The Lost Files: Memoirs of The Kaupo Get Away

There have been so many events and issues that have popped up since my last post. But everything that was on my camera and on my computer was somehow corrupted and I wasn't able to view, upload or edit any of my files… UNTIL NOW.

Thanks to some snazzy computer magic, I was able to recover most of my files!

So from this post on, any entry or upload that has the title “The Lost Files” in front of it, is a file that I was able to recover from the pits of computer hell.

To start off the Lost Files Series, last year I was able to take an amazing trip out to a part of Maui called Kaupo with some friends and family.

Kaupo is along the Southeastern shore of Maui, is a slightly isolated and rugged place and the people of

Olowalu Testimony at the Maui Council Chambers; A Plea to the People of Maui

Yesterday (Nov. 27, 2012) at 200 South High Street Wailuku, Maui; I had a unique opportunity to present my testimony before the Maui County Council.

My presentation was extremely different compared to the other 54 testifiers who were there. I had actually created a rap! I wanted to grab the Council's attention; And with the feed back I received from other audience members, I'm hopeful that my words were heard.

(To watch a video I created with the lyrics I thought of, you can view it on my youtube channel or by *CLICKING HERE*)

Shark Finning Awareness

By BlueMenpachi

You might have to zoom in (Ctrl +) in order to read everything.

Overpopulation Cartoon

By BlueMenpachi

You might have to zoom in (ctrl +) in order to find all the themes.

An Evening with Plastic at Kahului Harbor! 10/15/2012

Okay. I will admit. The last two weekends I was not at Kahului Harbor doing my weekly clean ups.
And I regret not being out there because of THIS!

Kahului Harbor Clean Up Log: Week 1

Greetings Readers!

Sunday August 12, 2012 marks the beginning of my weekly logged adventures to Kahului Harbor. Every Sunday, from 12:00pm to 5:00pm (possibly earlier in the day), I will head to Kahului Harbor to pick up trash and plastic debris which is brought in from the tides.

The amount of plastic debris out there is RIDICULOUS.

Tiny bits of plastic are scattered EVERYWHERE and is even mixed in with the rocks because of the ebb and flow of the tide.

Advanced Open Water "Scuba-fication"

Hey everyone,
I really need to get this blogging thing on a more consistent pace again.
So! A lots has happened in the past month.
I was Open Water Scuba Certified, or what I like to call, "Scuba-fied" and yesterday, I had completed my boat dive and deep dive for my Advanced Open Water!
It was so amazing.
For our deep dive, my partner, my instructor and myself went out to Molokini with the Maui Dive Shops boat the Makakoa.
We jumped off the boat and into the water and went down to 100ft!
And the first sea creature my instructor, Wayne, took us to see were two white tip sharks sleeping in this little cave~
They reminded me of cats! Sleeping all day and staying up all night.
We did our little puzzle thing we had to do underwater, then he took us around Molokini!
SO MANY COOL THINGS TO DORK OUT ON!
Varieties of fish, I saw my first flatworm, there were garden eels, peanut eels, those two white tips, butterflyfish, pufferfish (which are my favorite), so many things down there!

After our deep dive, we headed over to another dive spot called 5 Caves. Other people know it as 7 Graves or Turtle Town. (poh-tay-toe; poh-tah-toe)
We went down to about 40 ft here. And again... SO MANY THINGS TO DORK OUT ON.

"Code Of Conduct"

This past Saturday, August 27, 2011, some friends and I went out to Black Rock here on Maui to go enjoy a nice day at the beach with some exchange students from Japan.
All was well for the entire day! Well, almost the entire day. We were having fun, jumping off the rocks in the ocean and showing the Japanese students how to jump off and everything.

My cousin and I were going for our last jump off the top of Black Rock when i noticed, down to my left at the bottom of the jump, there were many snorkelers gathering around something that was in the water.

I saw there were two green sea turtles and the way the tourists were gathering around them, looked so dangerous... They were literally CORNERING the turtles against the rock face that it almost got stuck on the rocks... I was so angry... I watched the tourists as they continued to get even CLOSER to the turtles!

Japan Earthequake: Where everything is happening

Everyone has heard about Japan's great earthquake and tsunami that hit on Mar. 11, 2011.
You hear about how Sendai was the epicenter of the earthquake and that the Fukushima Nuclear plants are leaking radiation.
But I've found out that a lot of people don't know exactly WHERE on the globe everything is happening.
So I did some searching and thanks to http://www.japan-guide.com/ I found a great map that has everything color coded and marked.
:3

You can click on the picture to make it bigger and read the names of the places.
I'd also like to send out my love towards Japan. It's always been my dream to visit there one day and I wish there was more people like me could do. I do my best to support Great Japan by going to functions, or buying items for school clubs that will send the profits to the Red Cross. I just wish there was more I, my self could do, as an individual.
I would love to PHYSICALLY go over there and help clean up and stuff... But eh... We just do our best and support them from afar.
がんばれ みなさま!

Long time no blog!

Jeezum crow I haven't entered anything new in a LONG time!
I promise this weekend your gonna get hit with at LEAST 8 to 10 new blog posts!
I've been writing everything down in this handy little notebook of mine and soon it shall be on my blog!
So manye crazy things have passed:
Kihei got flooded from the rainstorm. Beaches are either getting cleaned up or polluted. The 8.9m earthquake that shifted Japan and the tsunami that followed it causing so many people to lose lives and lifestyles...
So many things happening in the world. At least people have been trying to help.
There are tsunami relief events happening around the islands AND the world.
There are beach clean ups that help a bunch. And Maui even had a small tsunami of there own! Very very small of course. THANKFULLY no horrible destructive damage.
(Maui better count their blessings)

There are so many things I want to blog about I'm not sure where to start!

