Paddleboarding on Hilo Bay

Aloha everybody!  We promised you a post about paddleboarding in Hilo Bay, so (drum-roll!) here it is.  On Sunday, February 10th, we went to downtown Hilo, which is where we live, to the bay.  There's a beach down there and the water is fairly calm.  We all got paddleboards and tried to learn how to make it work.  What is a paddleboard?  It's basically a surfboard, and you stand on it and use a canoe oar to paddle through the water.  It's like kayaking but standing up.  After learning how to stand up and keep your balance, which is hard, we paddled out to a small island called Coconut Island, which is probably a quarter-mile away from the beach.  On the way out, we weren’t really paying attention to the shore, and almost ran into fishing lines that people had cast out a long ways from the shore.  All the fishermen yelled at us and we did our best to navigate out of there, but the damage had been done. :/ We got to Coconut Island and sat for a bit and headed back. It felt like quite the accomplishment! On our way back, we had to deal with the fishing lines again, go figure, and finally made it back to shore.  We sat out for a bit and then grabbed one of the boards that wasn’t being used to try to get some photo-ops.  We were having fun until Jon dropped his iPhone in the ocean.  Luckily, he has a Lifeproof case that is waterproof.  Thanks to Kate Sennert’s quick eye, we found it pretty quick.  We took some pictures and some video and then the day was over.  It was really cool and a great workout!  

The next blog post will be about out trip to the summit of Mauna Kea, which has an elevation of 13,803 feet.  We drove to the top, watched the sun set at the summit, then came back down to about 9,000 feet and did a little star gazing.  It was really fun and we both recommend that you read that post and look at the pictures.  It was really interesting and we loved that trip. :)

To view pictures from this trip, go to jlaudnersphotos.shutterfly.com
There's tons of pictures from all our trips.  Feel free to leave a comment in the guestbook to let us know you're keeping tabs on us!!

Mahalo for reading!
Jon & Ashley

We've got Pictures!!!

Aloha Everybody!!!

We finally have a way for you all to view our photos!!!  If you go to this link, you should be able to look through our albums.  We're probably going to be uploading pictures to the various albums throughout the semester, but we'll try to have all the pictures uploaded that correspond with the story we post that weekend.  Here's the link:  http://jlaudnersphotos.shutterfly.com/

Let us know if that link doesn't work or if you're not seeing pictures.  We'll try to fix it.

Mahalo!!!