Reef Hawaiian Pro by the Numbers: Round of 32

After an painful day of small surf and interferences at the Reef Hawaiian Pro, we're down to the Round of 32. Unsurprisingly, most of the remaining surfers are Aussies with Brazil, Hawaii, and the US tied for second. Overall however, the remaining field looks quite diverse (check out the graph below). Of the five remaining Hawaiian surfers, three are from Kauai (Sebastian Zietz, Dylan Goodale, Evan Valiere) while a mere two are from Oahu (Freddy Patacchia and Mason Ho).

 



 

Remaining surfers also vary widely in One World Rankings, from 229th place (Dane Reynolds) to 3rd (Adriano de Souza). Nine top 22 World Tour surfers remain and five of the top 10 World Ranking surfers are still in the contest.

 

Here's the list of remaining surfers in the Reef Hawaiian Pro, in order of their World Ranking:

\With little swell forecasted for the next few days, the Reef Hawaiian Pro will likely be on hold for the next few days. Friday looks like the earliest possible day for contest completion.

UH Oceanography Promo

I'm so stoked the Oceanography Department at UH Manoa just produced a promo describing just what goes on in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. A number of my friends and professors are in it. If anyone ever asks what I do again, rather than stumble through an unwieldy description, I'll simply point them here!

2nd Lay Day for the Reef Hawaiian Pro 2013

No contest today. Wrong swell direction and unruly weather makes for some serious current and confusion out in Haleiwa. Hopefully things will clear up for a possible Triple Crown start tomorrow morning.

Check out a few photos from this morning: Day 2 Photos

Here's this morning's call:

Gearing up for the Reef Hawaiian Pro 2013



The last weekend on the North Shore was rainy to say the least. On Saturday, Mason Ho won the 4 star HIC Pro in big stormy Sunset. By Sunday, much of the scaffolding for the Reef Hawaiian Pro was already up in Haleiwa. Along with it were hordes of surfers practicing in the messy conditions. With a large swell building through the night, it looks like the first jewel of the Triple Crown of Surfing is likely to kick off tomorrow!

Check out a few images on the North Shore this past weekend:



A set rolling in at Logs.



Waimea breaking.

Waimea shorebreak.

Haleiwa.

Little dudes on the inside of Haleiwa.

What happened today? Here's this morning's call for the Reef Hawaiian Pro:

Lazy Sunday

No surf. No work. Problem. China Walls offers some entertainment to aleviate the boredom.

Fun in Town

It may be crowded, but it's so much fun sometimes you just look past all the madness. Here are a few of those days in Town.

Summer swell 2013

This summer has provided some excellent surf days. We got a monster swell real early in the season and the waves have been fun since! Flossie even threw some fun surf our way today. It hasn't been all roses though. In a battle of face vs. board I wound up with a broken nose, two black eyes, and a solid shot of humility. Regardless, here's to the midpoint of the summer and to hopes that I didn't just jinx the second half!

Stay Flossie Hawaii

Town (finally) gets some waves

It's been a long, miserable summer for Hawaiian surf. A few small, fickle swells and alot of strong wind led to a less than satisfactory 2012. But in the dying days of summer, the south side is finally lighting up. Here are a few shots of the waves today.

 



Estimating Tsunami Travel Times

Want to know how long you have until a tsunami generated in Chile reaches your doorstep? To figure it out you need two things: the speed of the wave generated and the great circle distance between you and the location of tsunami origin.

Wave speed (c) is related to the depth (H) of the water body the wave is moving through:

c = √(gH)

 

where g is acceleration due to gravity = 9.8 m/s² and H is in meters. The average wave speed in open ocean is approximately 200 m/s. This is fine to use in back of the envelope calculations such as this.

 

To find the great circle distance between two points you need the radius of the earth (approximately 6370 km) and the spherical angle (ψ) between the points, given by: 

ψ = arcos [ sin(φ₁)sin(φ₂) + cos(φ₁)cos(φ₂)cos(θ₂ – θ₁) ]

where φ₁ and φ₂  are the latitudes of the starting and ending points respectively. θ₁ and θ₂ are the longitudes of the starting and ending points respectively.

From there, use the spherical angle and radius to find arc length (s): s=rψ. Once you have that, you can find the travel time of the tsunami: t = s/c. Keep in mind that this is very general and rough!

