. Eventually I do get in, and see Kurt is close to the prowling onos, within 10 feet, and they’re big.
I closed in on the fish too, or at least the distance between us closed. I guess it was only by luck that the fish hung around so long in the first place; I can’t seem to recall making a stealthy, tactical approach. The onos seemed to just mill around us. Each fish in the pack exceeded 40 pounds, but there were a couple that really drew your attention. Getting to business, I moved at an angle to intercept their path. As they passed in a caravan from my right and at an angle slightly away from me, I picked out one larger individual. Briefly, he turned broadside to me, a mere 12 feet of the ocean’s vast expanse separating us. I extended the gun as he twitched back to a path angling away from me. Instinctively I fluttered off a few quick kicks and did my best Stretch Armstrong impersonation, trying to close the gap. Then I relaxed and let the gun lower.
If the situation required urgency I would have already blown it long ago. I knew I needed a really good shot if 1.) the single band and 6.3 mm shaft of my 110 were going to have the penetration power needed, and 2.) I was going to incapacitate it enough to prevent it from speeding off, spooling my reel, and taking my gun with it. The ono was well within range of the canons many divers use to spear them, but my gun is on the sissier side of the spectrum. Taking down a big ono with a Marc Valentin 110 is something like bringing down a deer with a .22. In the back of my mind there were still some questions about what sort of fury might be unleashed once I pulled the trigger on one of these guys, but I was pretty sure, kind of sure maybe, that I could land one if it veered off and came right at me.
Just then, one veered off and came right at me. This wasn’t the biggest of all, but it was definitely among the bigger ones. Definitely big, was the bottom line. It swaggered directly at me, then paraded broadside in close range- 6 feet or so. Close enough to activate the launch sequence. I gripped the gun’s handle with both hands, as though it was a Luger, took aim, and let the shaft do its thing. Immediately I saw I smacked it right in the gill plate, a great shot, but my nerves weren’t at ease just yet. The fish was obviously hurting, blood streaming out of it like smoke trailing a plummeting B-17. But did the shaft fully penetrate, allowing the barb to toggle open and grip the fish? I couldn’t tell, because the ono was dragging me in a counter clockwise circle; I couldn’t get a good look at its other side. Unsure of this critical detail, I played the bleeding fish gently. Fortuitously, I had changed the shooting line just the previous day. A little detail like that can be so important, a lesson I usually learn the hard way (for instance, had we had a second gun that day we could have picked up another ono, which kept swooping in on the fracas). Even with the ginger treatment I was giving the mortally wounded ono, it had pulled only a few feet of line from my reel.
Kurt went down with a knife and the idea of finishing the ono off once and for all. Up to this point the ono showed few hints of its speed and power, but Kurt must have roused up some sort of bad memories from the ono’s childhood, because it sprung back to life and thrashed away, taking a little more line from the reel and thwarting Kurt’s approach. Although unable to introduce his knife blade to the ono’s skull, Kurt did at least get a good look at the shot. It had indeed pierced through both gill plates. Now all I had to do was horse it up.
On the classic spearfishing video “Epic,” Travis Kashiwa narrates the footage of his struggle with a speared ono by saying, “I was just trying to make pretend I knew what I was doing. But as you can see, I had no clue.” I don’t know Travis Kashiwa, but by all accounts he’s an excellent diver, one whose prowess I could only hope to emulate. At this point I think I was doing a pretty fair impersonation. Just like Travis on “Epic,” I was getting thrashed about by an ono, without any real good idea of what I was doing. Things had pretty well turned into a rodeo; back and forth I rode the fish, trying to grind its brain to a halt with the cold steel of my knife. At last, a final shudder, the beast was subdued. Kurt and I lifted our heads from the water, the panorama of Honolulu’s skyline over our shoulder, exchanged a high five and let out cries of victory.
All this time a SCUBA charter was moored to the opposite end of the wreck, its divers oblivious to the thrilling encounter with the onos and the ensuing battle. On the beach, though, people took notice, some reconsidering swimming in the same waters as such a sea monster. We took it to Kurt’s bike shop and hung it on the scale. 55 pounds! I never weighed the opelu kala.
Next stop was my butcher block, the normal spot where I fillet fish, Kurt’s sidewalk. In all other respects Kurt maintains a real neighborly existence, but our propensity for catching fish must at times stretch his neighbors’ patience thin. Coolers of chum have ripened for days in the sun in his yard, and like I said, more than once I’ve turned his sidewalk into a sacrificial altar. I like to think we soothed things a little by handing out some ono steaks. There was plenty to go around after all.
Ono is one of the best, if not the best, food fish in Hawaii. It is suited for most any method of preparation. Forget sauces, spices, or stuffings, just heat it up and it’s delicious. Heck, don’t even bother with that. It doesn’t get much better than ono sashimi. Needless to say, I wasn’t disappointed to be eating ono instead of oats and canned peas for dinner night after night.
That ono is one of my greatest catches of all time. When I reach the Pearly Gates and St. Peter asks what I accomplished on Earth, I think I’ll start with, “Well, I never saw an ulua on a wreck, but let me tell you what I did see…” Even the footage Kurt grabbed of the ono rodeo makes me smile a little whenever I watch “Oahu Still Get Fish.” But big onos aren’t an anomaly on the Sea Tiger. There was an even larger one that I didn’t get. And since that day I’ve seen Harold Gibson boat one over 40 pounds that yanked two floats and a long tagline half way to Jalalabad in the time it took for his bluewater gun to stabilize from its recoil. Then on another occasion I saw a nice ono on the wreck but was unarmed. So, I’ve still never seen an ulua on one of our wrecks, darn it, but just maybe that’s because I divert too much attention toward the surface, toward the domain of the ono.

