I saw a huge number of old school surfboards (turns out there are 200, almost all made by Ambrose) a little south of the main part of Kapa’a, stopped in and met Ambrose Curry III, who has lived here since 1969. Turned out he is a fellow native San Franciscan, so we had lots to talk about. We hit it off on all cylinders and even went out in the choppy reef surf on 2 of his big boards (10′ and 11′) and got knocked around a bit while he pointed out landmarks on the shore and mountains.

Here he is standing next to a 15′-4″ board that is 30-7/8″ wide and weighs 40 lbs. It’s styrofoam with epoxy resin. (I saw some spectacular Hawaiian tandem surfing on TV last night.)

I told Andrew about my trouble riding an air mat and he said the really good mats were made by Dale Solomon and called Pneumatic Surfcraft, no longer available. They had, among other things a very roughened up top deck. He gave me a lot of mat riding tips, so I’m gonna give it another try when I get home.

Boy, was it fun to run into a brother native son, and a surfer to boot.

On east side of highway. Everything this lady sells is fresh and good.

By way of contrast, I ate a banana from my hotel’s “continental breakfast” table this morning and it left a bad taste in my mouth. Thinking back, I recall that in Costa Rica, one of the world’s big banana producers, the bunches of bananas on the trees are ensconced in blue plastic bags permeated with insecticides. The Ticos call them “condoms.”

The bananas from this stand are small and sweet, with an almost citrus-like tang.

Rambutan fruits. (Not prickly, but soft on the exterior.) Inside is a tangy gelatinous fruit around a large seed.

Guest editorial by Wayne Jacintho* posted in The Garden Island newspaper July 29, 2013: 

Kauai’s chemical companies (seed farmers) like to tell us they’re feeding the world. Using poisons and genetic engineering, they’ve helped give us an Everest of cheap federally subsidized corn that is fed to cattle, which gives us cheap beef. Since looking into this feeding of grain to a grass-eater, I no longer eat cheap beef. I buy local, and I’d like to tell you why.

My story begins with Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” a book about three sources of meals: American Agribusiness, organic farms, and hunting/gathering. In chapter 4, “The Feedlot”, Pollan purchases an eight-month-old steer in South Dakota and follows his steer to a feedlot in Kansas where it will be fattened for slaughter. He smells the lot’s stench more than a mile before seeing: 37,000 cattle, a hundred or so per pen, standing or lying in a gray slurry of feces, urine and mud, as far as the eye can see.

His steer will exist briefly in this place so different from a farm or ranch that a new name had to be invented: Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, or CAFO, which could not exist without corn that cost CAFOs less to buy than it does to grow, corn that has “found its way into the diet of [cattle] that never used to eat much of it … In their short history, CAFOs have produced more than their share … of polluted water and air, toxic wastes [and] novel and deadly pathogens” and a waste pollution problem “which seldom is remedied at all.”

Read More …

I found this book in The Talk Story Bookstore in Hanapepe and it looked authentic. It was put together by a team of 26 native speakers of Hawaiian Pidgin—their interpretation of the bible for speakers of Hawaiian Pidgin who find the king’s English bible difficult to understand. Below is a page and an excerpt:

John 3:16: God wen get so plenny love an aloha for da peopo inside da world, dat he wen send me, his one an ony Boy, so dat everybody dat trus me no get cut off from God, but get da real kine life dat stay to da max foeva. You know, God neva send me, his Boy, inside da world for punish da peopo. He wen send me fo take da peopo outqa da bad kine stuff dey doing.”

On a grassy hillside in southwest Kauai. Note simple awnings that keep rain, glare off windows.