Notes To My Mother

On the north side of the island of Kauai, just west of Hanalei Bay is a little beach called Lumahai. You can park along the road and walk down a well maintained trail to the beach. The beach is quite different from most of the others in this area as it slopes steeply into the ocean. This affects the wave motions, preventing them from breaking in the usual way. Watching them you can see that the water that is receding back to the sea is moving very fast, pushing against the incoming wave so that just as the wave crests, at the point it would normally break and wash onto the shore, the receding wave stops it and it just kind of collapses and washes onto the shore, without ever breaking. Here is a picture of it, just at the point most waves would break. I was at this beach in the late Spring and the surf was fairly mild. I can imagine in the Winter when the surf is much larger on the north shore that the wave action at this beach would be spectacular.  Because of the st...