Dream Day

2008-09-18T16:15:00.001-07:00

“Dream Day”
Scattered about the living room, everyone reclines stagnantly after dinner. The meal Kurt prepared of pan-fried uku, like an eruption from Vesuvius, has stopped everyone in their tracks. Now Derek, Kurt, and his three friends (attractive, female friends, as Kurt and Derek’s luck would have it), gaze at the television, where “Legends of the Blue” plays. The classic spearfishing video stars Derek’s childhood idol, Bruce Ayau. A distinctive diver with his black ponytail and cotton socks, distinguished by his diving prowess which Derek could only dream of imitating.
Kurt, a scholar in all pursuits, appears to be studying the video, gleaning bits of information on stalking technique, diving form, and generally looking good on video that he can later apply. In actuality though, Kurt’s pondering another Longboard Lager- a scholar and a respectable drinker to boot. “Bruce takes advantage of the uku’s curiosity,” narrates the film just before the speakers project the pop of speargun bands slinging the shaft- the uku’s death knell. Derek was using his modicum of meteorological knowledge (limited mostly to haphazard observations followed by inane speculation) to forecast the next day’s dive conditions, but the sight of Bruce dispatching the uku prompts recollections of his own uku encounter.
From the surface, the sea floor eighty-five feet below was clearly visible. The water was clean off much of the southeast coast; Derek and Kurt knew because they were busy drifting past it in the current. A high tide winds the current up like a toy car, letting it go on the tide shift and turning the waters just offshore into an HOV lane. But the wind was moderate and the divers were able to drift alongside their kayak, straying on brief forays then scurrying to catch up, like a dog following its master.
A few fish already adorned Derek’s kui. Two moana kali, defying nature’s laws by becoming even more beautiful after death, glowed pink furthest down the line. They had been speared earlier around boulder patches before the current picked up. More recently a small uku was added. Like an armoire collector on Antique Roadshow, the uku had been thoroughly inspecting Kurt’s flasher. As Derek approached, the uku wafted away, but not fast enough, and nowhere near far enough. At 100 feet Derek caught up to the uku and fired his spear into it. Down but not out, the uku ran line off Derek’s Marc Valentin reel. But its efforts would succeed only in delaying its ultimate demise.
Now Derek was dropping through the blue water, rays of sunlight giving way to an unfolding deep blue expanse as he descended toward a boulder patch, serving as a mall for reef fish, a food court for a spearfisherman. Behind a ridge he took up residence, peering over its top while keeping most of his body hidden from view. Mamo fluttered atop coral heads in small groups, and a few hinalea loped along. A sandbar shark, a species whose hunched back looks in need of a chiropractor, slid in from the side then took off after getting a look. A minute and a half after Derek left the surface a pot-bellied uku suddenly appeared, surveying the reef from a slight elevation. Derek relaxed, melted his green and yellow wetsuit into the ridge’s algae as much as possible, but knew time was expiring. Noticing that it had halted its approach, Derek crept toward the big, silvery slab.
Life is good for a big uku. Unlike a law firm or internet chatroom, Oahu’s reefs are not thick with predators. An 18-pound uku is pretty much Chairman of the Board. If there was a movie about reefs around Oahu, The Rock would play the big uku.
