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.

Rob Machado + DOG CALENDAR IS READY

First of all I'm excited to say the Sri Lanka Dog Calendar 2012 is finished and nearly on the printers. Soooo, if any of you would like one, please get in early and email me or fb me. I cannot actually think of a better Christmas present for your mum. My email is ad.keeffe@gmail.com. Donations of $10 or more would be awesome. Donations of less than $10 is not that awesome. All proceeds will go to getting me back there next year, possibly even make a 2013 calendar.

Aside from spending time designing calendars I've actually been doing other things. Like today, Saturday, I went surfing at Lani's and I'm pretty sure I saw Rob Machado out in the water. Surf was pumping bout 4 foot offshore. He was sort of sitting on the inside. So I'm waiting out a bit further than him and can't quite make out if its him or just someone else with a dirty little beard and big hair. Then this punchy little left comes through (I haven't been surfing in a week so I was absolutely frothing) and I'm getting closer to where he's sitting and then this thing starts to pitch and I'm thinking, froth, I'm gonna get barrelled right in front of Rob Machado. I pull in and can hear a few people hooting, but realise I'm not gonna make it out and decide to punch through the wave. Next thing I know I pop my head up and my board comes flying back toward me and one of my fins hit me right in the eye. I instantly realise this is bad, cause I've seen what fins can do to people, so I decide to go in as fast as possible. Now I couldn't even open get my right eye open, was feeling pretty groggy and could see a little bit out of my left. So I will never actually be sure if it was Rob Machado hooting me in a barrel. As soon as I get to the beach I race to the lifeguard tower. No need for ambo's but I got a lift with a tourist back to Wahiawa and then to the hospital. What a nice dude. He'd only been in Hawaii 10 hours, but was kind enough to give me a lift. After a little bit of super glue and a sore head, all I'm left with now is a dirty big bruise.

Hiking, missing boats and sick tourists

As part of the staff training, I recently went over to the island of Kauai on a leadership adventure trip. It was the most challenging, but also amazing hike of my life. We had to do a 11 mile hike along the rugged Napali coastline, carrying supplies on our back enough for 5 days. I mean we were carrying bare necessities. Now I'm exaggerating when I say this but there were several parts along the hike where if you slip you're either dead or very very bruised. It was an amazing trip in that people pushed themselves further than they thought they could go.

Taylor, one of my very good friends in the team nearly died a few years ago when he fell off a 30 foot cliff and took him over 2 years to rehabilitate in which time he got fully addicted to the painkillers and had to go through rehab for drugs too. Now here we were just about to embark on this hike almost 3 years exactly to the date, which as you can imagine was a little bit spooky, especially cause his knee was still pretty dodgy. Anyway we set off along the trail and got to one sketchy part when his right foot fell off the side of the path/cliff but he just regathered himself. I was amazed to see him get back up and keep going. After camping a couple of days in the Kalalau Valley, the plan was to get a boat ride out of the valley by our friend rather than hike back. By the time the final day came we were waiting on the beach praying and hoping that the boat would come. Taylor was probably praying the hardest cause his knee was know very inflamed from the hike over. I wasn't going to vocalise what I was thinking, but I was like, “that boat better come because there is no way Taylor's gonna be able to hike back on that knee”. One hour went by, two hours went by. By the time it got to 10'oclock we came to the conclusion that something must have happened, Larry and his boat aint coming, and we started preparations to hike out cause we needed to get to the other end of the trail before night fall. We were probably a little too confident of maybe hopeful that the boat was coming cause most of us had eaten all our food and had nothing left for the hike back. As we gathered our bags together we saw another boat coming nearer on the horizon. There'd been boats coming all morning but we thought just we'll wait and see, one last boat, this could be it. As the boat drew near the anticipation was killing us, I couldn't wait any more and started swimming out to the boat thinking that even if its not Larry maybe I could schmooze them boyish charm and convince them to take us. But it was Larry. I've never been so happy to see a man in my life. I'm not sure I've ever had a happier moment. Looking back on the shore, one of the girls was some overcome by emotion that she feel to the ground crying. Two and a half hours late, but we were saved. YEWL!

When we all finally swum our bags out to the boat we were greeted by about 10 extremely sick tourists who had paid a bucket load of money for this catamaran tour. We tried to contain our excitement and cheering which probably didn't help the situation. It got even better when we got to eat all their food cause the tourists were so sick. If I learned one thing from this trip, its that we can push ourselves way further than we originally think if we are forced to.