Travel for Love

I got out of the snow for a few days on a business trip to Orange County. My mom joined me for the weekend, and we spent some time in the afternoon exploring the Laguna Beach coast. In Crystal Cove State Park, we found lots of rocky coast full of tide pools. It was so much fun seeing all the sea life in the pools. Here are some pics.

The rocks were covered with mussels.

There were blue and grey anemones all over the place, of all shapes and sizes.

Further out in more water, there were starfish!

It was a beautiful place on a beautiful day!

I heard on the radio today that the Quicksilver Big Wave Invitational is currently taking place on the famous North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii. This surfing tournament only occurs sporadically due to its requirement for at least 20 foot ocean swells. If the ocean swells in Waimea Bay reach 20 feet sometime between the period of December – February, the contest will take place. This just happened yesterday, which is pretty cool. The last time this happened before this year was 5 years ago!

Roberto and I took a trip to Oahu exactly one year ago and one of the highlights was definitely seeing the huge waves in the North Shore. It certainly would have been nice to see the contest going on (although we did see stuff set up, just in case I guess) but the waves were still really huge! One thing I learned is that when a 20 foot ocean swell breaks, the face of the wave (where the surfer would be) is often 30-40 feet high. When we where there they weren’t that big, but there were some good 15-20 feet faces and some crazy surfers. We could not really get near the water because the beach was so eroded by the giant waves, and we could feel the ground shake when those waves pounded the sand. Here are some of our photos from wave watching in Waimea Bay this time last year.

These waves were just incredible. I’ll do a trip report on the whole trip sometime soon.