However, word had passed from coral head to coral head that already today two ukus were impaled and dragged to the surface where they met their end- the work of divers. The big, silver uku contemplated this horror as a diver, camoflauged in purple and gray, drifted by on the surface eighty feet above. Years ago, when he lived at the rock outcropping by the sand pit on the shallow reef, a diver had fluttered towards him, a terrifying sight, cheeks puffed out, eyes bulging, then lunged forward and shot a spear, nicking his tail fin and drilling into the reef with an explosion of coralline algae shrapnel. Replaying it now in his primitive mind caused stifling apprehension, unnatural of a big uku. These very feelings gave rise to irritation, a disposition more fitting of a beast with such a toothy snarl. He recalled that his pet sea slug, Sylvester, was mortally wounded in the ordeal. He felt a tinge of anger.
After all, he’s the most efficient and genetically gifted predator on this reef. These days his gonads alone weigh as much as he did in his entirety the day of his near-death experience early in life. Now he has fangs, big ones, like some kind of nasty mamba from the Serengeti. Now he has a belly that can hold four shrimp, three nehu, a hinalea, and a baby uhu; he knows, he tried it last spring. Now he can swim faster, bite harder. Now he’s bad, and this is his domain. The strong current swept that diver past already, why should he worry about that? An uku of his caliber shouldn’t concern himself with anything more than hunting down a meal. Speaking of which, just exactly what is that he sees behind that ridge?
The uku was, indeed, safe from Kurt, the diver who already drifted by eighty feet overhead. Safe for the time being that is, as Kurt is fond of turning the predator into his prey. No uku larger than five pounds is ever really safe from Kurt Chambers, a lesson learned the hard way earlier in the day by a seven-pound specimen. Now Kurt, comfortable in this realm and keen to produce more meat for dinner, scanned his surroundings for a sign of a respectable fish. Behind him Derek burst to the surface and bellowed, “I think I’m gonna need some help!” Kurt wheeled to offer his assistance.
Derek elucidated the problem. “Gut shot on a big uku. My line feels slack and there’s a shark down there, so I don’t know…”
“Hold on, don’t pressure it,” Kurt counseled, following Derek’s snaking reel line first with his eyes, then with his fins. On the bottom Kurt found an 18-pound uku, its side a gaping wound expanding with every thrash against the spear. Its vigorous struggles gained it no ground, as the reel line had snagged a nub of coral. Kurt bounded forward, his left arm a pogo stick hopping across the bottom as his right hand extended and he took aim. All hope for escape was vanquished with a slight flex of Kurt’s trigger finger.
The narration of his favorite video brings Derek back to the present. “Bruce notices a flash in the distance,” announces the narrator in his deep, stoic voice. Distance closes between Bruce and the uku. Tired from a day of diving, Derek closes his eyes now, but he can envision the scene. Bruce glides deeper as the uku swaggers closer. The uku’s perpetual search for food will soon land him on the dinner plate, an irony that briefly plays in Derek’s mind, but then he’s asleep. The uku is no longer pixels on the screen; it’s right in front of him now. A familiar sight, though he would have to get used to the feeling of diving with these cotton socks and black ponytail.

