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Originally Posted by AmazingGrace
Ok I just saw you made it back alive and in one piece... or so we are led to believe as you are posting... now tell us,,,, did you attempt to drown yourself or the wife... did you try to sink the boat... what was the adventure this time enquiring minds wanna know!!
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We had a great trip although it rained off and on while we were in Hawaii and I discovered that crossing 2557 miles of the Pacific Ocean in Feburary is much like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in May or September! Not warm, very windy, and pretty good waves.
The trip almost didn't start though as I had a last minute urgent matter from work tie me up and I ended up rushing out the door without my manila folder with all of our travel documents in it. I realized it halfway to the airport and had to turn around and go back home. I called my daughter to have her meet us halfway as we were on a tight timeline and in rush hour traffice. She found the folder but when she met us I grabbed the folder and realized it was the wrong one. She had found the right one but realized she needed to grab her shoes before running out the door so she laid it on a kitchen chair. When she came back in she grabbed an identical looking folder from the kitchen table that my son had placed there so he would remember to drop it off at my work!
I almost had a heart attack when I saw she had brought the wrong folder to me. We had to drive on the rest of the way home to get the right one. We did make it to the airport on time though and had a great trip.
The parasailing was great. The day we did it there was a wind advisory out the winds were so high. The special speedboat used for the parasailing was heaving about in the high waves like a cork in a bathtub. We had to carefully keep the boat balanced with the four couples and two crew members on board to keep from capsizing. The crew said it was truly "extreme" parasailing that day because of the wind and waves.
The liftoff from the boat was really smooth and actually a nice change from the rough seas. We were probably a mile or 1 1/2 miles from shore out in the ocean. I am scared of heights but at first was comforted when I examined the nice steel carinbers (sp?) that attach from the body harness you are in to the parachute. However I then looked up to see what the steel connector connected to and saw that it was a nylon strap that wrapped around the metal bar attached to the parachute and the the strap was just sewn together with stitching. My mind immediately started wondering how many thousands of times that stitching had all this weight on it, how good was it stiched, and what would happen if it let go! My next aphrensnion was in looking at the rather pedestrian looking yellow rope attached to the parachute harness in what looked like just a knot!
I kept thinking that if that rope came undone with the wind blowing the way it was we would probably be carried a 100 miles out in the Ocean before unceremoniously being depositid in the water.
It was exhilierating, scary, and peaecful up there. A very strange mix of emotions. It was strange looking down below my dangling feet to see the beautiful blue Pacific Ocean 700 feet below.