Tag Archives: Kawaihae

Waterworld

This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘Waterworld.’ (See more offerings here.) So why this photo of Kawaihae harbor? Well, this was where the 1995 movie, Waterworld was filmed. Actually, most of the filming took place beyond the stubby rainbow in this photo, out there in the deep blue ocean.

The movie blew away its original budget, spectacularly overran its 96-day shooting schedule, and suffered a laundry list of disasters from start to finish. It started shooting without a finished script despite the efforts of multiple screenwriters. The director and the star had different ideas about how the movie should work. It was shot almost entirely on water. Actors and production crew got seasick. Two actors were dumped from a boat and then run over by it. Several of the cast were stung by jellyfish. A stuntman nearly died from the bends after a diving scene. The star himself was lashed to a mast, 40-feet up, for one scene but when it was over, a gale sprang up, and he and the boat couldn’t be retrieved for half an hour.

Bad weather often prevented any shooting and numerous delays carried the production into hurricane season. High winds duly destroyed one of the intricate and expensive floating sets.

The completion of filming didn’t end the movie’s traumas. The director quit before the editing was complete. Test audiences gave it a lukewarm reception leading to continued tinkering. Ultimately, the movie wasn’t a total disaster. While it didn’t do that well in the U.S.A., it covered its costs with overseas income. There’s even a popular Waterworld attraction at Universal theme parks.

I saw the movie when it came out and made it the subject of one of the weekly columns I wrote for my local newspaper. That column is reproduced below, as it was written at the time. Bear in mind that was 25 years ago and some things have changed in that time (if you don’t know what a VCR is, look it up!).

Waterworld on the rocks, no ice

I went to see Waterworld last week. That’s the movie that was supposed to be the most expensive ever made at around $100 million, but turned out to be the most expensive ever made at more than $175 million.
It’s set way in the future when some cataclysm, such as the balancing of the Federal budget, has caused the polar ice caps to melt. The survivors live on wacky floating stage sets and dream of finding dry land and pizza without anchovies.
Right from the start I was in trouble. Where was all this water coming from? I wondered. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, if all the world’s ice melted, sea level would rise about 230 feet. While this would bode ill for the likes of New Orleans and Miami, there would still be quite a bit of land sticking up, such as Asia. I would have thought that someone, somewhere would have bumped into some of this land by the time the movie started, possibly during the previews of coming attractions.
Still, as readers of this column know, I am not one to let facts get in the way of a story. Perhaps, in addition to the ice caps melting, it also rained a lot. Or, maybe, the cataclysm that caused the ice to melt was a gigantic alien intergalactic water tanker crashing into Earth.
In any case, in this water-covered world the only clue as to the location of dry land is a little girl with a map tattooed on her back and a glossy real estate brochure offering view lots at attractive prices.
This girl is sought by bad guys whose bad lifestyle includes riding jet skis, living on the Exxon Valdez, and worst of all, smoking cigarettes. (Presumably they’re stale cigarettes since there isn’t anywhere to grow tobacco and or any government to provide subsidies.) The bad guys are even called Smokers just in case anyone might not realize how thoroughly awful they are.
Pitted against the bad guys is Kevin Costner sporting webbed feet, gills, and a mean temper. This may be because his last three movies bombed or it could be dissatisfaction at the amount of money being wasted instead of going into his pockets.
Unlike Meryl Streep, who tends to research her character’s background and come up with appropriate behavior and accent, Costner acts in the John Wayne tradition. He sounds pretty much the same in Waterworld as he does in all his movies. For all I know his dialogue is the same. That could explain why the couple down the row from me decided to chat all the way through the movie.
Now, I’m not an intolerant person (and anyone who says I am should be taken out and shot), but people talking through movies is one of my pet peeves. It drives me bonkers when something happens on screen and I hear someone ask, “What did he say?” By the time the explanation is given, another scene has gone by prompting the question, “What happened there?” They never catch up.
This is why God invented the VCR. VCRs allow such people to have no idea what’s going on in the privacy of their own homes. They also avoid the risk of having me pour hot buttered popcorn on their heads.
Playing opposite Costner in almost the only female role, apart from the girl with the map, is Jeanne Tripplehorne. You can tell hers is a supporting role because she did not get as much material for her costume as Costner and consequently ran short in the bosom area. Not that I’m complaining.
One reason there are so few women in the movie is because Waterworld is an action/adventure movie. Hollywood rules state that in action/adventure movies, women cannot appear for more than about 20 minutes and during that time they must be either naked and/or get killed.
Because it’s an action/adventure movie, it also features a stipulated number of explosions, fires and, of course, meaningless violent deaths. There is even a mandatory car chase, not an easy thing to work in when the freeways are deep under water.
Actually that scene is one of the many tongue-in-cheek bits in the movie. In fact, apart from Costner being permanently cranky, everyone else seemed to be having a pretty good time, albeit while acting as though they’re desperate and starving.
It may be that this lighthearted attitude spilled over to the accounting department of Universal, the company that made Waterworld. That was my first thought to explain where the $175 million went. But then I noticed that all those fires burning through the movie were fueled by studio executives throwing actual dollar bills into the flames.
I understand that, in an attempt to recoup some of their costs, Universal plans a sequel. It’s about a movie studio that drowns in a sea of red ink when the accounting department’s computers crash and burn.
It will be called Realworld.

