September - November Collection

Only a Swede

Casual wrestling in the living room

These are my besties

Small group in the alley

Hey dad I took a nature photo

Beautiful Kauai

Nicest place in the world

Thanksgiving preparations

Best thanksgiving ever!

Road to north shore never gets boring

And here we are

North shore

Pretty standard - donation of 787kg of cream cheese base

Waianae surf club

Splashes and squirts

Yesterday was one of the most moving experiences at STN since I've been here. Recently due to the dismal summer swells I have stumbled across a new found passion.... Cave diving. I've gone diving and spear fishing a few times in my life, but not too many. As a general rule of thumb if there's waves I will always choose surfing over diving... that was until the surf was completely flat for months and finally my hand was forced. And it. Is. so. Fun!!! So basically you take a big breath, you swim down into a cave and then you come out the other side, either up into another cave or out into the open water. Once you get far enough down and your looking through the tunnel you can see the silouttes of fish everywhere because of the way the light reflects. The funny thing about it is that even though most of the time you can see the light on the other side it can be deceivingly long. The other day when I went for the first time, I powered through the first few caves and was feeling pretty confident. Then we went for the big one. The thing was there was a few of us following each other sort of like a train. I was forth in line. Problem was the guy at the front could obviously hold his breath a lot longer than me cause he was taking his sweet time. I get to the part of the cave where it starts to open up, starting to run out of breath and I realise I'm only half way through the cave. Out of pure instinct I push my friend out of the way and power my way past another one or two guys finally making it to the surface gasping for breath. It freaked me out so much a little poo come out. Our local friend Kawika pops up last laughing his guts out at the antics he just saw from behind. Lets just say that was the last cave I did for the day. So, yeah, Shark's Cove on the north shore is epic. I've gone 3 times so far and getting better at equalising and holding my breath and all that technical stuff. So if you've ever wondered how to hold your breath longer underwater, here's a few tips. http://freediving.shark.nu/2007/03/06/top-10-on-how-to-hold-your-breath-longer/ These are some photos, none of them are mine, but it gives you some idea.

Contests and beautiful Waikiki

Hey guys so, as some of you know I've been down at Waikikikiki doing a surf contest the other weekend and thought I'd post a few extra photos from it. A few of the photos are of Kyle and the team who sponsored some of the kids from the Waianae Surf Club. They were absolutely over the moon. Such a fun few days.

Wahiawa Outreach

Hey guys its been a while, but I couldn't resist sharing some of these photos with you. One of my main tasks with running the internship is do organise the Wahiawa Outreach. Wahiawa is where we live, so every Wednesday afternoon help either a business, or the police, or a family in need, or however we can think to bless the community. The last couple of weeks we've been trying to clean up Lake Wilson. And we seriously pulled out a mountain of trash and I still feel like we have yet to hit the tip of the ice-burg. We did however find some interesting items.

The second bunch of photos is when we helped out the local police with a positive message sign waving fiasco.

Departures, Arrivals, and Still Getting Lost

When thinking of what to write for my latest blog I could not go past putting a photo up of 3 of my closest friends. This is possibly the most epic Christmas card I've seen. I can't believe that they actually stayed not laughing enough to be able to take this photo. Thank you Robert, Zach and Zach.

Anyway last week was my first week in my new role internship staff with all the new interns having just arrived. After a month of preparing it was great to actually deal with people rather than just preparing for people to come. As a newly designated staff van driver I putting my directional skills to use by driving a 15 seat van to the Feeding The Hungry food distribution in Kalihi. After turning off the highway and back-trekking twice in opposite directions the interns were getting suspicious that I didn't know where I was going. The real clincher was when we ended up on an United States Airforce base. After asking for directions from the nice lady at the checkpoint we were finally on our way.

This wouldn't have been so bad, except that I'd already had one mishap with a airport pick-up earlier that week. No, this time it wasn't the arrivals and departures that confused me. It was more a case of trying to find out how to do a lap of the departures terminals. There were two directions I could have gone and of course I took the one that sent me back on the highway for several miles in the wrong direction. It is so frustrating when you turn off a road that you can't do a u-turn on, only to find out that you're on another road which you can't do a u-turn on. It a good thing that I know myself well enough to give a 15 minute allowance for getting lost. Thank you Janelle for being patient with the pick-up.

The first week of the internship has been memorable. This new crew of interns so far have been absolutely all star, and help create a diverse and exciting environment. I'm gonna elaborate more on this in my next newsletter. If you want to receive this and don't already, just send me your email address via facebook.

Andy gets pitted at pipe!!

So you all know the pipe masters has just come to a close and to go and watch it live on the beach is like a dream come true. Super blessed to be able to do that. I know every one of the boys back home would be frothing to come. And to have two aussies in the final was so epic. I feel like the more I watch the waves the more I feel like I could drop into one, except the harsh reality is that I would probably do a bottom turn, try to pull in, only to have 400 tonnes of lip hit me in the head and push me down into the razor sharp reef. So yesterday I emailed my friend telling him that I got to go to the finals of the pipline masters, which was a dream of mine. This was his reply.

No way, the finals of the pipeline masters! That's sick mate! Does that mean there's a chance of money and rankings? (Although you're probably not interested in all that?) I hope you win! Good luck! Anyway I'm off to tell everyone I know my mates in the Pipeline Masters Finals!

The writer would like to remain anonymous.

If that's not a confidence booster I don't know what is. Thank you very much for believing in me.

Rookie Thanksgiving

So this Thursday was my first ever real american thanksgiving. I anticipating a lot of food for the day and so didn't eat breakfast. We then started out the day at 9.30 in the morning by playing American football in the morning, like a legitimate game with rules and everything (obviously because I was playing with Americans). It was nothing like the few times we tried to play it at lunchtime at school. All I remember at school was you can pass the ball forward and can tackle people even if they don't have the ball. I recall people standing around confused and then getting hit it the back by someone tackling them. So back to my thanksgiving day game, within the first 20 minutes I was getting told off by my American friends, apparently you can't push someone over when they're about to catch the ball. After a while I got the hang of it, its actually pretty fun.

What happened latter in the day was obviously an extreme rookie mistake. So we have this massive lunch, turkey, cranberry sauce (which apparently is just jam). Side note; who puts jam on meat? Mashed potatoes, while we watch some football highlights on the big screen. Then.. we decided to go surfing straight afterwards. I was pretty reserved about the whole idea, tired and my legs were pretty stiff from football. So I paddle out with the boys, just paddling is making me feel sick already, and my head is starting to pound (think I hadn't drunk enough water that day). Then I get this sick wave, its absolutely pumping and I do a huge gouge in the pocket, and half way through my legs from my hips to my toes completely lock up and cramp. The surf was so pumping so I try paddle back out, but I couldn't pull my toes back round. The end.