Fall Shootout 2006

2008-09-18T16:15:00.000-07:00

Fall Shootout 2006
I lost the first spearfishing tournament I entered. I don’t mean that I just didn’t win, but I got dead last place. I either finished by weighing in zero fish, or was disqualified for bringing in one that was undersized; I’m not real sure how that was officially scored.
The Fall Shootout begins at a little restaurant in Kailua called Pinky’s. At 8:00 AM one hundred divers (fifty teams of two) are unleashed to shore dive where they please along some fifteen miles of Oahu’s windward coast, as long as they are back by 1:00 PM. Some divers are already dressed in wetsuits by the time the floodgates are opened at 8. Others have parked their cars strategically around Pinky’s in order to avoid the traffic jam and get to their spot first. Miraculously, everyone exhibited patience exiting the parking lot, or at least the two cars I cut off and the one I swerved around didn’t seem to get too bent out of shape.
Kurt Chambers and I began mapping our road to victory a couple months prior to the tournament, pouring over aerial photos and nautical charts like we were planning a war. After a few fruitless scouting forays we hit the proverbial rock bottom, which in our case was a slimy sand substrate about a mile off Ka’a’awa at a drop-off I discovered on an aerial photo. I must have been victimized by camera tricks, because what we ultimately found was a slope from a 60 foot rubble flat to a sand bottom at around 75 feet. We decided to quit wasting time scouting and just dive our familiar grounds at Rabbit Island.
We knew we could outswim the other teams and get the first crack at the fish we hoped would be out there. Even at the time we knew that wasn’t a guaranteed recipe for success, but we didn’t know of any ulua holes so we threw our chips down on hoping fish would be back there and rolled the dice. We had seen plenty of fish behind the island before, and Kurt had even broken up a party at an omilu house that spring and came away with a fifteen-pounder. So even though scouting didn’t pan out, we weren’t totally screwed.
Quite the contrary. In fact, half our plan did, indeed, come to fruition. When we arrived at Makai Pier, the beach facing Rabbit Island, there were at least two other teams already there. But we suited up quickly, attached everything to the buoy, leaving our hands free to speedily stroke the mile out to the island. I believe it took around 40 minutes to get out there, but the important thing is it took the other teams over an hour. We would be able to hit the ridge on the island’s northwest side first, maybe picking up an uhu (there was a prize for smallest uhu over 18 inches). We would be the first to ambush the mu pile by the big boulders half way around the island. We would get to check the omilu house around the back before anyone else and spear any other game lurking back there. But it turned out we were just first to see nothing was home.
I did end up shooting a nice kala pretty quickly, so at least I was on the board. But each team could only weigh two fish. So a four-pound kala was pretty useless without something meaty: an ulua patrolling the deep reef, a lurking uku, maybe even the rare, but not unprecedented, appearance of an awa in the surge. So I strung up the kala and looked for a real prize. I swam to the omilu house, but no one was home. There’s a spot Kurt and I know where more often than not you will get at least one chance at a decent fish- an uku probably, maybe a kahala, but it’s been a kagami before, even an ono. I didn’t know where the fish were this day though. At this point I didn’t really even know where Kurt was.
For a while I thought I was keeping him off to my left and a little behind me. But I eventually realized another team that finally made it to the island owned the buoy I had been tracking. I rode the surge of a swell up the cliff face of the island and grabbed onto a little ledge to look for Kurt. Already occupying the ledge was a sea urchin, who didn’t want to share his perch, but gladly gave the tips of his spines to my fingers. I let go and decided to ride the swell round-trip a couple times, kicking madly and swiveling my head at maximum elevation, but never saw Kurt. I don’t really know what he was doing all this time, although I would later find out what he wasn’t doing: catching fish.
Instead of spending more time looking for Kurt, I worked the nearby pile of mu, a fish that can get a bit hefty and is one of the more respectable species a diver could turn in. I ended up picking up a small one, the young fish’s curiosity, like that of an innocent puppy, resulting in his demise when he rounded the boulder to investigate the disturbance (it was me, with a speargun… surprise!). Like I said, a small one, three pounds, useless for the tournament, but it would be good to steam. Later, I knocked down a fair-sized red, hoping to take honors with the smallest uhu. When we finally crossed paths, I saw Kurt had gotten one just a little larger than mine. He had also picked up a papio.
We expended every last second we were allotted, but alas, we came up empty. We raced back to Pinky’s, the last pair to check-in I think, and turned in our uhus somewhere around 12:59:48. Lance Ohara was measuring fish. He slapped mine down by the ruler. “Too short.” Quickly he slid my 17 inch uhu off into a cooler, replacing it with Kurt’s. “Too short,” and only seconds after handing in our uhus, the last of our hopes vanished as the cooler closed on our fish, too short to be considered for the award of smallest.
To win a tournament like this it is almost imperative to bring back an ulua. Uluas win these tournaments for the same reason Billy Madison won at dodgeball: they are in a size-class above the rest. As I recall, in this particular year, 2006, only two uluas were turned in, both by one team- the winning team of Vernon Takata and Shawn Fujimoto. I saw some other impressive fish: a fantail with scales the size of Santita’s corn chips and a grill-top sized kala that I remember got an extra look from Kurt (times have changed) among others.
Kurt and I both admitted we got it handed to us that day. Still, it was interesting to me that 100 guys could go out, many of them to grounds they’ve grown up diving, and fail to bring back many real monsters. This was an even more prominent theme in the next tournament I would attend, the 2007 Gene Higa Memorial, in which no uluas or ukus were caught. In the Fall Shootout, Dave Sakoda, at that time the best diver I had ever dove with (quite possibly still the most lethal diver I have dove with), caught little more than Kurt or me. Spearfishing is just so hard to begin with, but when you have to count on catching two of your best fish of the year in a few hours some specified morning… Well, I’m literally the last person who knows anything about that.

