Mala Maui to the Wild Side of Lanai and Back

We treated ourselves to about 2 weeks ‘off the grid’ on the wild side of Lanai.

This remote area has no roads or ever foot paths to get to,

so we really felt like being on the far side of the world.

The video shows how nice it was when we arrived…

Gentle waves serenely flowing on to the rocks around us.

3 days later, They doubled in size,

so we sailed to the middle of the ‘west side of Lanai’ to a place we call “Pillars”.

Lot’s of ancient Hawaiian folk lore and history there and

there is an ancient Hawaiian heiau temple base of rocks near where we had been… but,

There was just too many crashing waves to even swim to the rocky shore

to stroll over to see them.

At Pillars, even if you do swim to shore, there is nowhere to go, lots of vertical cliffs.

But it was full on ‘nature channel’ and very intense ‘weather channel’ fun and excitement…

At times… a wee bit too much excitement.

~ ~ ~

So, we were getting the swells from the north rolling through… and…

The southern swells come from all the way ‘down under’ from the south pole.

We recall when sailing to and from New Zealand,

these massive storms came through every 3 or 4 days.

So one has to time their departures and arrives.

We’d depart literally on the tail of one storm,

so we’d have a chance of out running the next one.

You never really pull this off,

at best you can get a few days out before getting the full on southern storm at sea experience.

~ ~ ~

The easterly trade winds were at full tilt boogie…

about 30+ knots 24/7 for all the time we were there, except for when

yet another ‘later season cold front’ was flooding Kauai & Oahu for almost 2 days.

~ ~ ~

We had keep postponing our return back to Mala because of the excessive trades.

But finally the weather had a two day slow down, not much of a slow down ,

but enough to let us sail that infamous channel between Lanai Molokai & Maui.

A sailboat must tack back & forth many times in order to get upwind.

But as you can see in the video, we at leas had half the day with nice flat calm seas.

~ ~ ~

We did get our ‘obligatory’ bashing in the last few hours… But heck… If it was easy….

Everybody would be out there…

Perhaps that’s why we did see another soul the whole time.

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The music is from my CD call “A Sailing Adventure”.

I recorded this in my professional recording studio in the mid 1990’s. This is the first project I worked on with Bobbie Jo when we first met at my studio.

I offered her & her band free studio time for a musical trade of their talents.

After nearly 6 months of working together,

we notice our knees would ‘zeeng’ when we sat next to each other in the control room.

I waited until we finished all our vocal tracks before daring to ask her out on our first date on Feb. 22….

222 has remained a very dear date for us all these years later 😉