Just The Right Kind Of Crazy

Several times/week I go for a 5ish mile run that loops around my town... down to the ocean and back. It's one of my favorite loops b/c it's got nice views of the ocean and it's a bit hilly and usually I'm just relaxing and cruising fairly easy when I do it. Anyway, I used to call it my 'Gilligan's Island Loop' b/c there's a view of a cute little island out there which is where they filmed the intro for Gilligan's Island way back when...

It never really occurred to me that this would be a good place to swim. Mostly b/c ~8 years ago when I was buying this condo I mentioned something about how cool it was that it was to live so close to the water for swimming and my real estate cut me off and said Don't even think about swimming there- Kaneohe Bay is a breeding ground for sharks! Well ok then. So I've never, not once in almost 8 years, swam there.

But then I saw a picture on FB (the one posted above!) last weekend that some of my friends were swimming around that island... Great 1.75 mile swim, they said. Beautiful reef, they said. Hmmmm. So we can swim there after all? What about the breeding of the sharks?? I asked Scott and he said, "Oh they're just baby sharks..." So what? Baby sharks don't eat so we don't have to worry about them? I did a google search for Coconut Island pics for this blog (we didn't bring a camera this morning so I'm shamelessly stealing pics from others!) I found a couple pics of the sharks that are out there. Spoiler alert: We didn't see any this morning.

So as the sun was coming up this morning I was running down to the water with my cap and goggles in hand. It's ~2 miles down to the private property we were trying to sneak onto to start the swim... that's the other issue with this swim- no good public pier to launch from. Once you're in the water, it's public. But getting to the water is tricky, b/c it's private. PITA if you ask me! Nalani was worried about breaking the rules so this was not a relaxing morning for her. Mark and I are more the rule breakers so we were like WHATEVER. Sure enough when we were on the private pier about to jump in the water a guy on a boat came up to us and told us it was private and we weren't allowed to be there... we played dumb though and smiled and told him we'd be careful and this would only take like 40'. :) So off we went!

And you know what?? I LOVED IT. It was super cool swimming around the edge of the reef- sort of reminded me of that scene from Finding Nemo where Nemo wants to swim off the edge of the reef- we basically just hovered around the perimeter of the island right along the reef drop off. Here's an aerial view I found online...

We stopped a bunch and chatted... checking out the island from the backside... and decided that if we had access to a pier where we knew we wouldn't get in trouble we'd be swimming here ALL THE TIME! So maybe 10' after that we saw a guy on a stand up paddle board headed our way... stopped and chatted with him and turns out he has a house with a pier not too far from the private one we pretty much got kicked off of. He said normally he doesn't allow people to use his pier but that we were apparently just the right kind of crazy (his exact words!) and that he would let us use his pier access. TA DAH! Like serendipity or something?? He gave me his phone number so we can get in touch next time we want to run to the ocean for an awesome swim. Here's a view from the backside of the island looking at Oahu. Obviously I did not take this picture but this is what we saw this morning... Windward Oahu. This is where I live. I really try not to take this for granted. :)