Let Me Tell You About My Weir

2008-06-05T13:59:00.000-07:00

You wouldn't let a bunch of schoolkids cross a freeway on their own at the end of the school day. No, you'd want to give them a footbridge, a crossing guard, or even better, a giant waterslide that bypasses the whole thing. And that's just what our weir (pronounced like the word we're) does, except instead of inedible school children, we're dealing with valuable and delicious salmon. And though there isn't a road within 40 miles of the lake, there is a 300 foot waterfall fraught with jagged rocks and lots of dangerous gravity. Yes, nature fouled up and failed to facilitate the lake with an exit for gourmet, red-fleshed salmon, so weir enter stage left.
Weirs have been around for a long time. The first weir was made millenia ago, likely as a public works project to give a job to Cro-Magnon zoologists who would otherwise spend all day fishing, complaining about the current state of donuts, and otherwise a being a bane on society. These archaic weirs were apparently a big hit, because since then some cultures somewhere used them to catch some kind of fish. At least that's what I remember learning in some class at some school I went to. Of course your modern hatchery technician is a gentler, more informed breed than the savage weir fisherman of yore. Our weir offers sage passage to salmon in a gesture of friendship- like a peace pipe or the Statue of Liberty. Of course, it's a trick. When they come back we'll net and kill them by the tens of thousands.

Here's a photo of the weir to give you an idea of the modern marvel we're dealing with. The first order of business is of course getting fish to the weir. In the past the salmon (called smolt at this stage in life) were released from pens and allowed to head to the weir on their own volition. But the smolt is not a trustworthy creature. The little cretins do undesirable things, such as getting eaten by trout and lounging around for an extra year, as though they are a bunch of dropouts and stoners and the lake is their parents' basement. At Deer Lake we encourage valor and integrity in our salmon, and in order to instill this, we pump them out of their pens and shoot them through 2/3 of a mile of pipe into the ocean (with the price of gas, air travel is out). Some fish have managed to escape anyway. Last year a hole got torn in a net, ice pushed the surface of the nets under all winter, and recently, as the smolt were at their smoltiest point, a bear chewed the floats of a pen, half sinking it and allowing smolt, those free-thinking hipsters, to swim away into the lake. These rebellious fish are on their own to make it to the weir. I wish them luck, because if they holdover in the lake and get too large, then next year I will have to kill them, look for encysted or free-living worm-like cestodes in their organs, then rip out various bones in their head. I hope they'll make the right decision.

The de-watering box is another key component of the process. At this time take note of the finely hand-crafted wooden covers. I made those. Anyway, this box allows me to control waterflow through the pipes by manipulating a variety of valves, then checking flow, then swearing when I see its improper level, then repeating the process until the desirable level is established. I do this at least twice a day, as recommended by the American Dental Society.

This is the alternative to the weir. As you can see, if you take it you will get to the ocean shortly. At least some of your pieces.

After the de-watering box, it's just a wild ride down those pipes. It takes me back to my youth when Mike Roy and I were the first people ever to ride The Aquazoid, a dark tunnel of a waterslide at Water Country USA. Eventually this zany, madcap adventure must come to an end. Real-life beckons after all, and these slimy little guys are set to become sport fish, commercially harvested food fish, a part of the natural food chain, and lawyers.

Here we see a few smolt heading down the weir. We've dammed up the front of the weir and due to some sort of hydrodynamic principle, maybe even Bernouli's Law or Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the water sucks out of the stream and shoots over the front of the weir real smoothly. I've got in and tried it. It's real fun if you hit that middle channel. If you're stuck on the side like that little guy in the photo it's less fun.
In addition to skirting the waterfall, the weir allows us to collect fish in a pen at the end of the pipe in order to be counted, measured, etc. But mainly it keeps me from being a bane on society for a month or so at a time.