Lipoa Beach Walk: TRASH FINDINGS

After Maui had that big rain, we've still been feeling the after effects. The water at Lipoa was even more brown than usual and there was drift wood all over the entrance with bits of trash, or shells.
When I was at Lipoa again this morning. I decided to pick up what ever little trash I could along the way.
And here's what I found:

MOP Project week 1: Seaweed collection!

So for the past week I've been collecting Hypnea musciformis for my school project.
Ultimately, I want to make awesome compost and fertilizer out of it.
On Monday (1/24/11) from 6am to 7am, Wednesday (1/26/11) 6:30am to 7:30am and this morning from 7:30am to 9:00am I was down at Lipoa in Kihei collecting seaweed.
In my proposal it says it says that I will collect 417 lbs of Hypnea, but since I don't have the space yet at my house I only collected 183 lbs this week.
I took out about 16 lbs and put the seaweed into a blue bucket and rinsed off all the seawater that was sitting on it.

A Beautiful Evening with a nice Rainfall. But please be careful of run-off

It's pouring tonight on Maui, and there'e that lovely smell in the air of a nice clean rain.



But please remember everyone, with all that rain comes run-off. And contaminated run-off is bad juju for our oceans.
Everything that gets thrown out into the streets will either wash right down to the ocean or will travel through the storm drains only to get washed up on our beaches and (again) our oceans.



Be mindful of the things you see or throw onto the ground. There are consequences for careless actions.
So i ask again. Please be mindful of what is on the ground.
Mahalo!
:3

Project Proposal Fall 2010: Maui Invasive Seaweed Collection, Eradication and Experimentation

Maui Invasive Seaweed Collection, Eradication and Experimentation


Yesterday in my oceans 101 class, our project proposals were due. We could pick anything we wanted to do a project on. It could have been anything from a small local project to a large scale national or even international project.
I picked a small scale local project and I named it Invasive Seaweed Collection, Eradication and Experimentation.
We had to cover an introduction, our methods and materials we would need and use, references and an estimated budget.

Continuation from A Dream of Energy

A user left a comment on my Dream of Energy blog saying that although he agrees for a greener Maui, if the sugarcane were to be removed, we would have a bigger problem with dust and erosion.
I had a spring thought that instead of sugarcane, what if we were to replace that with pili grass instead?

Plastic Poison List

Everyday, people use something plastic. It could be disposable or even a long term use of that particular plastic. But when you're done, you'll probably end up throwing it away right?
Here are some of the things I've thought about that people use that end up in the trash, that goes to the landfill and in some way or another, the ocean:

MOC blog adventure 3: Spineless Wonders

Today I went to the ocean center again at 10:30 a.m. because I had to finish up a homework packet for my marine biology class that's due tomorrow. (Talk about cramming)

I ended up staying at the spineless wonders tank for about a half an hour watching the lobsters eat.

In the Spineless Wonders tank there are:

four spiny lobster (panulris sp.)

one red reef lobster (enoplometopus sp.)

four tiger cowries (Cypraea tigris)

four squirrel fish (Sargoncentron diadema)

one soldierfish (Myripristis amaena)

a spaghetti worm (Loimia medusa)

a 7-11 crab (Carpilus maculatus)

It was around 2:30 p.m. when I noticed a cowrie doing something I hadn't seen before.

I thought it was laying eggs but it wasn't. It was feeding!

It had something that looked like a siphon, similar to the cone snails, except it wasn't as long and it was more wide. It was eating food that had been dropped in the tank.

As I watched the tank I noticed that one of the spiny lobsters looked more pale than usual and that it was missing five walking legs! Four on his left side and one on his right.

Then I figured it must have been because of the Red reef lobster that was in the tank too. I saw that the red lobster was chasing that one spiny lobster around the tank! The spiny lobster always ran away from the red reef lobster! It tried to nip at it with its claws and kept chasing it around the tank. It was being such a bully.

2:30 must be the feeding time for that tank because there were some mussles and chopped up octopus and fish in the tank.

I saw that another one of the bigger spiny lobsters liked hanging around the cowries when it eats. It got hold of a mussle and pried it open! And the 7-11 crab seemed like it liked the cowries. He didn't so anything to them. he just stood near the cpwries whenever they were near food.

It took about only five minutes for him to fiddle around with the mussle shell and crack it open. I could even hear it making the cracking noise THROUGH the glass!

It was really cool to see a lobster just break and crush and pry open a mussle shell.

And even watching the cowries feed was interesting. I just wish I could have seen their radula. Their little tooth thing that scrapes at their food.

The cowries seem to have a good sense of smell using that wider siphon to look for food.

It went straight for that orangey fish egg looking thing and made as quick as a cowrie could to eat it.

Hada pretty good time at this tank today.

Btw, have you thanked your zooxanthellae?

:D

MOC blog adventure 1: Squid findings?

First post of my MOC adventures.

Today was probably the fifth time I went to the Maui Ocean Center ever since I got my student pass from school.

This blog post however, is about yesterday when I went. I was surprised to see that they had put in 3 new squid in the Deep Sea tank that's right before the 54 foot long Shark Tank.

But what was even more surprising was that one of the squids had laid eggs!

I asked one of the naturalists, Joe, if he new that there were eggs in the squid tank. When I took him to the tank to have a look, even he was surprised to see that one of the squids had laid eggs.

He also said that one of the squids must have already had the sperm packet on her, as he hadn't seen the eggs in there before.