Summer Week 9

Erica had an all day art class on horses, she was so excited,
Gilbert has taken up residence in the bottom of our old stroller,
Friday we headed to the beach, right after we got there it started pouring, while everyone else was packing up and making a mad dash for their car, the kids were having a blast,
I ran under a tree and saw this beautiful shot, usually there is a reef on the horizon,



it eventually cleared and the beautiful blue color returned to the water,
this is such a great beach, where else can you go that has a view of Diamond Head,
and war ships so close you can about touch them,
after the beach we went to the Hickam Wetland Trail and learned all about wetlands, the only bird we saw was the big one in the sky, we need to come back in the evening,
this is a fuzzy picture but there were these bushes with huge thorns on them which made for a difficult hike in flip flops,


next we stopped at Fort Kamehameha. In 1907 as Pearl harbor was being dredged, the Army built shore defenses at Queen Emma Point to protect the ships. Before it was a military base and renamed Fort Kamehameha the land belonged to the Queen Emma.
In 1913 the families arrived, Fort Kam was just tents and batteries, not until 1916 were permanent quarters constructed. The houses, which were once favored places to live as they are backed by a beautiful cove, have been unoccupied since 2008. These houses had to be sturdy to survive, as Colonel Windslow explained, "One of the greatest difficulties with which the fortification engineer has to deal in is the terrifically destructive effects of the discharge of the high-power guns." The houses are listed as Historic Homes and cannot be torn down and replaced.
The first battery was built in 1907, there are 9 total. The largest, Battery Closson, named after Civil War General Henry Whitney Closson sits right behind Officers Row. The attack of the Japanese on December 7, 1941 showed the inadequacy of coastal artillery and shortly after the guns were removed and scrapped.
the other original structures are the church, flagpole, and bandstand. In 1991 the army accepted the exchange of Wheeler AFB for Fort Kam.
The historic houses on Hickam were built in the 1930's. Captain Howard B. Nurse, the officer in charge of the construction, designed a plan for a "Garden City" with generous amounts of open spaces and major and minor axes connected by tree lined boulevards. Interesting trivia, the ceilings in the homes are made of canec-a fiberboard made from sugar cane bagasse (a fiber pulp after the sugar has been removed).
The water tower, built in 1938 of a Moorish design and is 171' tall. There are 8 2,000 lb eagles at the points of the octagon. Every December since 1969, 8000 light are strung from the top to the base making it the tallest Christmas tree on island.

After our tour of Hickam we went over to visit Erik. Normally when we see Erik the divers are just sitting around waiting. They do a lot of waiting. Today we got to see a really cool job. First the kids hung out and looked at all the cool fish eating algae on the side of the sub. Then the divers suited up and jumped in, next the crane raised (something secret Erik said), lowered it into the water and the divers attached it to the sub. This secret something is really cool. I went on Wikipedia and this is what I can tell you. Subs have countermeasures designed to deceive radar, sonar, enemy missiles...
This tower is the 100' Submarine Escape Training Tank used from 1932-1983. It's a tank full of water, sailors entered an airlock beneath the chamber, a flood valve would fill with water until the pressure equaled the pressure at the bottom of the chamber. The sailor would exit the airlock and go to the surface with a buoyant air pressured hood. In 1983 the tank was drained and the top was converted into a conference room by RADM Jack Darby and called the House that Jack Built.