For You

Is there still any childhood mystery left in you? Come with me and find out.
You can google this place on maps just to make sure that I am not pulling your leg. Witch Cliff, Oz.

Okay, okay! : ‘Witchcliffe, Australia’.

Wendy lives here. Yeah, that’s right, Wendy as in Peter’s ‘adopted mother’. She moved here. Peter got her the place. It‘s a guest house, now. She renamed it from the original. It was an ol mining place. She named it ‘Coffee Rock Cottages’. Fixed it up nice. Yes, you can actually stay here. If you dare! If you are adventurous enough? Are you?

Peter got this place for her cause Jolly of england was completely on the opposite side of the globe. Why should he have to travel alllll that distance when she could live close to Neverland.

Tinker stays mostly here now with Wendy. It’s cause of the fireflys on Neverland. The fireflys on Neverland have got it in their minds that Tinker is the Madonna of all Fireflys. Won’t leave her alone! She had it and went to live with Wendy. Which is the interesting part of staying there. Tinker can be a bit of a nuisance! – Hee he! – a bit….

How do you think Coffee rock Cottages got its name?

Can you imagine the number of spilled coffees while unsuspecting Pommies sat on their duffs thinking nothing but of their next meal!

Tinker’s favorite ploy: In the evening after dinner the Pommies lining the veranda hav’n a cup a and suddenly out of nowhere: FLASH!!! Right in front of their blooming eyes!

Cups and saucers, Yes, pommies always have saucers, flying everywhere! Not to mention what was in the cups.

So you can sit there as you are, right now, and say, ‘Oh Silly Bob! You got an active imagination, but…’

But!!!

The Kookaburra always has the last word in Western OZ. And you will only know this if you are daring enough to find out. And you should hear the crows complain about their lot in life! You’ll have nothing to complain of again after you’ve heard their tell.

An’ besides all this, sometimes, oh yes, sometimes, someone else comes by. But he won’t tell you who he really is… you need a whoooole lot of imagination for that .

Yes, I wonder. Do you still have any childhood mystery in you? Or are you an ol’ duff?

When Natalia and I come, we stay at this one. This one I painted.

An Ocean Sunrise

In the mid 90's I paddled with Hawaiian Canoe Club of Kahului, Maui in the Senior Mens's Division. We always did the Queen Liliokalani Long distance off of Kona as well as the Molokai Hoe.

I went with the Luuwai family out of Maalaea Harbor on Maui the night before this one race. We were using their boat as the escort boat for our canoe. We were going to go fishing early that morning at the buoy off of Lana'i and then rendezvous with the race off of Molokai.

At dawn I woke and this is what I saw. I decked out on the back of boat in the open cabin. We were traveling south west. The sun light was just rising out of the ocean between Molokai and Maui directly behind us. The open ocean swells where rising and falling trailing in our wake. As the larger swells rose up and before they fell away the sun shone through them. I layed there and watched this spectacular play of reflected light in the waves, silhouetted through the waves and ocean and sky and mountains and clouds. It was a moment frozen in time like a treasured picture I carry with me. I watched this in my minds eye all that day like a dream as we keep a candance of rythmatic strokes paddling across the channel from Molokai to Waikiki on Oahu that day.

Now I have the opportunity to share it with you.

Flower and Sunkiss

Well, this most certainly wasn’t my first surfboard but it was a special board. Maybe you will agree. It had a very, very interesting life! The one on the left.

The one on the right was Natalia’s first surfboard. The same very interesting life.

We had walked into the surf board shop at Sorake Beach on Nias, Indonesia to rent boards. We stayed at the Friendly Inn with Rick and Sheryl.

As we were staying there for some time, over the course of time, I had gone by the shop almost every day. The shop was between our bungalow and the point. We could either paddle by it of walk by it coming or going surfing.

There were 7 blanks standing in the corner of the surfshop. The shop owner said that an Ozzie had brought them and was going to shape them, but had suddenly changed his mind and left. There the blanks stood.

Like I said we were there for some time.

One day I got the idea to tell the shop owner that I would shape all of them, he puts up the materials. I had to glass these two but he would glass the remaining 5. I get the two boards. He gets the 5.

Here they are as you see them. It was my 108th and 109th board. Surfers remember such things, don’t they? I mean unless you’re some kind of machine in a manufactures establishment.

Anyways, no more renting two boards for the week. I put in a week of work and get two boards. Good deal, yeah? Natalia was well on her way to learning how to surf and so when she got this board she was ready for it. Natalia did the designs. We were limited to pigment colors. We were on Nias. It had taken the shop owner a three day turn around trip to go and get the glass, resin, acetone, etc. For some reason we named our boards. I had never done that before. Flower and Sunkiss.

So every evening, in the some what cool of the evening, Ha! –we were at the equator, I was at his shop for that week shaping the boards, then glassing ours.

We stayed for 4 months with a turn around visa after two months.

We went over to Bawa at the end of our trip there on Nias. After Bawa we went to the Philippines for the typhoon season and then the next year we went to Sri Lanka. Eastern Province at Arugam Bay to stay with Fred and Somlak at their Siam View Resort.

We made a decision to leave our boards there as we were going to Japan. We could come back the next year and have them. That was our idea.

The painting of Flower and Sunkiss is on our patio of our bungaloo at Siam View, Arugam Bay, Sri Lanka late August, 2004. I had taken up water color painting as a hobby.

In December of that year, 2004 the tsunami generated in Nias went to Sri Lanka, Arugam Bay and reclaimed Flower and Sunkiss.