Turtle & Waimea Bays

As you can probably tell from the last post, I'm tired and not in a particularly good mood, so sadly this will be short.

This weekend we went to the North Shore. After seeing a turtle in the sea a week or so ago (and a fish a few days ago, which jumped out of the sea just feet from us!), Tom was itching to go up to Turtle Beach, which is actually called L-something Beach. I can't remember the name. The beach is pretty, but extremely rocky. There were loads of people, but no turtles, although Tom thought he saw one in the sea.

It's been relatively wintry here lately - there has been quite a bit of patchy rain, and this morning the sky was covered in grey clouds. The temperature has also probably dropped a couple of degrees. However, it's worse up on the north side of the island. Although Waimea Bay is clearly beautiful, the sea was powerful and terrifying. When we first got there, once you swam out a bit, you were fine - however, if you stayed in the shallow part, the sea would just sweep you up the beach or out into the water as the waves ebbed! I was scared by that, but then... oh, my god. The waves were suddenly like tidal waves. One of them I ran away from, as if for my life (it pretty much was!), but it caught up with me, hit me in the back of the legs (strong enough to leave a mark) and totally took me out. Tom had a similar experience, although his involved the wave pulling down his too-loose-anyway swimming shorts!

The waves were at least ten foot high, and we each got caught in them. The sea took my sunglasses and deposited large amounts of sand in every crevice of our bodies - three showers later and we're both still finding sand in between our toes and in our hair! This is a picture of waves at Waimea Bay - not ones I took, I think the waves there on Saturday were a bit smaller than that, and more like blocky walls of water than surfable waves like this.

Sunday we did little - I say that, but I worked like fury and Tom watched some films. We talked to my parents over Skype for an hour, which was lots of fun - webcams are amazing things! We also roasted pork belly, which was good, but not great like the pork butt last week. Oooh, this is making me hungry. It's lunchtime anyway. Hope you enjoyed the pictures (if not the strop!).