When my cousin Eddie normally is on one of his many boats, it's a good bet that he'll be bringing something good home for dinner at the end of his spear. However, once a year, he turns into a naturalist and works with a team of scientists studying the Hawaiian Green Sea Turtle.
Here is Ed with my sister Dawn laughing as the various boats are being launched for the day...
All total, six boats were going to be used for this turtle tagging, all of which belong to the various members of the Bicoy family on Molokai...
Our eldest daughter Alyssa quickly disappeared, heading off on one of the early boats with her cousin Zachary (whose back is to the camera)...
We were on our way to our Grandpa's house on the water to set up a base of operations, but on the way out we had to stop to say a prayer where the family dropped our cousin Daryll's ashes two years. Here is everyone gathered on the decks of our little armada of boats...
Back in the latter part of the 1940s, our late grandfather Petronilo Bicoy built a house on a sand bar near Palau'au off the southern part of the Island of Molokai. The house is surrounded by reefs and large rocks which form a natural sea wall around the area. This means that the sea just a few hundred feet out can be rather rough, but the area around the house tends to be far more tranquil.
Grandpa was a fisherman and would use this house for respite from the weather and place from which to go diving as needed.
Of course, it is totally illegal for anyone to build such a house on the water anywhere in Hawaii, but Grandpa's house has been there for so long that it has been "grandfathered" in -- so it's the only place like it in Hawaii.
During low tide, the water is only about 18 inches deep at the highest part of the sand bar so you can ground your boat and walk right up...
Remember, this house is in the ocean -- it is a very unusual to find a shallow area like this because of the natural barriers surrounding it. Go out a hundred feet in any direction and the water quickly gets deeper even at low tide -- so the entire experience is a little bit freaky.
The good news is that our kids had a blast running around this little shallow part of the Pacific Ocean...
The little metallic shed on the right side of the picture above is the bathroom. Of course, there is no plumbing in Grandpa's old house so if you gotta go, you can watch it float away!
While most of the kids stayed behind, Alyssa, Kekoa and I jumped back on one of the boats and went out to the bullpen nets which were set up to catch the turtles.
Since this was low tide, the water was only waist deep, but that's perfect for clearing a bullpen net. Kekoa was too little to walk in the water at the nets, so he jumped on me for a ride...
Alyssa wandered out as well to explore the turtles and other sea life in the bullpen...
This was supposed to be a scientific excursion, after all, so someone had to actually do some work checking the turtle's tags and taking measurements.
The process begins with you jumping on the back of the turtle and pulling it out of the water. Cousin Ed's son Joey was only too willing to show off his skills...
Then Ed made sure to let Kekoa pose with one of the turtles...
After a few hours of clearing the bullpen, the boats headed back to Grandpa's house so the real scientists could take their measurements and the like. Here is everyone looking at one of the turtles that was last picked up in 1996, so the scientists were quite excited to find this one again for the first time in a decade...
David and Bretty had a great time and have taken to boats like a boat takes to water...
The ride back in was much rougher than the way out, but that didn't stop Malia from getting comfortable by the time we reached the wharf...
So after a quick shower, it was off to the Bicoy Ohana Reunion -- an annual event that has occured for the last 34 years in a row...
At age 83, my father is the oldest of 12 children, and most of my cousins are older than I am and have children who have children of their own. In other words, when we Bicoys get together, a couple of hundred people show up.
The challenge for folks who live outside of Hawaii is the cost of travelling home. So a few years back my cousin Fred and I were driving back from Arizona to San Diego at 4 o'clock in the morning (that's a whole other story). During that drive, Fred and I were lamenting the fact that since we both are only able to attend a reunion every few years that chances are that our respective immediate families will rarely see each other. So we dreamed up the idea of holding a "big" reunion every five years or so in which mainland folks were be encouraged to attend.
There still would be the annual event, but every few years folks would make a special effort to come back for the "big" ones.
This is the first of the big reunions and we expect some 400 Bicoys tomorrow night for the main meal -- all people descended from the same couple -- my grandparents, Petronilo and Paula Bicoy.
Of course, with all those folks showing up, food is a really, really big deal.
Each meal for the three days is assigned to the different descendants of the original 12 children of Grandma and Grandpa. For those of us descended from Bernie Bicoy, our task was to prepare a very large dinner on Friday night.
While we worked in the kitchen, others were outside working on today's catch...
You didn't think that Bicoys would set up a bullpen net to catch turtles and ignore all the other fish in there did you?
And when the time came to serve the various members of my immediate family lined up to dish it out...
Just look at the line outside...
Thank goodness for paper plates because our daughter Alyssa and my sister Dawn's son Zachary got to do the dishes...
Alyssa stuck around for a few more hours but the rest of our children headed back to the condo with us after dinner because the kids didn't have a single ounce of energy left in them...
Tomorrow, the pig roast and the annual Bicoy Ohana show...
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