Steve, Chloe, and Josh: Kayak Adventure

Our Kayak Adventure

Saturday was a huge adventure for us.  So I’m putting up three separate, yet redundant posts.  Both kids were actually excited about writing and posting for once, so I wasn’t going to say “no”.  And I wanted to document what I personally remembered so as not to lose the details to the sands of time.  Since each of the three accounts describe the same events, I’ll leave it up to the reader to choose her/his author.  My entry is super-long, so unless you are a glutton for bad humor, I’d read one of the kids’ versions.  But just so we’re clear, Josh wants everyone to know that in fact, his is the funniest of the three entries.

Steve’s Take:

OK, this is going to be a pretty large blog entry because yesterday (Saturday) was easily the most eventful day of the trip aside from earthquake/tsunami-scare day.  I’m not really sure where to begin and what to include, because there are so many details, and I don’t want to bore my readers with too much prose.   I guess I’ll just write a bunch and you, dear reader, can skip to the really good parts as you like.

I woke to a cranky family that had already been up for a couple of hours getting on each other’s nerves as they wallowed in their boredom without the pleasure of a television to keep them company.  I was already in the doghouse for not planning enough fun adventures on the trip, and so being the last to rise, I wasn’t helping my position much.  I was going to have to rectify matters pronto.  So, after a trip back to the house of the local family that rented us our bikes, to get Josh’s bike repaired (seventh such trip, though all for different bikes and different issues; this time the chain was falling off Josh’s bike every 20 meters or so), Josh and I stopped by a couple of tour companies to inquire about sea kayaking out to the little island that we can see from our stretch of beach.  One company would have charged a little less but they told us that they started the tour a couple of miles down the beach to make the trip to the island shorter.  The other tour company left virtually from our front doorstep and sounded like they provided a bit more of an adventure, not to mention pineapples!  I chose the more expensive option.  The idea was to extricate myself from the doghouse.  We wanted big adventure, right? Oh, the best laid plans of mice and over-confident gringos…

So at about 1:00 in the afternoon (low tide, which is important to the unfolding of the story) we got in our two-person kayaks ready to impress the guide (in his own craft) with our S.F.Bay-kayaking-experience-laden skills. Not that we shirked off any instruction.  They simply had never planned on providing any.  I guess as far as they are concerned everyone is born with an innate understanding of how to row amongst the waves.  Besides, I was already bleeding profusely from the head due to an unfortunate rendezvous, in our swimming pool, with Josh’s two front teeth (you’ve seen the size of those suckers, right?) a few moments earlier. (If you have a son, you don’t have to ask, if you don’t have a son, you don’t want to know.)  So, my point is that the quota for things going wrong for the day had already been reached, right?  So why worry about a silly little thing like how to kayak on ocean waves? 

Well we made it over the big waves near the shore and out to sea without much trouble.  Nothing to worry about.  And we made it to the island without incident, though I did think my arms were going to fall off I was so tired from rowing.  You see, Josh isn’t much help with an oar or a paddle, or whatever the darn things are called.  He did try some of the time, but I’m pretty sure he was just putting his paddle in the water and letting it getting pushed back by the water as we trucked along and then lifting it out again.  I’m not certain he did any actual pushing himself.  Apparently Chloe was a trooper in Carol’s boat, and did a fair share of the work.  It was probably close to an hour of paddling one-way, so I was a bit bushed and not looking forward to the trip back as much as I thought I would be.

Here's some video footage on the island:

In any case, we made it to the island without too much trouble.  Once there, we snorkeled for about half an hour.  When you are as spoiled with scuba diving in tropical climates as Carol and I are, it is hard to be impressed with any given snorkel trip.  We saw maybe ten different species of fish and the visibility was only about 10 feet.  The kids thought it was awesome due to the sheer abundance of life in the water, but we all gave it up pretty quickly when it was apparent we’d seen what there was to see.   So we chose instead to scamper around on the island and watch the thousands of hermit crabs eat the scraps of our bananas and pineapples.  Seriously, there were so many hermit crabs within that half-acre or so of beach that you had to watch wherever you stepped simply to avoid becoming a serial killer.  They were every shape and size.  The variety in the shells was astonishing.  I’m going to have to blog about all the critters we’ve encountered on this trip, but that will have to wait until another day.