SSV Makani Olu

I was on my way to work one morning when I noticed the sailboat in the top image. The array of white sails caught the early morning sun and stood out against the deep blue water. I pulled over, took this photo and headed on in to work.

I saw later that the boat had anchored in Kawaihae harbor, so on my way home I stopped by to check it out. The SSV Makani Olu is a three-masted staysail schooner (SSV stands for Sailing School Vessel), and is used as a training vessel for various programs run by Marimed Foundation. The boat is based at Kaneohe Bay, on the east coast of Oahu.

In the photo to the right, the boat appears to be four-masted, but that’s just because the mast of the boat behind it lined up perfectly.

For more information about SSV Makani Olu and Marimed Foundation, go to marimed.org.

Unloading a barge

Containers are unloaded from one of the inter-island barges at Kawaihae harbor. It’s not a forklift doing the work, more of a grip-n-raise, though I doubt that’s its official name. No prizes for guessing that the shipping company is Matson, but I like the repetition of their name in the images.

Kawaihae breakwater breach

Some recent high surf made a breach in the breakwater of the northern small boat harbor at Kawaihae. Besides punching this hole in the rock barrier, the wooden mooring floats were also badly damaged and boats using the harbor were ordered to relocate since it was no longer safe.

Repairing the damage being estimated to cost around $8 million. Usually these kinds of thing overrun the estimates by a generous margin.

The top photo shows the extent of the damage as a tug and barge approach the harbor. Below, the picnic tables are deserted as the wind whips up whitecaps and a blast of sand across the area.

Incidentally, the tug and barge were unable to get into harbor because of the strong crosswinds and spent the night out at sea. They were still there next morning when I saw them, but were able to finally get into the harbor a few hours later.

SV Kwai in harbor

I saw this interesting-looking vessel tied up alongside the wharf at Kawaihae harbor for a week or more in the first half of January. When I searched for information about the boat, I learned that it’s the Sailing Vessel Kwai, a cargo vessel operating between Hawaii and Kiribati and the Cook Islands in the Pacific.

I’m not sure what it was doing in Kawaihae. The boat had been in Honolulu earlier in the month, on completion of its 51st voyage. Their 52nd voyage left Honolulu on January 24. Perhaps they were picking up cargo or doing maintenance in between these dates.

According to the first blog from Voyage 52 (here), the boat returned to the west side of the Big Island to search for a ghost net. A ghost net is a large clump of fishing nets that can be very destructive to ocean life and that will eventually wash up on shore somewhere being equally problematic when it does so. This net was estimated to be 50 feet long and deep by 70 feet wide.

A tracker had been attached to the ghost net so that it could be retrieved by a larger boat but, according to the blog post, when SV Kwai reached the area, only the tracker was found and retrieved. I haven’t heard or seen anything else about the net, so it is either still floating in the ocean or has washed up somewhere.

For more information about Sailing Vessel Kwai, go to svkwai.com. For more information about the ghost net, go here.

Better Days: Swamped boat

Yesterday, in certain parts of the island, the wind was honking. 20 miles south, there was a fresh breeze, but up around Kawaihae it blew a steady 40 knots with many higher gusts. Walking into the wind I had to lean forward at the kind of jaunty angle that would have seen me fall on my face on a calm day.

In the late afternoon, I made my way to Kawaihae harbor to see the waves and get a free skin treatment in the form of sandblasting. The very sheltered harbor was roiled with whitecaps from the whipping offshore wind. Most of the boats were bouncing up and down on the choppy waves, but I noticed something amiss. One of the boats wasn’t bouncing because it was mostly underwater. The outboard engine was the most prominent part to be seen.

I suspect that when the wind drops, the boat will still be barely afloat. But it should be able to be salvaged, pumped out, and ready to go again in fairly short order, so long as it doesn’t get taken out on a day like yesterday.

Better Days: Abandoned car

Abandoned vehicles are something of a problem in Hawaii. The root of the problem is that it’s expensive to responsibly get rid of an old car. So people leave them by the side of the road or on undeveloped property by the highway. I’ve posted before about one such vehicle here.

This latest one was sitting alongside the road just north of Kawaihae. At first, it looked like an older car that had perhaps broken down and was awaiting a tow or for the owner to return and fix it. But after a few days, it was clear that wasn’t happening.

If a vehicle sits unattended for a few days, people move in. Wheels are often the first to go. Then the hood goes up and anything useful in the engine compartment gets removed. There’s also a good chance that someone will tag the vehicle with graffiti.

What else can they do? Why not set it on fire. That’s what happened to this one. When I took these photos, the car had been sitting there two or three weeks.

About a week later I saw a police car parked behind it. The policeman wrote out a notice warning that the car will be towed at the owner’s expense if it was still there the next day. It should not come as a surprise that no one reacted to this notice, but neither was the car removed.

Another week passed and some traffic cones were placed around the burned-out hulk. There was good reason for this. The car was low to the ground and, with all the color burned off, it blended into the road. Someone could easily not have seen it, especially at night, and run into it.

Another week passed and then, one day, the car was gone. Only the traffic cones remained surrounding a small mound of ashes. Another week later, the cones and ash mounds area still there, but one day those too will disappear and that stretch of road will be ready to accommodate the next abandoned vehicle.