Jeff Billimek’s Journal

The birds were really loud right before dawn. I think I heard hundreds of birds singing outside. Fortunately I was able to fall back to sleep again. Shortly after waking up, Larry and Amy said that we were going to go down to the Princeville Hotel beach for the day. Since we aren’t staying at the hotel, we are going to have to lie about what room we are in if we are asked. After getting to the hotel and valet parking, we got lost trying to find our way down to the beach. The hotel is laid out in a strange way. The lobby is floor 8, but the floors go from 1-4 and then after four, it jumps to 8-12. It’s really strange.

Once we got to the beach area we picked out three padded beach chairs on the sand and soaked up some sun. Shortly thereafter, Larry and I went down to the surf to go snorkeling. We had to go a little bit off to the left as the tide was out and all the other areas were shallow. We found our spot: A deeper ‘channel’ that ran out from the beach to the ocean with reef on both sides. We snorkeled out to right before where the waves were breaking. Along the way we saw the tail of an eel sticking out from underneath a rock. We also saw more of those long-thing fish that look like alligator gar. The look scary and if they were bigger, I would certainly be weary of them with their larger body and long mouth. Unlike gar though, I didn’t see a whole lot of sharp teeth, so that was good.

Larry wanted to go over to the ‘left’ and ‘right’ of where we were to say in front of the breaking waves. While swimming around those areas, we were out of that channel and floating right over the reef in some shallow areas. When the waves come and go the motion will either push you ‘up’ or ‘down’. When the waves were pushing me down, I felt like I was getting much too close to the reef and tried to avoid the shallow areas or to swim across them as quickly as possible. In some instances, I was using my hands to pull myself along. Larry noticed this and told me not to do it. I thought it was because he didn’t want me to disturb any of the coral, even though I was taking care not to touch any. He explained that there are a lot of sea urchins within the rocks, and if I touch any, I’ll likely get stung. I’m glad he told me that because after moving onward, I noticed sea urchins all over the place in the reef. Sea Urchins come in many different sizes. They are spiky black ‘balls’ that look very menacing.

After snorkeling for a while, Larry and I headed back to the beach. Shortly after getting back and drying off in the sun, it was 11am, and we decided to get some lunch. Behind the beach is the hotel pool and behind that is the bar with a restaurant to the right. We had lunch at the hotel restaurant. I had a tuna salad sandwich and a mai tai. It was nice having lunch outside near the beach. I paid for lunch this time too.

We went back to our beach chairs after lunch and a while after that, Larry wanted to go back into the water. I declined, so Amy went with him. By this point in the trip, I had some areas of sunburn on my body, so I reapplied sun block to help prevent any more. Amy came back first and then Larry came back a while later. He went out further and said he saw some sea turtles. We all laid out in the sun for an hour or two longer, but then some clouds came in and it looked as if they would be around for a while. So we decided to go back to the house.

I read more of my book (I’m close to half done now, so I need to slow down or else I won’t have anything to read on the plane back to Atlanta.) We decided to order pizza so Larry hunted for the phone number of a pizza place and found one. We decided to get two medium pizzas: One with double pepperoni, and the other with pepperoni and Canadian bacon. While on the phone placing the order, Larry got angry with the person because they wouldn’t put chicken on a pepperoni pizza. After that, Amy got upset with Larry because she was concerned that they would sabotage our food. Larry and Amy then got into an argument about the merits of getting angry with food people over the phone. Fortunately it ended and Larry and I picked up the pizza that turned out to be really good.

We finished in time to go see the sunset over the beach just down the road. I actually remembered to bring my camera this time, but just as the sun was going down the sun went behind some clouds. I still took some pictures but hope we get to see another sunset that I can get better pictures.

After the sunset we headed back and watched a 1964 documentary about surfers titled, “The Endless Summer”. When the movie was over I was very tired and went to bed.