Paradise Ride Kauai 2011
Paradise Ride Kauai 2011 is a 2-day bike ride on the island of Kauai. Its an amazing, fully supported ride through some of Kauai’s most breathtaking scenery, along the ocean, through valleys, local neighborhoods and open countryside.
Each day the route averages 55 miles, however several shorter options are available to accommodate all types of cyclists. The terrain varies, ranging from flat to moderately hilly. The roadways and shoulders are paved and the routes will take us both inland and along the coastline of the Garden Island. Each day’s route is well supported by event crew, including bicycle technicians and medical support people. The Paradise Ride Kaua’i will provide meals, snacks, water and sport drinks during the event.
The ride is produced by Malama Pono Health Services which began as a grass-roots response to HIV on the ‘Garden Isle’. Today, the mission of Malama Pono is to educate and support those dealing with HIV/AIDS, STDs, and infectious Hepatitis. Paradise Ride Kauai is an important source of funding and helps provide services and programs not otherwise supported by Kauai United Way and State or Federal programs.
Kauai Beaches and Rock Quarry
Rock Quarry Beach is located on the North Shore of Kauai where the Kilauea Stream empties into the Pacific Ocean. This small beach is bordered by a densely vegetated hill and an abandoned rock quarry, which overlook the bay. The stream hits a sand bar as it reaches the sea and forms a large pool good for swimming and fishing (when the water is calm and clear).
This beach is off the main road and down a dirt road, and therefore more secluded and less frequented. Rock Quarry Beach doesn’t have a reef barrier to protect it from high ocean waves, and becomes a popular surf spot especially during the summer when the rest of the North Shore is quiet. Many people also enjoy kayaking in the river, fishing, or snorkeling.
Dirt-roadside parking
No facilities
Secluded beach
Swimming
Snorkeling
Fishing
Surfing
Bodysurfing
Directions: Driving North on Highway 56. After mile marker 21, take a right on Wailapa Road. Continue for half a mile, then take a left. Drive until you reach a dead end. Park on the road and walk to the beach.
Please remember: When in doubt, don’t go out.
Check our Kauai Surf Report.
Ocean Acidification and Marine Life
Marine life ranging from the smallest plankton to the largest whale may be affected by ocean acidification. Coral reef ecosystems will be some of the first casualties of ocean acidification. Impacts to these beautiful and important habitats could have huge consequences for a quarter of the entire biological diversity of the oceans that depend on coral reefs for food and shelter. Shellfish such as sea urchins, lobsters, sea stars and brittle stars are some prime examples of creatures that could be affected. More acidic oceans are expected to lead to a shortage of carbonate, a key building block that these animals need to build their shells and skeletons.
In addition to coral reefs and shellfish, animals without shells or skeletons such as squid and various types of fish may be negatively affected in a variety of ways. Impacts to individual species may ultimately disrupt entire food webs. For example, pteropods are tiny swimming sea snail that forms a large base of the food chains and their shell building is particularly vulnerable to increasing ocean acidity. If pteropod populations plummet from acidified waters, this will affect the population numbers of animals that eat them, like salmon. If salmon numbers drop due to a loss of pteropods, it could further impact predators that eat salmon, such as killer whales.
The changing acidity of the oceans threatens to throw off the delicate chemical balance upon which marine life depends for survival. Corals are the framework builders of reefs, by far the most diverse ecosystems of our oceans. However, the effects of acidification are not going to stop with reefs. Like dominoes, the impacts are going to be far-reaching throughout the oceans.
Kilauea Point Lighthouse Lens
In 1909, thirty-one acres were purchased for the construction of the Kilauea Point Lighthouse, and construction began three years later in 1912. The centerpiece of the lighthouse was the lens designed by Augustin Fresnel and fabricated in Paris. A Fresnel lens contains hundreds of glass prisms concentrating and focusing the light passing through. The lens is two-sided (shaped like a clam’s shell) with two bull’s-eyes on each side.
The entire lens assembly weighs about 4.5 tons and was designed to “float” on mercury and pressurized air. A system of cables, weights, and pulleys rotated the lens, similar to descending weights turning the hands of a cuckoo clock. The weights would gravitate down a shaft in the center of the lighthouse. The lighthouse had to be wound every 3-1/2 hours by pulling the weights back to the top, then an electronic motor was installed in 1939, eliminating this lighthouse keeper’s task.
The fresnel lens and clockworks were manufactured in France at a cost of $12,000. But, when the lens arrived, it was discovered that the assembly instructions were in French, so a message was sent to Honolulu, requesting help with translation. Fred Edgecomb was dispatched on an interisland ship from Honolulu to Nawiliwili Harbor and then rode twenty miles on horseback to the site. After he had helped translate the instructions, the four-and-a-half-ton lens was assembled in the tower and floated in a trough six feet in diameter and nine inches deep filled with mercury. The revolving lens, which was first illuminated on May 1, 1913, produced a double flash every ten seconds that was visible up to a distance of twenty-one nautical miles.
Electric Vehicles in Hawaii
A network of electric vehicle charging stations in Hawaii is a key step in getting consumers to embrace the technology because they want the assurance that they will be able to recharge their vehicles when they are away from home. The Nissan Leaf, the first mass-produced electric car to be sold in Hawaii, has a range of about 100 miles on a single charge. The effort to put more electrical vehicles in the state got a boost with the awarding of $2.6 million in federal grants to install and promote charging stations across the islands.
Six companies and organizations will receive grants from federal stimulus money. The “EV Ready Grant” program is designed to complement the “EV Ready Rebate Program,” another initiative funded with stimulus money that provides a $4,500 rebate to individual consumers for the purchase of an electric vehicle and a $500 rebate for a home charging station. Grants were awarded to:
- Better Place – for charging stations on all islands and the introduction of EVs to a rental car fleet.
