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Fortress 5060Home \ Fortresses \ May 2000 \ 5060
Location: Bellows Beach |
Saturday,
May 6, 2000
On Fridays, it is common for me, Lisa, and many of our friends, most of them sociology
grad students at the University of Hawaii, to meet at our regular table on the lanai
at a local pub called Shipley's for happy hour beers, food, and
conversation. This is often followed by buffoonery at either the local bowling alley or
one of the many karaoke rooms around town. The evening before this fortress was
built, we were at Shipley's, as usual, and it was during the conversation
portion of the evening that I was talking about tides with my friend Eddie
Glazier. He's a surfer and has studied tides for quite a while, and I learned a
lot about tides from him that night. He told me that the low tide on the windward side
of the island, where I build my fortresses, was lower that week than he had seen in a long
time.
-Shut up and get to the pictures-
Since then, he has moved to Alaska, where he doesn't do much surfing. But the next day, I got to Bellows Beach around 11:00 am, just after low tide, and saw that Ed was right. I couldn't believe how low the tide was. I had never seen so much flat beach.
There was not a cloud in the sky, and it was hot. I knew I had to build a good distance from the tide to give me enough time to complete the fortress before it would come and flood it, but I didn't know how far. The beach was so flat way out where the tide was, and I knew it would cover a much greater distance with every inch it rose. So I built a good 20 - 30 feet from the tide. I had never built this far from the tide, but I knew it would be coming.
To help fortify against the tide, I constructed a huge base again, like I had with SF4220. I made 11 molds with the 5-gallon bucket for a huge foundation. It was not fun carrying 5-gallon buckets full of water from the ocean to the construction site in that heat, but it was necessary, and I was in the zone--focused on the success of this fortress.
I was generally happy the way this fortress turned out. The drainage system consisted of a single pipe with two intake filters connected. I thought the fortress had a very futuristic look. I made a couple of nice towers but had two arches collapse. After the success of the last fortress, SF4290, and its beautiful arch, I wanted to make more arches, but I got greedy and tried to make them too big. The first one I made collapsed. I had an idea for the second one to turn a 5-gallon bucket upside down and build a tower on each side and an arch across the top of the bucket. The theory being that this would quickly give me height. Instead of piling a wall of sand for the arch, sand that will just get removed anyway, why not stick a bucket there, build the arch above it, then remove the bucket. Well, the arch was nice, and it was high, but as I removed the bucket, it collapsed, tragically. You can see this bucket built into the wall in some of the photos.
The tide did make it to my fortress within a few hours, sooner than I wanted, and I wasn't quite finished yet. I even constructed a very large water breaker out of 5-gallon bucket molds in an attempt to protect the front for as long as possible, but the tide was relentless and eroded it away almost as fast as I could build it. I eventually turned my attention back to the fortress, but I just didn't have time to complete the right side. (You may notice I tried to avoid that part of the fortress in some of the photos.) The tide just started pounding the front, not only before I could complete it, but even before it really had a chance to flood. It eventually flooded a couple times, but there was very little left of the fortress by then, and it resembled ancient ruins more than a fortress.
Since I got there so early and the tides came in so early, I was able to watch it wipe out the entire fortress. It was only 4:00 pm and since I had to rinse off sand anyway, I decided to do it while body boarding for a half hour or so. There were just a couple of lumps left of the fortress when I went out to the water, but by the time I finished body boarding and was getting ready to leave, there was absolutely no trace that my once-massive, 13 5-gallon mold fortress had ever been there. At one point while riding in, I was floating up the beach on my body board and floated right over what had been the construction site earlier. It was weird.
I got some good photos before the attack of the tide. And some during.
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