The smell of sea air and sunburned skin

This morning we returned to the heiau to take kite and fixed wing aircraft photos. I set up points for ground-truthing the images with the tops of can white tupperware lids. These were within the image boundaries and we logged very accurate waypoints of them to georectify the final image. This also included some fun times with a walkie talkie.

After lunch on the beach we took a tour of the cave and sinkhole which was pretty stellar. It was neat to be able to connect what I had read in the book to what was actually going on in the cave, but unfortunately we weren’t able to check out the burial caverns. The other groups took aerial images of the plant grid while we were doing this and I think they got some shots of us standing in the giant sinkhole.

We are an incredibly lucky group of people who get to work in an awesome location along the coast, but that also means that there is zero shelter from teh blazing Hawaiian sun so even after applying and reapplying sunscreen throughout the day, most of us end up roasted and toasted by the time we get back to the vans to go home! My sunscreen can’t compete with theses UVs!