last FULL day on Maui

We had read about the Maui swap meet in our lonely planet guide so we headed out around 7:45 to go check it out and meet up with Sandy. Although a lot of the things on sale were the typical made-in-china-commodity-vacation-items, there were some nice shirts there, some beautiful but expensive hand made wood bowls, and a huge selection of organic fruit and nuts.





There was also an excellent food stand where we bought teriyaki chicken/ garlic noodle bowls and bento for later on in the day. We also picked up a book for the plane (Moneyball by Michael lewis for $6), some cool fish-shaped drawer handles,



some organic macadamia nuts and bananas. Chloe had by this time become obsessed by a variety of banana known as an "apple-banana" which has hints if apple in it. However, it seems like you need to find them when they are quite ripe, or they just taste like somewhat bitter normal bananas. There were several stands at the swap meet with ripe apple bananas, as well as another varierty which we hadn't seen before called an "ice cream banana" which had notes of vanilla and just the slightest wispy hint of banana (I'm practicing for a new career writing tasting notes for esoteric banana varietals). We ran into Sandy, who was buying t-shirts and steadily moving down and crossing names off her gift list.

From the swap meet, we headed out to Kite Beach again, where the wind was light and I rigged my 12 meter switchblade. It was fine in the zone near the beach ("the inside"), but within ten minutes I was way overpowered on the outside and came back in to rig chloe's 8 meter GK sonic. With the sonic and my new (used) underground FLX I had one of my best kiting days ever, in two one hour sessions.

I got a little air (mostly off of waves, but some on turns near shore), stayed upwind effortlessly, and more importantly managed to ride some waves in. It seems to take very careful control of your speed, but the sensation is pretty amazing. At some point I'm going to have to buy a directional surfboard style board. The problems that I had riding the waves were that for the big ones the wave would push me forward, slacken my lines and occasioanlly dump the kite... and I would all of a sudden be in the midst of a set of shoulder height waves and whitewash and get a pounding. Anyway, it was bliss (the riding, not the washing machine of the whitewash!), which was only slightly spoiled by my getting too greedy later on in the day and trying to launch in light winds. This led to getting dragged alon the beach, dumping chloes kite into a huge bush (sorry Chloe!!) and getting heckled by an overweight local who doesn't even seem to kiteboard. Chloe took a short lesson with a mini-kite on short lines and felt a lot better by the end. Dave had previously gotten his 11 m Yarga re-fitted with a fifth line bar, and had gone out on the water but was a little too lit on his 11 (most people were on 9 m kites) and ended up down the beach with tangled lines. Here he is walking back up the beach:

I could feel his pain after having my kite fall out of the sky on my last session near shore and having to detangle a huge birds nest of lines earlier.

When the wind was dead near shore and after a few more attempts to launch, we called it a day and headed back to Kihei to clean up. Dave and Sandy had invited us over to share some teriyaki ribs that they were grilling, so we headed over there after washing as much of the by now usual waterproof sunscreen/sand mixture off as we could. The ribs were great but we were sad to say goodbye to Dave, Sandy and Dylan. Hopefully they will visit us out in CA.