My brother-in-law Scott is a pilot for Delta and they get a small number of "family discount" tickets each year. In some ways they are very inconvenient: You have to dress well (slacks, shoes, dresses and nylons on appropriate genders) in case you end up flying first class. You have to fly standby and are not guaranteed a seat, although you can call their computer and find out how full a flight is before you drive to the airport. You have to use them within one year or they expire. You can extend this another year by choosing a destination and paying in advance. (Then if you fail to use it you loose your money). But if your work schedule is flexible, like mine, these tickets give you a strange feeling of freedom. I don't have to plan a trip months in advance. I can just decide "Tomorrow I will be kayaking around Kauai" and it can become reality. These tickets start you thinking about jet travel as if it was a mass transit device, like a city bus. Why are airlines so different from local mass transit? Why can't I just hop on the next jet going in the direction I want to go?
Unfortunately I only had one of these tickets so flying off to Kauai seemed unfair to Marty who would not be able to come along. She told me "No, you should just go!" Her logic was that if the two of us went to Kauai, or any other Hawaiian island, we would both be unhappy. If I went kayaking, Marty would not want to come and would be unhappy waiting around for me. If I didn't go kayaking, I would be unhappy surrounded by all that water I wasn't paddling in. So I made plans to go sometime in April. I chose April because of some research about the island that I did earlier in the year. April is when the humpback whales leave, so I wanted to go early and see them. April or May is when the large swells start to calm down and you can paddle the caves of the north coast. So I figured some time in-between would have a little of both. On a small island, I can always go to the other side if the waves were too high on one side. I sent e-mail to a bunch of Kauai kayak outfitters and got in e-touch with a few kayakers (I call them my "local informants") who gave me location and weather advice.
My plan was to arrive on the island, rent a car, a roof rack, and a kayak. Stay in cheep hotels a few nights and spend a lot of time camping out. The State Parks require registration in advance, but my "local informants" assured me that there were a lot of city parks that allow drop-in camping if they have space. April was a bit out of the regular season and finding camping spaces this way should not be a problem. Depending on the weather I would drive to one place or another and do day trips on the kayak. The road doesn't go all the way around the island, but with a few hitchhiking trips I might be able to kayak all the way around the island in two weeks or less. I was trying to plan this trip around a business trip that didn't quite have a firm date yet. Then a fellow BASKer, Jamie Morgan, suddenly got a month off between jobs and asked around for a good place to kayak. I told him my plans for Kauai and suddenly we had a firm date to kayak the last two weeks of April together. We could split the cost of renting a car and perhaps the costs of renting a condominium or something. He got a bunch of information from Penny Wells who used to run kayak expeditions down the Na Pali coast, the part of Kauai that has no roads or even any trails the whole distance. Penny recommended a hotel called the Garden Island Inn and we made reservations. Jamie bought his tickets. I called up the recommended kayak outfitter to reserve a couple kayaks for a week.
When I called Kayak Kauai, they would not rent me a kayak. The guy on the phone told me: "April is a bad month for kayaking (come back in late May or June), and besides we don't just rent kayaks out to people for use on the ocean unless you go on one of our guided trips". Can I go on one of your trips? "No, because we aren't doing any in April". Why not? "Because the ocean is too dangerous this time of year". Can't I rent a kayak and drive it around to the lee side of the island? "The easterly trade winds and the northerly swell make it unsafe anywhere on the island. We have huge swells out here". I called up the NOAA buoy number 56001 page on my screen and said: You only have 6 foot swells today. I have been watching your water for the last few weeks. Yes it gets hairy from time to time, but on those days I'll kayak up a river or go be a tourist. "A 6 foot swell in Kauai is the same as a 12 foot swell in California". (Bullshit). Well assuming I showed up at your doorstep and convinced you that I knew what I was doing, what is the weekly rate for a kayak? HE WOULD NOT EVEN TELL ME THIS.
I sent out email to my local informants in Kauai. One of them called up all the local outfitters and got a similar story. For liability reasons, renting a kayak was difficult to impossible this time of year. Another one of my local informants, Mike Malone, replied with an apology. It turns out that he works at the Kapaa office of Kayak Kauai, and promised to talk to the guy who would not rent me a kayak. Two kayaks would be waiting for us when we got to Kauai. In addition, he offered to sit down with us and go over a chart. To tell us about local hazards and must-see places. I arranged to meet him on Tuesday morning, the day after I flew in.
Jamie Flew in on Sunday and his wife did not like the Garden Island Inn. They spent all day Monday looking for a place they liked better and did not come back until almost midnight. I got in an hour early on Monday and went swimming in the water at Kalapaki Beach, then snorkeling. The water was cloudy in the harbor with a sandy bottom and nothing to look at, but I got to try out snorkeling in tropical waters. Jamie and Jana had the car so I was at loose ends. I looked up the regulations on camping the Na Pali coast. On a very poor map in the phone book I decided to walk to the State office that gives these permits. It turned out to be a little over 3 kilometers each way, so I tried out my metabolism and my sunblock in the tropics. Both worked just fine but I should have put on better shoes. I almost got blisters on my feet and only avoid them by stopping at Kmart on the way back to buy some better sandals. The ones I started out with had little toe dents with bumps between them that moved to the wrong places. The poor map didn't inform me that I would be walking half of the way on the side of a freeway. Not an attractive hike to take on my first day in paradise. In all I ended up hiking 8 kilometers in the middle of the day. Fortunately my feet quickly recovered the next day.