- AeroVironment – to install up to 320 charging stations on all islands, conduct grid integration analysis, and accelerate electrical vehicle introduction to dealerships and vehicle fleets.
- GreenCar Hawaii – to introduce EVs to car-sharing services within the hospitality industry.
- County of Kauai – for charging stations on the Garden Island and EVs for County fleets.
- City & County of Honolulu – for charging stations on Oahu, EVs and an online charger permitting system.
- Plug In America – for an EV Ready Guidebook for Hawaii, along with education and outreach.
Once deployment of the charging stations is completed, Hawaii will have one of the nation’s first statewide public charging networks supporting electric vehicle drivers.
Hawaiian Wildlife and Spinner Dolphins 4
Once a week a cruise ship visits Rangiroa. Expertly using the pressure wave off the bow, the dolphins get the effortless ride of a lifetime. . . surfing sideways and even upside-down in the flow. . .
At day’s end, as the bottlenose and their adopted spinner surf the waves, a large school of spinner dolphins further offshore makes haste for their feeding grounds. . . Now all the collective energy of the school comes together as the dolphins approach the most thrilling and dangerous part of their lives.
Scientists have likened the dash to the deep — and all its accompanying aerial displays — as akin to a football team psyching itself before a game. This communal pep rally serves yet again to synchronize the dolphins’ intentions, and perhaps to overcome their fears. For as night falls, a change takes place in the deep water far below.
A community of marine life, known as the deep scattering layer — which spends the daylight hours at depths of up to 3,000 feet now begins to migrate upward. As these riches come within reach, many surface dwellers — including the spinner dolphins — begin to hunt. Small subgroups spread out across the sea.
Despite being separated by several miles of water, the school still coordinates its activities through sound — -and through spinning — which reaches an explosive crescendo in the darkness of night . . . Time after time, the dolphins dive . . . down into the utter darkness at 800 feet, or more.
Schools of squid rise with the deep scattering layer. Jet-propelled, they are among the most elusive of prey.
Yet dolphins of many kinds are adept at catching them. For all the spinners’ skill and agility in this eerie world, they are wary of predators. Many sharks live in the deep scattering layer . . .
Using their echolocation, the spinners scan the darkness. . . then using their whistles, they call members of the school back together. and unite for their defense . . . And so most nights, the collective defenses of the dolphin school protect each member from harm. By dawn, the spinners regroup. Well-fed, they move once again towards the shelter of the islands.
Millions of years of natural selection have made spinner dolphins supremely adapted to the paradoxical worlds they inhabit . . one in the darkness of the abyss . . the other in the sunlit shallows. But nothing in their evolutionary past has prepared these dolphins for the onslaughts of the modern age. In the open sea, spinner dolphins and spotted dolphins frequently swim above large schools of yellowfin tuna. Fishermen in the eastern tropical pacific use dolphins to locate the tuna. . . Then set their nets around the dolphins.
O/C Marten:
Setting nets on dolphins to catch tuna kills them in large numbers. There’s no way to avoid that. And really what the public ought to understand is that the problem is not solved. Dr. Ken Marten was an official observer aboard u.s. tuna boats for two years. His job was to count and report the number of dolphins killed.
V/O Marten:
The mother boat launches 4 to 6 speedboats which chase the dolphins for an hour or more at high speed until the dolphins are exhausted. The mother boat approaches and sets the long purse seine net around the dolphins.
Any place the net is still open, the speedboats are sent and now they have a new function — to drop bombs into the water, that explode, and prevent the dolphins from escaping out of the net. And the rationale behind that is that if the dolphins ever escape out of the net, the tuna escape with them.
The nature of such a huge net around dolphins for such a long period of time, is that dolphins can get caught in folds of the net and drown. And it can happen to all of the dolphins in the net. And the number of dolphins in the net may be 3 or 4,000. These aggregations of spinner and spotted dolphins in the deep eastern tropical pacific are almost like little cities of dolphins. And the entire city can be wiped out.
The spinners’ brilliant defensive systems. . . group loyalty . . . sonar . . . speed and agility . . offer them no protection here — and may even work against their survival in the chaos of the nets.
Many of the dolphins who do escape may die soon afterward . . . as they are now completely deafened by the bomb explosions underwater. Tragically for a dolphin being deaf is equivalent to being blind.
Marten:
I can state this on my own experience, because when the tuna fishermen used to throw the bombs at me, as an observer, to keep me from reporting large kills, those bombs made me deaf for about a day. Nor do the “dolphin-safe” labels appearing on some cans of tuna offer absolute guarantees that no dolphins were killed . . . Meanwhile, the effect of tuna fishing on dolphins has been catastrophic. Today, more than 60 percent of the population of spinner dolphins in the Eastern tropical pacific has been wiped out in the tuna nets.
This morning, after a successful night of hunting, the spinner dolphins of Kealakekua Bay are returning to shore. Mornings are a time of celebration — as the members of the school meet, and play together. Youngsters practice their lessons. Little by little, the warm, clear waters entice them to rest . . . the dolphins draw closer. Together they rise and fall from the surface . . . until each spinner slips into sleep, safe inside a cocoon of friends.
In the 30 years that spinner dolphins have been studied, much has been Deciphered of their lives in the wild. Yet most of their world remains — and may always remain — completely mysterious. They thrive in what is essentially a different universe . . and yet, we feel close to them.
Perhaps the attraction lies in a sense of kindred spirit . . .
For although we understand something now of the complex and serious business of their lives. . . we can also feel their unique and joyful energy. . . that moment of flight . . . that instant when the burdens of life are cast away.
