February 23 - Kayaking on Kaneohe Bay

     We rented a kayak to explore the expansive "disappearing sandbar" in Kaneohe bay, which lies on the Windward Coast across the island from Honolulu.

     The bay, which is the largest sheltered body of water in the Islands, is about 8 miles long and 3 miles wide, and is protected by one of only two barrier reefs in Hawaii (the other is off of Molokai).  There are many coral reefs within the bay where people snorkel and dive.  We brought our snorkels with us, but our goal was to kayak out over the large sandbar the occupies much of the center of the bay.  We kayaked about a mile through slightly choppy water to reach it.

We arrived near low tide, and in spots we had to exit the kayak and pull the boat through the inches deep water.

It's a little strange being a mile from shore in water that laps at your ankles.

Here's a little video of the sandbar.

 While we were floating around we heard the roar of aircraft coming from the Marine Corps Base on peninsula on the east side of the bay.  At first I thought it was helicopters, but then we saw these two fighter planes "attacking" the base.

By the way, the first attack by Japanese wasn't on Pearl Harbor, but actually occurred here nine minutes earlier, when bombers attacked the Naval Station here.

 I couldn't identify the planes as the flew over our heads.

     But they were loud and made some amazing maneuvers.  Later, I did a little googling, and found out they were F-22's, the most advanced fighter planes in the world, and at $417 million a piece, they better be. A total of 187 were made. 

      One of the supposed attractions of kayaking over the sandbar is observing fish, rays, and turtles as the  swim beneath your boat.  We meandered around the perimeter of the sandbar for about an hour, and did sea some schools of silver fish.  We didn't see any of the colorful reef fish that we've seen while snorkeling on other occasions, but that makes sense, because here the bottom is covered with sand. 

     We paddled out towards Kapapa Island, which sits just outside the barrier reef and is a refuge for Shearwaters.  The waves were breaking in two foot high white caps, and we didn't want to try to get past them with our camera protected only by three year old WalMart dry bags, so we turned back.  We did get a nice push from one of the waves, allowing us to surf about fifty yards before it ran out.

     We only had about an hour to return the kayak before closing time, so we headed back.  We hadn't snorkeled, and Diana wanted to at least dip her head into the water to see what she could see.  We had a fifteen leeway, so she stepped off the boat and looked around.  Just then, a green sea turtle swam near, and from my vantage point above the water I was able to direct Diana towards him.  Curiosity drew them together, and she got within 20 feet of the turtle before he turned and swam away.

     We raced back to shore, muscles and lungs burning a little from the effort, making it with minutes to spare.