One of our thousands of new friends

Four pineapples later, it was back in the kayaks bound for home.  So my shoulders were a bit tired.  No sweat.  Piece of cake.  Easy as pie.  The Thies family eats adventure for breakfast…  Well, not so much.  You see, there is a rocky reef way out to sea, between our beach and the island.  We avoided it well on the way out, but that was during low tide. Now, as high tide approached, there was no refuting the fact that the waves were considerably higher.  At one point the waves were breaking near the reef at an average of between ten and fifteen feet above the level water.  We were way out to sea from the shoreline, but the waves broke on this reef much more violently than they do on the beach.  The guide was trying to communicate with us about how to deal with it, but he was quite a distance ahead and in my defense, he spoke only Spanish, and I had been doing a pretty good job of understanding up to this point.  I was pretty darn sure he was telling me to keep the kayak oriented parallel to the wave crests (and the reef) and to simply row like crazy to get past the rough patch.  It seemed counter-intuitive to me as rolling the boat seemed easier this way, but who the heck was I to question the voice of experience? 

Well, we were doing fine, even having fun riding up and down over these mammoth waves when that one wave from the movie “The Perfect Storm” was suddenly upon us.  Josh and I had managed to find ourselves right smack in the middle of the highest part of it just as it was breaking.  I’m thinking it was about 20 or 25 feet high.  I don’t know, maybe fear exaggerated my perception of it, but I felt pretty small next to that sucker, I can assure you.  Josh had no idea what we were in for.  I, on the other hand, was reciting the “Hail Mary” at light-speed, and I need not remind my readers that I am Jewish.  The tsunami had finally come, just three weeks later than anticipated. 

Well, to render the story of one of the longest moments of my life short, the big one got us.  It got us good.  On an apparent “student-body to the right” play call, the boat rolled, we fell out, I got pushed forward for a first down and then some.  When I finally emerged from the water, my first thought was to find the fumbled football, otherwise known as Josh.  He was bobbing up and down too panicked to scream about 15 yards away from me.  I couldn’t see the kayak anywhere.  Another wave hit, and another.  By the time I finally got to Josh, I had also scooped up both paddles, and now the guide was screaming at me to swim on away from the huge waves and the rocks.  Well, I didn’t really need that advice, but getting it done wasn’t quite as easy as getting it said.  Swimming in a life vest, with a nine-year-old in shock and in tow and carrying two awkward kayak paddles is not easy as wave after wave crashes on you and pushes you in the opposite direction.  The guide tried to row to us to help, but he was quickly dumped from his boat as well.  And when he went swimming after his own kayak, he eventually ended up on the rocks, hundred of yards away.

After what seemed like hours of swimming, but was probably less than five minutes, we got to Carol and Chloe who had somehow, and I’m not ruling out divine providence here, avoided the big waves and made it to the other side of the rough patch intact and in kayak.  So now what?  I could finally see our kayak, maybe a quarter mile closer to the beach, but in the wrong direction.  We needed to go west about a mile, parallel to the beach, before heading north towards land (thereby avoiding rocks, rip currents, and such.)  The kayak was east of us.  Bright orange and therefore easily visible but far enough away that it might as well have been sitting on our living room couch back home in good-ole safe, dry, San Rafael.  Four people, two completely spent.  One kayak that could never hold us all.  No guide.  

Well, to change sports analogies, if you are playing baseball, and it is still only the third inning and you are getting pummeled by the other team, with no chance of a comeback, there is only one logical thing to do, right?  Pray for rain!   Game canceled.  No harm done!  Well I don’t know which one of us had come to that point in their thought process.  I’m pretty sure I was still thinking about football. But we got the rain, nonetheless. One of Costa Rica’s patented daily booming thunderstorms decided to burst at that moment.  The rain was soon coming down so hard I thought for sure I knew how the guy feels who drives that little truck around picking up the golf balls at a driving range.  Only this range was being used by thousands of extremely accurate and sadistic golfers, all swinging simultaneously.  What next?   Were we going to be struck by lightning?  Was it time for a great white shark feeding frenzy?  I wouldn’t rule out a freak meteor accident at this point.  Panic hadn’t set in, but I sure as hell didn’t feel in control of the situation.

