Urchins and Boils and Eels Oh MY!

All of my creative juice has been harvested and stolen by 13 grimy, loud, and most importantly precious first and second graders. They must have also stolen my good judgement as well because this week has been filled with choosing danger over fear and safe choices. As a result, this post will be brief and fact based.

Monday afternoon, the bell just rang and the bus pulls up to take our kids. Pastor/Principle/Parent/Provider Tara calls me over to his house. It was a rough day with many misbehaved kids. This can't be good. "Loren called, surf is good, hurry up and go!". (mind you, this could mean anything from 2 foot to 20 foot surf, depends on what they mean by "good"). Hop in the truck and drive 15-20 miles (yes, this little 42 square mile island has more than 10 miles of road) to Malem. Its big. Poor Ryan and River, its big. Paddle out in the rip current, sit in the line-up, oh great this is bigger in person. Matt Simpson whispers "this is only a 4ft swell. oh, and watch out for the shallow section at the end of your ride". Here goes nothing, it gets bigger, start paddling, its even bigger, drop the 10 foot face, almost eat it, saved it, life is good, that was big, line up again, i'm hooked. A rogue set washes through and eats River and Ryan whole (i looked back to see boards flying in all directions). We almost finished the entire night unhurt, thank you God. Remember the shallow section? As I was paddling in for the night i found it, shredded a finger and ended up with a boil on my ankle. But we're alive.

UPDATED on 9/19/13 at 10:50PM: My fingers have begun to sprout boils as well.

Side note, but related to poor judgement: we have acquired something we like to call "poverty cheese". While grocery shopping at ACE hardware last night we purchased a little cheese. Got home and looked at the receipt to realize that he now have $30 worth of American cheese slices in our fridge.

This short post has turned into a long one, so here is the short story of our trip across the reef. River and i set out for a late evening ocean soak that ended up as a barefoot death march. Since it was low tide we decided to walk across the reef instead of soak in hopes of finding stranded fish. Instead we found creepy snake like anemones, poisonous eels that stalked us, large sea urchins (River found one with his foot), very large hermit crabs, random locals appearing from the ocean, and a miriad of other creepy crawlies. The sea is a different place at night. Quote of the night, "Do you know what I don't like? This moving grass". i poked the grass as these words were flowing from my mouth and out popped a foot-long eel. What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, so we're going again tonight.

We're alive,
Tyler