Yesterday morning I arose early, as I often do. First thing, I repaired to the computer to satisfy an urgent need regarding Jupiter aligning with Saturn, which we were told would take place that very night, the night of the Winter Solstice. Using all my minimal computer skills I was able to deduce that one should find the moon (how hard is that?), follow a straight line down to the horizon, which in our case is the ocean, trace a line north about ten degrees, look back up about the width of your thumb and...Voila! ..the aligned planets. All this while I was humming The Age of Aquarius quietly to myself. Everyone else was asleep and preferred to keep it that way.
Well, with that astronomical project put to bed I ceased my humming and checked in with my email. Right at the top of the stack was something from Kathy and Vernon, presumably snowbound in their house in the Oregon forest:
Woke up to the news about Kilauea! Can you see the action?
Well, I had woken to the sounds of the Fifth Dimension thrumming in my temporal lobe, and it was still dark out, so I could only guess at what might be happening. Only a moment later Sandra exclaimed from the nearby boudoir, "Kilauea is erupting!"
This might be good news for somebody, but it isn't for us. We have had all the vocanic eruptions that we can stomach. Vog, vog go away, Little Sandra wants to be able to see the beach from her lanai. Just last week as we drove north to our rendezvous with the Surge Wrasse the air was so clear that we could see Maui from the airport, an event unthinkable only two years ago.
An hour later the sun had come up. The sky was blue without a trace of haziness. Sandra had read that a vog plume was blowing west and people in Oceanview, a mere 45 miles to the south, were admonished to stay inside. Supposedly they were already wearing masks and one might expect that masks would be helpful if one wanted to avoid inhaling volcanic particles. But remember, this is Oceanview, the closest thing we have to the wild west on the leeward side of the Big Island, so its possible that there aren't any, excuse me, ain't no masks in Oceanview. Plenty of MAGA banners, though.
It being Monday, which is to say not the weekend, which is deemed unsafe, I made my way down the hill to Kahalu'u a bit after 9 AM. As I drove down Sunset I could make out a little surf on Lyman's, with surfers the size of ants catching the waves.
At Kahalu'u there were a few small waves traversing the bay, but they were dwarfed by the throng. I found myself a table in the shelter and began to change, but I proved to be a magnet for a gentleman reef teacher who was determined to be the swizzle stick at this beach side super spreader event.
Soon enough the Stick and I parted company and I was in the bay. It being winter, I'm wearing a neoprene vest, so the water, which Tides For Fishing tells us is 79 degrees, is still quite tolerable. The water was fairly clear and there was a moderate number of fish, but an even greater number of seagoing tourists.
I swam for about an hour and returned to shore about 10:30. I had thought that there were a lot of tourists before, but the intervening hour had swelled their numbers. Its Christmas in Kailua, with all of the tourists here. I dressed quickly, avoiding the human swizzle stick and made it to the car, hopefully virus free.
Back at Casa Ono, my sweetie and I shared a lunch and then, being an old gopher, I took a nap. When I awoke, things had changed. There was now a plume of vog fluffing up the southern horizon. Through the afternoon this increased to the extent that most of the sky above our ocean view was quite hazy. It became dark about 6:30. At 7 when we went out to look for the planets, we could see the moon way up in the sky but the horizon was vogged in up to about 20 degrees. So much for the Age of Aquarius. Its more like the return of Madame Pele.
jeff
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