Tsunami Repair

Last weekend I stopped off at Anaehoomalu Bay to try to fly my new T2i KAP rig, but the wind was too low to fly a kite, much less a camera. Instead I looked around and saw that the section of beach that had been washed out by the tsunami had been replaced! I talked to some of the maintenance workers there, and they said the work had been done two weeks earlier. I couldn’t fly a camera then, but I vowed to come back as soon as conditions were better.

This morning I checked the wind and saw that conditions were almost ideal. I grabbed my stuff and headed out, hoping the wind models weren’t wrong. I wasn’t disappointed. The wind was higher than I expected. It was high enough I could fly the rig from my 6′ rokkaku. I did two flights, one with a circular polarizer and one without. The sun was almost directly overhead, so the set with the polarizer worked better than might be expected. In the end I made just over a hundred exposures, some of which stitched together well enough to show the repair:

The new sand is a different color from the original sand on the beach, though I expect that’ll become more subtle over time. Even after just three weeks the water in the fishpond has already turned the characteristic green it has been in the past. In time it will be hard to tell something had happened at all. One of the clearest signs remaining is the wide delta of sand out in the bay, extending toward the reef. Other than that things really are returning to normal.

At the moment the entire repair is faced by giant sandbags, and signs along the repair ask people not to walk on the sand bags. I hope that the plans include dumping more sand in front of the sand bags to recreate the beach that was washed away by the tsunami. I also expect there are plans to repair the stone wall that was destroyed. Time will tell.

It was a good day. The T2i KAP rig worked well, I was able to photograph the repairs, and I’m getting a better feel for the weight of the new rig in the air. Can’t beat it.

– Tom