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Hawaii has many weird
world records

It's unfortunate that someone from Hawaii missed out on buying the "Hawaiian Fire Department" jet-powered firetruck that holds the Guinness World Record as fastest firetruck. Powered by two British Hawker jet engines, the firetruck has reached a speed of 407 miles per hour, which means it could get from a Honolulu fire station to a Nanakuli brush fire in about three seconds.

Why anyone would want a jet-powered firetruck is unclear. It would seem that once a firetruck reached 300 or 400 miles per hour, the driver and crew would become irrelevant. But Florida resident Shannen Seydel built the jet truck and raced it for years at aircraft shows and county fairs, amazingly never crashing the thing and more amazingly never putting out any fires.

I talked to him last week when I learned the truck was for sale, but as we spoke someone was buying it for a price approaching $1 million. Seydel said he named the truck "Hawaiian Fire Department" simply because he had been in Hawaii once and loved the islands.

So, we don't get a world speed record-setting firetruck here. But it made me wonder what world records Hawaii does hold. It turns out we have quiet a few.

For instance, we hold the record for the greatest distance traveled by a pedal boat. It was set by Kenichi Horie of Kobe, Japan, who peddled out of Honolulu in 1992 and went 4,660 miles. Presumably he pedaled home to Japan, but he might have just gotten lost and ended up pedaling around Micronesia for a few months.

Not surprisingly, we hold the world record for the most active volcano, Kilauea, which has been continuously erupting since 1983. But most people don't know we also have the world record for longest lava cave, the Kazumura Cave on the Big Island.

On one of our volcanic peaks, Mauna Kea, are the world-record largest infrared telescopes, the Keck twins. With those telescopes you can see distant galaxies or even a weird Japanese guy pedaling a boat in Micronesia.

The islands being somewhat of a freak of nature, they also claim the world record for highest sea cliffs, along the north coast of Molokai, and for the most rainy days, on Mount Waialeale on Kauai. The Kauai Visitors Bureau doesn't like to remind people that Kauai is the wettest place on Earth, but it is. At least at the 5,148 feet elevation of Waialeale.

Hawaii has some curious records for the world's largest things, including the world's largest aloha shirt, made by Hilo Hattie in 1999. We pretty much own that category, as few countries are interested in making really big aloha shirts. I'm not sure where the aloha shirt is on display, but with a few tent poles, it probably could house a family of nine.

Or it just might fit the world's largest sumo wrestler, Salevaa Atisanoe (a k a Konishiki), who I believe not only played high school football at Waianae, but was the entire front line.

Hawaii owns the world record for the highest altitude reached by a propeller-driven aircraft, the remote-controlled flying wing Helios that reached 96,500 feet in 2001. The Helios proved that flying wings can go really, really high and improve life on Earth in ways that are yet to be worked out. The guy who bought the Hawaiian Fire Department jet truck might want to buy Helios, just so he can own two enormously expensive silly things.

Hawaii's least-known and most heart-wrenching world record is the fact that we had the oldest kinkajou in captivity. His name was Sugar Bear, and he lived to the age of 40 years and 6 months at the Honolulu Zoo. A kinkajou is a type of nocturnal varmint that usually lives in the treetops of Brazilian forests. Sugar Bear lived basically in a PVC pipe at the zoo until he died in 2003. Sugar Bear slept most of the time, most likely dreaming of Amazon forests, the girlfriend he never had and, perhaps, firetrucks that can go 400 miles per hour.