Carol was kind enough to switch places with me for a bit.  We figured she is the stronger swimmer, especially when holding on to the kayak and so swimming with all legs (if you haven’t seen my legs, think toothpicks with feet).  And I was the stronger rower in any case (if you haven’t seen Carol’s arms, think chopsticks without the sushi).  We plodded along for a short while, but really had no hope of getting anywhere without a rescue.  And then, there he was.  From out of nowhere in the fog, swooped Aqua-man himself, minus the orange and green wet-suit, plus a beard, and long black curly hair, and a few dozen extra pounds of belly fat, and a glorious motorized fishing dinghy.  He scooped up our kayak, brought it to us, dropped it off and motored off to help our guide on the rocks without so much as a “con gusto” to our unending chorus of “muchas gracias’s”.  We haven’t seen him since, but if we do, a man-hug is in order and a full-on sloppy kiss is definitely not out of the question.

Back in our kayaks, we rowed on, still getting pelted by the rain.  I’d lost my favorite hat and sunglasses and my machismo along with them.  The guide caught up to us unbelievably quickly.  He wasn’t too happy about the huge gash on his foot, but he managed a smile when he saw nobody else was too hurt and nothing of value to his company was lost.  We eventually made it back to the beach and unsuccessfully tried to ride the waves into shore.  Both Carol and I were unable to keep our kayaks right side up on the way in.  But it’s not like we weren’t all washed up already.  We turned in our kayaks and walked home, without fanfare.

I have included a picture of my shoe.  I think that it was destroyed by the kayak as it flew past me in that incredible wave.  I do know the boat hit my leg since I am nursing a pretty messed-up calf muscle injury at the moment.  At the time I didn’t feel anything.  But just picture me walking home with a limp on one leg and a ridiculous looking whip-like motion of my foot on the other so that for every step the sole of the shoe could actually stay between my foot and the rocky road beneath.  Picture me still getting rained on, slumped over as I limped along, exhausted, and defeated.  It really was quite pathetic.  But Carol and I couldn’t stop laughing the whole way home partly because I was so pathetic and partly because we were so happy to still have four living members of the family.  Josh and Chloe were of course already over the whole event, and had run ahead home to get under cover.  I’d cite the resilience of youth, but I’m pretty sure their reserves of energy had something to do with the fact that Carol and I did ALL of the paddling on the way home. 

Today was a much slower day.  We did wake twice in the night to the sound of what seemed to be some incredibly large animal on our metal roof, clanging around like it couldn’t get any traction and then repeatedly falling into some gutter or vent.  The noise would go on and on and was a bit disconcerting.  There were also two more quake aftershocks, one last night and another this morning, both of large enough magnitude to scare the crap out of you if you hadn’t already experienced dozens more just like them in the last couple of weeks.  In addition, Josh and I both got stung multiple times by some very aggressive jellyfish today and had to run home with our legs feeling as we’d been struck by lightning.  Speaking of lightning, the bursts were fantastic over the ocean last night.  It is simply stunning when the whole panorama is lit up by a bolt for a split second.  And we got to see it over and over again as we ate dinner on the beach.

Fun weekend.  Let’s do it again next week.

Look out, because I've got a paddle, and I know how to use it!

Josh’s Take:

Today my family went kayaking because my mom wanted an adventure.  Chloe and my mom were in the same boat, and my dad and I were in a different boat.  When we started kayaking we rowed until we saw a buoy.  Then we waited for everybody else.  When everybody was ready we paddled, and paddled, and paddled.  It seemed to take hours.  Every once in a while, we floated over a ten foot wave.  When we finally got to the island that we were headed to, the guide gave us all some pineapple.  It was juicy.  We gave the rinds to the hermit crabs (which there were thousands of) and they crawled over them greedily.  Not counting the shell, we saw one hermit crab about two inches long.

