Aloha Everyone,
As all of you are planning your visit to Honolulu, we want you guys to know what a exciting time it has been for us planning the Pre-Deaf Cruise Event for the first time. We are bursting with enthusiasm and are looking forward to seeing all of you here before the Deaf Cruise on July 25th, 2009.
Come join us as we will be going on the Grand Circle Island Tour of
O’ahu on July 22nd, 2009. The feature attraction of our tour will be a
visit to the Pali Look-Out; a historically significant place in Hawaiian
history. See below for more information about the Pali Look-Out.
“The Nu’uanu Pali was the site of the Battle of Nu’uanu, one of the
bloodiest battles in Hawaiian history. This battle resulted in the conquest
of the island of O’ahu by the King Kamehameha I who unified the Hawaiian Islands. In 1795 Kamehameha I sailed from his home island of Hawai’i with an army of 10,000 soldiers. After conquering the islands of Maui and Moloka’i, he moved on to O’ahu. The pivotal battle for the island
occurred in Nu’uanu Valley, where the defenders of O’ahu, led by
Kalanikupule, were driven back up into the valley where they were trapped
above the cliff. More than 400 of Kalanikupule’s soldiers were driven off
the edge of the cliff to their deaths 1,000 feet below. In 1898 this road
was developed into a highway during which’s construction 800 skulls were
found; those skulls were believed to be the remains of the warriors that
fell to their deaths from the cliff above. This road was later replaced by
the Pali Highway and the Nu’uanu Pali Tunnels in 1959 which is the route
used today.”1
1. Cited, Pali Look Out, Nu uanu Pali – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
As for Friday, July 24th, come join us as we visit the Pearl Harbor
Memorial, located at Pearl Harbor in the City and County of Honolulu,
Hawai’i. We will visit the USS Arizona Memorial, which marks the resting
place of 1,102 sailors who perished along with the USS Arizona during the
attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese Imperial Forces on December 7, 1941.
Did you know that……..
“Sixty years after Japanese bombers sank the U.S.S. Arizona; the silent
wreck still sheds fuel oil, drop by drop, over the memories of a hellish
Hawaiian morning.
A month after the attack, Navy teams were salvaging guns and usable
hardware from the battleship. Divers wearing heavy copper helmets were
bringing up safes, record books, and live ordinance.
Metal smith 1st Class Edward Raymer was first to penetrate the Arizona. In
his recent war memoir, Descent into Darkness, he writes how “viscous oil
thickly layered everything in the harbor. The hulls of ships and the
pilings on docks were coated with it, and the entire shoreline was
blackened.” When he dived to the battleship, “the dense floating mass
of oil blotted out all daylight. I was submerged in total blackness.”
Lights were useless because they reflected directly back into the diver’s
eyes. Instructed to find and disarm an unexploded torpedo, Raymer groped his way through the spaces of the Arizona’s third deck, trailing an air hose connected to a pump topside. “I got the eerie feeling again that I
wasn’t alone. Something was near. I felt the body floating above me.”
Raymer’s movement through the water had created a suction that drew
floating corpses to him, bodies with heads and hands picked clean by
scavenger crabs. “Their skeletal fingers brushed across my copper
helmet,” he remembers in horror. “The sound reminded me of the tinkle
of oriental wind chimes.”
Medics wearing gas masks against nausea gathered only 229 Arizona dead from the waters before the Navy reluctantly decided to leave the rest
untouched.”2
2 cited, http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/static-legacy/ngm/0106/
We hope you all will join with us as we take in those unforgettable sights
and memorials. We are sure that the memories and the sights you will see
during your stay here in Hawai’i for the Pre-Deaf Cruise event and the
Deaf Cruise will stay with you for a lifetime.
Malaho,
Mark Morales
The Pre-Deaf Cruise Event Chairman