IF THIS IS BERMUDA, IT MIGHT BE A TRIANGLE
by Sam Moses, Senior Editor
A nightmare just woke me up. I was part of a team of windsurfers-as in, team of horses. Four of us were sailing in the dark ocean, side-by-side and connected by a rope, and we were harnessed to a barge, which we were trying to pull. Huge swells. They washed us all under, and because I was fourth in the row, I had to stay under water and wait for the other three to untangle and waterstart, before I could get back up.
Actually, I think it was something even stranger than the dream that woke me up. Harsh reality. Club Paradise is located between the popular windsurfing beaches of Kanaha and Spreckelsville, just under the east end of the runway of Kahului airport. The jet traffic is high, and the dirty little realities of political persuasion have led to exemption for Hawaii from some FAA regulations, in particular those having to do with noise and blackout times. The result is extremely loud jets taking off all night long.
It may be real, but it's still other-worldly. It's nearly 4 a.m. as I'm writing this, and I just stepped back inside after taking the first few sips of my morning Lion café Hawaiian laced with Puerto Rican Bustello, out in the grass by the water. It's very dark, the stars fill the sky, the tradewinds are gentle, the surf is lightly and rhythmically crashing. The air is soft and sweet and moist. All the paradise stuff. As I was basking in it all, a low roar began building, as if from high above. It quickly expanded and fell downward like a big loud blob, an upside-down mushroom cloud of sound smothering the area. Suddenly a giant spacecraft with blinking lights appeared over the tops of the palm trees, so close I thought I could see faces in the windows of the alien tourists headed back to their own planet. They were odd-looking people. Some of them looked like mangos and others looked like FedEx packages, as flights at that hour are produce and other freight. The noisy craft banked away and shrunk into the stars, the sound diminished to soft thunder far over the water, and a minute later
I was alone in paradise again.
From my bed, three or four times a night, the roar wakes me up, and I open my eyes and look out the open window and see those blinking-light space ships flying loudly and slowly over the tops of palm trees. In semi-slumber, it's quite surreal. More than once, from deeper slumber, I've thought it was
a huge crashing wave.
Night or day, the presence of these regular perverse blasts of commerce is downright weird. Conversations have to be constantly interrupted, for 30 seconds at a time. It's driving the video crew crazy. It's also extremely exciting for my two-year-old, Makani Kai. We have a game here. During swim time at the pool each day, whenever a jet takes off he mimics it by running around on his little
short legs with his arms extended, before nose-diving into my arms in the water.
My wife Kim and I named him when we were on vacation on Kauai. At the time, she was pregnant with Maks, as we call him, and we knew he was a boy. His older brother Tai was two at that time, and because Kim is Vietnamese, Tai's ethnic blend has given him a very Hawaiian look, and natives thought he was one of them. We figured Maks would look the same, so we gave him an Hawaiian name. Only thing is, he looks like me.
Makani Kai means sea breeze, more or less. Later, a travel-agent friend told us she knows about three or four cheap motels in Hawaii named Makani Kai. So sometimes we have to tell people that no, Maks was not conceived in the Makani Kai Motel.
For three weeks now, we've barely left this place, except for a few runs to Kahului and Paia. Today we'll be renting a car, and for the next week we'll be doing the tourist things in the mornings-the drive to Hana, the Haleakala crater. So I might not be writing as much, unless the jets and espresso keep me up all night. As the postcard with a sketch of a guy flat on his back on a sunny beach says: Sorry, but I haven't been in a position to write.
But never fear: Roberto Ricci is scheduled to come by this morning to talk to our guest testers, and the guy is so full of creativity and charisma that it will be impossible not to stay up nights writing about him. And we'll continue to keep you updated with John Chao's photos and captions summarizing the days.
Tuesday was the windiest day so far (it's blown 23 of 25 days, now). I started out on a 5.0, one of the new Gaastra Grind wave sails, and, thanks to a tuning lesson from its legendary designer Barry Spanier (another industry titan hanging out here), the sail was very secure despite being considerably overpowered. I switched to a 4.4 Sailworks Revolution wave sail and the RRD 250, which is 8'2" and 72 liters. It carried my 188 pounds without a single whine. Smooth, quick, light and responsive, like powerful sports car with great handling-a BMW Z3 six-cylinder comes to mind. The Chili video crew had a chopper hovering over the water for two hours, and the director and cameraman are making stars of us all with interviews on the beach. This week's rostrum of guest testers is absolutely outstanding, both for their abilities and the way they've tackled their evaluations of the boards and sails.
The guest testers and Roberto Ricci are next, in this space. Hana and Haleakala won't get in the way.
