|
|
Fortress 2251Home \ Fortresses \ Jan-Feb 2001 \ 2251
Location: Bellows Beach |
Sunday, February 25, 2001
Truthfully, I didn't build much of a fortress today. I just felt like
experimenting with the drainage pipes. I had no camera either so unfortunately
there are no pictures of this day's work. We had a good time at the beach
though.
Lisa and I took off for Bellows around 1:00. Low tide was around noon, so the water would be creeping up the beach after we got there.
For quite a while, I've thought about creating a cascading system of drainage pipes. Instead of a pipe draining back towards the ocean, it would drain into another pool, which would drain back towards the ocean. The problem with this design is that water travels downhill so there would have to be an upper pool and a lower pool. But by the time the tide was high enough to flood the upper pool, it would be destroying the lower section of the fortress--unless it was raised by building it on top of a very tall foundation. But I didn't feel like doing a whole bunch of work today so I just made the pools side-by-side, with one slightly higher up the beach than the other and started piling up sand for the dual fortress.
I started construction pretty close to the water so I wouldn't have to drag buckets of it up the beach. Originally, I hadn't even intended on carving the fortress; this was just some experimenting with the drainage system. But once the piles were there, I couldn't resist, and hacked out some quick towers. Lisa was reading some of her Sociology books but took a break to come down and see what was going on with the fortress. She carved one of the towers and started acting goofy. I told her she could do whatever she wanted to the tower and she asked if that meant she could knock it over. She's silly. But she didn't knock it over.
I waited for the tide but the problem was, the tide wasn't coming up very high and even though I built close to the water, it never got high enough to flood either section of the fortress. That finicky tide. I didn't even bother building any towers on the upper section. I was bored with it.
I turned my attention towards the crabs. They come out in the late afternoon and that's what time it was, so they were popping out all over the place. I grabbed a plastic cup I use for testing the drainage system, filled it with sand, and dumped it upside down over a crab hole. I repeated this several times until I had a small forest of drinking-cup-shaped towers, then waited until the crabs dug themselves out again. I wanted to see if they would dig up through the towers of sand, making their entrances on the top of their four inch sand tower. A few turned on the way up and popped out of the side of their tower, but none managed to make it all the way, straight up to the top. A couple of the larger crabs dug out through the bottom, breaking up the lower portion of their little tower. I firmly believe they were all amazed at their new cool digs.
Between the double drainage system and the crab towers, I guess it was a day for experiments.
It began to rain very lightly and we were getting ready to leave when up drove Mark and Cindy. Cindy had mentioned that they might make their way out to Bellows on Sunday and they did, just in the nick of time. So we hung out with them for awhile--especially since Mark decided to bring a six-pack of good German beer.
While we drank the beer, I talked about my experiments of the day. Then we talked about hiking on the island. To better visualize the location of a hiking trail, Mark made a small, impromptu model in the sand of Tantalus mountain, then piled up another small mound of sand for the adjacent mountain range. I asked him how hard he though it would be to construct a giant model of the entire island. He said it would be easy.
For the next 40 minutes, the two of us constructed a scale model of the entire island of Oahu that was a good 18 feet across. Mark has lived in Hawaii since he was a kid and his acute knowledge of the terrain was essential. Diamondhead, Hanauma Bay, Tantalus, Kaneohe Bay, even the beach we were standing on, everything--it was all there--even the island runway of the Honolulu International Airport.
Lisa and Cindy marveled at our creation, or at least pretended to. When we left the beach, we left behind a small forest of crab towers, next to a cascading, dual-pooled fortress, which was beside our scale model of the island. It was quite a day.
Then we all went out and had beer and hamburgers and Mexican food.