Greetings!  Well yesterday I was too tired to write, so I'll catch up today.  Yesterday we drove to the Olivine Pools.  There is a place on the north side of the island where the lava shelf pokes out just a meter or so above sea level.  This lava shelf has been water battered for years so that there are pool areas carved into it.  When the surf is high or when it rains, these pools get filled with water.  The result is a crystal clear water oasis right beside a pounding surf.  Apparently these pools can get quite warm when the sun shines on them and they're not being filled with fresh sea water.  But when we went, it was cloudy and the surf was quite large, so ocean water kept spilling into them.  It was the coolest thing -- there we are, swimming in these deep pools of clear utterly peaceful water right beside a raging surf.  (The surf was downright scary -- I would NOT have wanted to be swept into it!)  Some of the pools had fish in them, and little hermit crabs, and we even saw a sea urchin.  A couple of the pools were really quite deep -- we couldn't touch the bottom, and some people were snorkeling in one of them.  We were very glad we decided to find them and check them out!

Today we had big plans of going down the road to Hana and visiting the rain forest and swimming in some of the waterfalls along the way.  We saw the news this morning and there were cautions about the high surf.  So we thought it might be a great day to visit Jaws - the well-known surfing area for humongous waves (and here you thought that the title "Jaws" referred to a shark thinking I was a turtle on my boogie board and coming to taste me!!  Sorry for the let-down... :) ).  Well, we found the way to Jaws and it was through a pineapple field.  So we left the car where the paved road ended (oh, I forgot to mention that we traded the Jeep last night for a different vehicle -- a convertible Mustang!  If Perry was writing this, that would have been the first thing he mentioned!), and we started walking down a MUDDY road.  And walking.... and walking.  We walked past a dump, and then a few more dumps.  It rained a couple of times.  We came to a 'Y' in the road and went left, and walked some more.  We were about to get discouraged when we heard voices somewhere way behind us and we looked and saw a truck that obviously took the right side of the 'Y'...  We decided that we must have taken the wrong way, and turned around.  We walked and walked through the MUD!  Did I mention that it was muddy?  So muddy that it was sticking to our shoes and we had to stop and scrape them off every few hundred feet.  I only had flip-flops on too, so the mud was flipping up onto the back of my legs.  And the weight of each sandle was so heavy that I had to walk weird to keep them from falling off my feet!  Anyway, we found a short-cut that looked like it got onto the road that the people were on, but by the time that we got onto the road they were on, they had turned around and were headed back to their truck.  We finally caught up to them and they told us that Jaws was back the way we had came!  Argh!  But they said it was only 1/2 mile or so down the road.  So we decided to turn around and go there -- we had come this far already, why give up?!?  So we turned around, and it rained again, some more.  Ok, to make a long story short, we got there!  The hill getting down to the ocean was very steep and there was a big rope that you could hold onto as you went down.  It helped very much.

Once we got down to ocean level, the waves looked pretty big.  But they weren't THAT big.  Until some guys started surfing on them -- then you could tell they were pretty big.  These guys, who were probably anywhere from 5.5 to over 6 feet tall, were probably 1/4 or 1/5 the height of some of the waves -- which meant the waves were anywhere from 15 - 27 feet.  Wow!  A guy and his grandson came down and we started talking to him and he said that the waves can get huge when the surf is big - he said 30-40 feet, but the book we have said they can get up to 70 feet.  Scary!!  The surfers have a buddy pull them in on a sea-doo and they ride the wave and then their buddy comes and gets them.  The guy with us said that when the waves are really huge the sea-doos have a hard time getting in there to pick them up.  The waves roll and pound and the surfers can get continually pounded into the ocean, so they actually have little oxygen containers with 3-4 minutes of air in case their buddy on the sea-doos can't pick them up right away.  He also said that when the waves are big, the sea-doos can crash right into the beach (which was all big boulders).  Anyway, he said that there was a big wave coming in that had apparently hit Owahu around 9am, so we waited around for it.  We waited for 2 hours and it never came, so we left, and walked back through the muck, scraping our feet every few hundred meters.  Did I mention that it was muddy?

So anyway, by the time we got out of there, it was nearly 2pm and we were filthy, and it was raining.  So we came home, had a shower, and went shopping.  Hana will have to wait for another day!