I've generated a Matlab script calculating the travel time for a tsunami generated in Santiago, Chile to reach Honolulu, Hawaii (~11.5 hrs according to my script). If you want to pick different starting or ending points, just mess with the latitudes and longitudes.

Interested in tsunamis? Check out these sites:
Violent Hawaii: Deadly Tsunamis
NOAA Tsunami Website
 

%Long Gravity Wavesclose all

clear all

c = 200; % speed of propagation (m/s)
r = 6370; % radius of Earth (km)
r2 = r*1000; % radius of Earth (m)

lat1 = -35.846; % Latitude of santiago, Chile -33
lat2 = 21.467; % Latitude of Honolulu, Hawaii 22
lon1 = -72.719; % Longitude of Santiago, Chile -71
lon2 = -157.983; %Longitude of Honolulu, Hawaii -158

cosangle = sin(lat1)*sin(lat2) + cos(lat1)*cos(lat2)*cos(lon2 - lon1);

angle = (acos(cosangle))*(180/pi); % angle in degrees

arclength = 2*pi*r2*(angle/360) % arclength between locations (m)

time = (arclength/c)*(1/60)*(1/60) % travel time (hr)

  

AI forever

It doesn't matter how many times I watch this, it always make me tear up.

Mike Love

We toured the Garlic and Ginger Festival at Ward, Honolulu, HI, last night. Surrounded by garlic sandwhiches, garlic steak, garlic ahi poke, garlic garlic garlic! The sweets were thankfully embellished with the ginger half of the festival theme and included ginger cotton candy and (it seemed everyone's favorite) candied ginger bacon.

The entire place had run out of beer by the time we got there, so we got in line for some cocktails. No ginger or garlic themes here though. That would have been fun.

But the highlight of the night wasn't the garlic or the ginger. It was the music. Mike Love, a local reggae musician, was amazing as usual.

Here's a taste of his awesomeness:

Mongooses on Kauai?

Yesterday the first live mongoose to be caught on Kauai was trapped at the Marriott Kauai Lagoons. Houston, we have a problem.

Photo courtesy of Hawaii News Now

In the late 1800s mongooses were introduced to Big Island, Maui, Molokai, Oahu in an effort to curb rat populations. Unfortunately rats are nocturnal, while mongooses are active in daylight hours, rendering their introduction completely useless. Mongoose populations exploded on the islands they were introduced, decimating ground-nesting  native bird populations including petrels, shearwaters, and Hawaii's state bird, the nene.

Kauai, it seems, had been spared. The story goes a ship loaded with a crate of the critters was destined for the island in 1883. One of the workers on board was bitten (they're not very nice), and in a fit of rage kicked the entire crate into the water (thank you random bipolar guy!). No other shipments of mongooses were sent to Kauai.

Growing up there, I had always thought of Kauai as mongoose-free. Just another reason it was the best island. (Uhh... I mean worst. Don't go there.) But every once in a while I'd hear someone describe a rat-like creature they'd seen but had no idea what it was. In 2003, my uncle came to visit from the mainland. He was walking along a beach on the north shore when he saw some sort of strange mammal he couldn't place. As he described it to us - kind of like a rat and squirrel mixed together - it sounded a lot like the mammal that wasn't supposed to exist on Kauai. February 2004 saw another report of a mongoose sighting appear in the local newspaper, The Garden Island.

In fact, there have apparently been over 160 "credible" reports of mongooses over the past 44 years, with sightings ranging all over the island.

Then they found one. In 1976 a lactating female was found dead on the road in Kalaheo. Kauai definitely had a mongoose problem. But the question shifted from "Are they here?" to "Are they established?" If mongooses had a stable breeding population, Kauai was in trouble.

Now that a live mongoose has actually been caught - this one a mature male - there is little doubt Kauai has an established population of mongooses in the Lihue area. Likely elsewhere too. What worries me are those sightings spanning the entire island. Just how serious is Kauai's mongoose infestation? And how can we stop it before the Garden Isle becomes as lifeless as Oahu (again, I'm a little biased)?

Check out the article on the KHON 2 News website: First Live Mongoose Captured on Kauai

Flat Stanley's last days in Hawaii

On Flat Stanley's last few days in Hawaii, I took him to my parents' house (Kawena's grandparents, Kiki and Gramps). Stanley visited with my dog Kekoa, who was unsure of Stanley at first but warmed up to him. 