After that, the guide gave us snorkel gear to put on.  When we were snorkeling my dad saw a blue and yellow fish.  It was the only bright colored fish I saw the whole time.  When I saw it, I chased it around and around until I got salt water in my snorkel.  I couldn’t find it after that.  I got tired and I got out.  So did my mom.  We played sand hangman.  I did two words, and she guessed both: phoenix and hugging.  Then we went over to look at the hermit crabs again.

When my dad and sister got out of the water, we looked at sea urchins and a big smooth box fish in the tide pools.  The fish actually let us pet him. 

This guy was the least skiddish fish ever.  Eventually, he swam off, but only after a lot of coaxing.

My dad found a cave and my mom took a picture of us in it.  When everybody was ready, the guide gave us each a banana and we headed out to sea again.

Not sure why, but Josh loved this "cave"!

On the way back, we went over a fifteen foot wave.  It was cool for about two seconds.  Then a twentyfive foot wave crashed on us.  Everything went dark.  At that point I didn’t care who turned the lights out.  And when I came up, I shot out of the water like a bullet.  The guide tried to help us but he got wiped out as well.  He and his boat landed on some rocks.  He got a really deep cut in his foot because of it.

A man in a motorboat came to help us.  He picked up our kayak and my dad and I got back on it.  The other people we were with, because they were so scared, got the heck out of there.  When we started going again, it started raining so hard that it hurt.  My dad yelled back at my mom, “Was that a big enough adventure for you?”  She never answered though.  When we finally got to shore, my sister and I were so cold that we grabbed the keys and sprinted home.  Obviously, we had a scary, exciting, and very adventurous kayak trip.

Chloe’s Take:

Yesterday we went kayaking to an island and went snorkeling.  My mom and I went in one boat and my dad and brother went in another one.  While we were going to the island everyone was paddling as hard as possible so that we wouldn’t get pushed around by the waves.  Once we got to the island I was so tired from all of the paddling, so we decided to rest for a little bit.  Then, we went snorkeling.  I saw a foot-long fish that looked like a rock and a couple of deep sapphire-blue fish.  After that we went back on shore and saw hundreds of little hermit crabs.  Just before we left we explored some tide pools and saw a black box fish with white and blue polka-dots. 

Finally, we left to go back home.  The adventure wasn’t over yet.  While paddling back, there were many giant waves.  Some were ten feet tall.  The biggest one was at least twenty feet high and just starting to peak at the top.  Unfortunately for my brother and dad, they were right where it was cresting.  The wave devoured them in one giant splash.  We couldn’t find them for a while but we saw their bright orange kayak tumbling in the waves a far way off.  Our guide tried to go rescue them and ended up falling into the rocks instead.  We wanted to go and help them, but we were worried we would get flipped too.  Eventually, they were able to swim over to our kayak and stay there for a little while.  We were all nervous that we wouldn’t be able to get back to shore, with four of us on the kayak at once.  Then we saw a man in a motorboat heading towards us.  He saw the kayak, picked it up, and brought it over.  At first, we thought that he was going to give us a ride back, but that wasn’t the case. 

We all got back in our own kayaks and headed for shore.  Just to make matters worse, it started pouring.  The rain was coming down so hard that it hurt.  After about five minutes, the rain calmed down a bit, but we were still, cold, wet, and miserable.  We were almost at shore, but not quite yet.  To keep our boat from tumbling over in the waves, now that it was white water, we had to keep our boat perfectly straight.  We got past the first few waves, but then we totally wiped out.  Luckily, we were in far enough that we could stand.  I was laughing so hard that our guide thought I was crying.  When I got out of the water, my first thought was, “Aaah, I’m cold.”  My second was “Aaaah, we’re done.”  That was the end of our crazy adventure.

