not fishing related, sorry.

Although I've had many instances while fishing where I felt I was in danger, I've never felt anywhere as near death as I did this one time...

About a mile from my house in Hilo, Hawaii was a place us kids used to go swimming on the Wailuku river called boiling pots, so named because when the water would rage through there after a heavy rain it looked like cauldrons of boiling water.

The water was pretty cold for Hawaii as it descended Mauna Kea from great altitude, carving its way through lava fields thousands of years old, sometimes even taking its path through the ancient lava tubes. There are towering waterfalls in the boiling pots stretch of river that carve out deep plunge pools. The combination of high sides and deep water made it an ideal place for cliff jumping.

Some local kids showed us the place originally, pointing down river and saying 'whoa brah, no go down dea...kapu' which I took to mean 'our foolish and antiquated ancient hawaiian belief system suggests that all people with brown skin avoid the downriver treasure trove of fun'.

...and yeah, if you were to go downriver from boiling pots you too would find what I found, one of the most beautiful and amazing things I've ever seen in nature...

The entire river appears to get very, very tiny and dump thirty five feet from a waterfall into a pool with no exit. This was our favorite pool to jump into because the sun never reached way in there and it was always cold. We called it the 'icebox'.

To get to the next pool downriver you have to walk uphill about ten feet. I wrote that correctly....the downriver pool is ten feet higher in elevation.

I never really considered WHY it was like that until we were jumping into the icebox one day and I felt the cold fingers of death grab me by the ankle and try to pull me under. I know now that it wasn't some monster, evil hawaiian spirit or the ******* pele but at the moment I was suspended between life and death swimming as I hard as I could for the surface you could have fooled me. That pool had no above ground exit but the water was going somewhere.....it tried to take me with it.

Only later did we find out that boiling pots was a place held sacred in 'ancient' local hawaiian history as a hiding place for the ******* pele. There may be some association between that mythology and the place's later becoming a popular place for suicides.

This experience radically altered my frame of reference for the phrase 'near death'.

I did put the boat on a rock dropping into the canyon this year but managed to get it off and remain upright...fishing wise that's as close as I've come.