 My parents' house has a direct view of my favorite surf spot on Oahu, whos name I will leave anonymous. It's one of the few places on the south side that no one really knows about or surfs. As usual, it was sunny and beautiful.

These shells were collected over the years by my grandmother and grandfather when they lived on the east side of Oahu

Checking the surf one last time.

==

Did I mention I have a rabbit?

And she likes Stanley.

Bye Stanley!!!!!

Bye Stanley

Flat Stanley in Waikiki

 I took Flat Stanley to check the surf with me in Waikiki. The waves were pretty small but conditions were beautiful. Sunny and light wind. We checked some of our favorite spots. Bowls, Bomburas, Kewalos, and finally setttled on Point Panic. It is a bodysurfing only spot, so we had to be sneaky.

Diamond Head in the background

Checking Bomburas

It's flat!

The surf was fun. Again Stanley had to watch from the beach, but he had a nice tour of the south side of Oahu!

Flat Stanley on the North Shore

We took Flat Stanley to the north shore of Oahu, one of the most famous surfing destinations in the world. Here he is at Mokule'ia.

Open ocean aquaculture: what's the problem?

"Look out Hawaii! Open ocean aquaculture (OOA) has many problems," warns Neil Frazer, professor of geophysics at UH Manoa. Focusing on the new OOA system off the Big Island, Frazer cites multiple shortcomings of the system in his November 2010 article to the Honolulu Star Advertiser. First, he argues OOA of carnivorous fish is "worse than over-fishing" because production of these fish requires massive amounts of food in the form of wild caught fish; fish that would otherwise be feeding people of Third World countries. Second, farmed fish have higher levels of pollutants than wild caught fish. Third, sewage from these caged fish negatively impacts the ocean environment. He further argues that OOA can act as an agent of disease for wild populations of fish. Wild fish would starve or get eaten when they fall ill. However there are no predation or starvation pressures on these caged fish, allowing them to spread disease over long periods of time. 

One of his arguments stood in stark opposition to what we had heard in the aquaculture class I'm taking this semester: the sewage issue. In class we learned one of the pros of offshore, open-ocean cages was that you did not have to worry about waste products. The waste would be distributed by oceanic currents and diluted thanks to the massive expanse of the ocean itself. No worries, right? Frazer argues dilution is not the solution; it just becomes someone else’s problem. These differing opinions I believe are a result of each person’s different experiences with aquaculture. My professor is speaking from an aquaculturist’s point of view. Someone who has been in the business to do just that: business. After all, aquaculture is a business, not a science. Frazer’s viewpoint is that of an observer, a possible consumer (although not likely judging by the article). His interests lie with environmental well-being, not with making money. Both opinions are valid; they just come from differing points of view.

In oligotrophic and relatively fast moving waters like Hawaii, I don’t think a few OOA operations would be a problem. The added nutrients from the waste may add to increase in primary productivity, but not much. And would increasing primary productivity a bit be such a bad thing? It may increase food availability for higher trophic position fishes, commercially important fishes. Could OOA increase wild stock biomass? Further, the cages themselves may attract fish, providing refuge in an otherwise featureless environment. This is an observed phenomenon; buoys miles from the islands have been found to attract fishes in larger concentrations than they’d be otherwise.

The promotion of disease in wild stocks is one of Frazer’s most troubling arguments. By protecting and feeding sick fish, OOA cages are a “reservoir of infection.” Diseases among caged fish could transfer to wild populations. Further, Frazer worries some caged fish escape the nets and interbreed with wild stocks, lowering the genetic robustness of the population. Is it possible that OOA is hurting populations of wild fish?

Frazer ends the article by talking about the advantages of Native Hawaiian fishponds and seems to suggest we should be using that aquaculture method rather than OOA. But could we support our demand for aquatic protein entirely from fishponds? What Frazer fails to mention is that the Native Hawaiian population was much smaller than Hawaii's population today, and even with that smaller population it is highly unlikely they were able to provide for themselves enough protein through fishponds.

I think we need to give OOA a chance. We are over-fishing our wild fish stocks and will soon need an alternative source of fish protein. Plus, OOA is far more sustainable and ecologically friendly than mass cattle, pig, and chicken production. Although we could all just become vegetarians and avoid this whole issue. Anyone?  

Check out the article here.