Chloe: Tidepools and Monkeys

Chloe: Today my mom and I decided to take a trip to the tide pools.  We got on our bikes and set off.  Of the three most interesting things we found during the trip, only one was in the tide pool, however.

First, on our way there, we heard some chirping in a tree, so we decided to investigate the noise.  As we surveyed the trees, some birds flew out and were chasing each other.  They were especially graceful.  They were leaf-green birds with yellow wingtips.  I believe they were some type of parakeet.  They were super cool.

Next we got to the beach.  We were looking for some starfish that we saw the other day.  The starfish were different than the one’s back home because they were surprisingly fast.  We wanted to take some pictures of them, since we forgot our camera the first time around.  

In our search for the starfish, we discovered an octopus camouflaged among the rocks.  The octopus was a rust color similar to the seaweed nearby.  He was about the size of my hand when he was all stretched out.  But when the octopus swam, it squirted through the water and contorted its body into a comet shape about the size of my thumb.  We picked him up to examine him more closely, and we found that his little suction cups tickled our fingers.  When we released him he zipped into a tiny hole, no bigger than a centimeter. 

Finally, on our way back home, we heard a strange noise in the trees.  It was something like a cross between and pig’s oink and a dog’s bark.  So we decided to do a little reconnaissance.   When we checked out the treetops we saw about five monkeys.  Two were in their own trees.  The other three were most likely a family, including a baby.  They were a dark brown color, almost black, and sounded like howler monkeys. We didn't really get a good picture, sorry.  But I was thrilled that I finally got to see a monkey!

Josh: Surprising Day

Josh:  Today was a pretty surprising day.  

First, I got up, ate breakfast, and got dressed in my swimsuit.  That wasn’t very surprising.  But then we went to the school nearby and asked to volunteer for something.  They gave us a job.  It was to pick up a lot of trash on the beach.  I thought it was going to be fun, but I got bored pretty fast.  Here is the first surprise.  I found half a wet, sandy vest and cigarettes in wrapping paper.  Isn’t that pretty weird?  After that, my dad and I went to the beach and played in the waves.  Here is the not-so-fun surprise. When we came back and I was about to cool off in the pool, I reached for the beach ball (which I got for 60 cents) and I slipped into the pool.  My left knee and my big toe on my left foot started bleeding like crazy.  It was not fun, but it was unexpected.  I ate dinner, but to my surprise, I didn’t have to eat the chili that my dad made.  He actually let me make my own dinner!  And I already had nachos for lunch!  Now I’m going to bed.  Surprise, surprise…  J

Chloe Surfs too!

Chloe:  Today I had my first surfing lesson!  I was so excited.  First my brother and I practiced catching waves by doing a little boogie boarding.  That used to seem exciting until we went surfing. To start off the lesson, we put the board on the ground and practiced getting up from your stomach on to your feet. You have to put your hands next to your chest, push up, and bring your feet up to the middle back of the board.  At first I was confused about why you don't stand at the middle of the board, until I actually tried it.  When we first got into the water, we just practiced catching waves and paddling to shore instead of standing up on the board.  Then once we got the hang of it, we tried standing up.  It was so difficult.  At first I was very discouraged that I couldn't stand up.  But once I stood up I was so proud.  Now that I had mastered standing up, I had to master keeping my balance on the board.  I stayed up once pretty easily, but then it took a long time to mater staying up.  I had a couple wipe-outs which made me somewhat sad, but then I realized it happens to everyone.  And, I had just started, so it was normal.  During the whole time our instructors had helped us start, chose our waves, and told us when to stand up.  Now my instructor told me to try it by myself.  I was so excited.  It was hard at first with no help, but I eventually got the hang of it.  In a little bit I realized I had gotten so tired.  Surfing is a very tiring sport, so I took a break.  While I was waiting to get my energy back, I thought how satisfied I felt.  I was very happy with myself. Overall, I was very happy I learned how to surf and I very much enjoyed it.

Steve: Just for the record, Carol and I had a lesson too.  But we didn't catch on nearly as quickly as the kids.  I, especially, seem to have no aptitude.  But we're going to keep at it!