Big wheels, hard boots, tiny skate bags

Posted on August 16, 2026 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

I’d been searching for skate bags that could comfortably hold the Powerslide Next skates I’d just bought. I fitted them with an Endless 3x110mm frame and large wheels. These big-wheel skates have been all the rage among urban inline skaters for many years now. They’re great for long-distance skating on rough roads.

But these wheel frames were longer and taller than the usual 4x80mm hockey frames I’d skated in the past, such as the ones on my True carbon skates. These hard boots were also taller and bulkier than the hybrid carbon-shell boots, such as the Powerslide Tau, that I’d been skating in for the past three years.

Powerslide Next hard boot 3x110mm (left) vs True Hockey carbon shell 4x80mm (right)
Powerslide Next hard boot 3x110mm (left) vs Powerslide Tau carbon shell 3x110mm (right)

These big-wheel skates did not fit any skate bags in my possession. The Inline Warehouse skate bag that had carried many of my past skates, for instance, couldn’t be zipped up when I squeezed a pair of PS Nexts with big wheels into it.

Inline Warehouse skate bag cannot be zipped up when holding PS Next 3×110

I was genuinely surprised to find no skate bag explicitly marketed as suitable for today’s big-wheel rollerblades, the inline equivalent of a Hummer compared to a sedan. It appears that most of these skate bags were designed for slim ice skates or kids’ rollerblades.

In this treatise, I show four skate bags, their actual measured dimensions, and whether my monster pair of rollerblades fits inside them.

Powerslide Next 3×110 won’t fit an Inline Warehouse bag, and severely bulges a Rollerblade bag
Powerslide Next 3×110 just fits an Ealer skate bag, and very comfortably fits insides a Gooyule bag

I also weighed them halfway through writing this. I kept trying to describe their perceived build quality; whether they felt hefty or flimsy, and so on. I finally brought out the scale to eliminate my subjective bias.

Measured weights of Inline Warehouse bag (532g) and Rollerblade (504g)
Measured weights of Ealer bag (446g) and Gooyule (346g)

Before I continue, however, I should clarify that by “skate bags” in this essay, I mean compact, triangular-shaped bags. I don’t mean duffel bags, and I don’t mean large skate backpacks. I want the most compact bags possible so I don’t waste trunk space, since I usually carry a bunch of them in my car just in case I need to stop somewhere to skate.

Triangular bags good, large backpacks bad
Compact skate bags in the trunk

And, by “big wheels” in this essay, I mean a 3x110mm configuration similar to my Endless frame, with a 276mm wheelbase. I am aware that speed skaters roll on 4x110mm or 3x125mm. I don’t think my skate bags will hold those.

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Updates on Project Bach-Wrote-What?!

Posted on June 24, 2026 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

I created the website bachwrotewhat.com two years ago on a whim. My goal was to collect and showcase unaccompanied and modern cello music for the rest of us amateur cellists. As I chronicled compositions in this style that I came across, I also began writing a number of pieces of my own, which I now call “self-accompanied” cello music, inspired by modern and even pop music.

When I first launched the project, I wrote a self-accompanied version of The Swan by Saint-Saëns, as documented in this post. Even though every note of that beautiful melody found its way into the new composition, almost nobody could recognize its pedigree. The truth is that condensing both melody and harmony into what is essentially a single linear stream of notes is a difficult task.

In the case of The Swan, I eventually laid a separate melody track over the self-accompanied solo to prove a completely useless technical point to a certain person in my household: the melody had been there all along, just not in a form that the ear could easily recognize. I jokingly titled this double solo Swan × (1 + Bach).

Swan x (1 + Bach), March 2024

In the two years since, I have written seven more self-accompanied cello pieces. By now, I have long since given up trying to present the original melodies in what I’ve come to call “recompositions.” True to form, all of the original melodic notes are still there, and in many cases the original harmonies and chord progressions survive as well. But once I’ve sketched out a few bars with some new ideas and motifs, I let the recomposition take on a life of its own.

Some of these works grew too complex and too demanding for me to play well. For instance, my recomposition of a Brahms piano intermezzo attempts to capture its rich counterpoint on a single cello. At a whopping six pages of sheet music, the piece takes nearly eight minutes to play. I called it Brahms Intercello.

Brahms Intercello (May 2026)

One of my most recent work, titled Yesterday Came Suddenly: for a cello without company, is something of an exception. It’s uncharacteristically short, and it follows McCartney’s original melody quite closely. Rather than reworking the tune beyond recognition, I simply wove in melody-like lines inspired by his original guitar accompaniment between the vocal phrases.

For the first time, I wrote something simple enough that I could devote some mental bandwidth to interpretation and expression, while also managing to stay more or less in tune from beginning to end. Here you have it: Yesterday for a cello without company.

Yesterday for a cello without company (June 2026)
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Kuhio Beach and Ponds in November

Posted on January 10, 2026 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

Kūhiō Beach at Waikīkī, along with its two walled ponds, is often misunderstood. It is frequently lumped together with the rest of Waikiki beaches and dismissed as eternally crowded – “like a zoo”, as they say. In reality, each beach along Waikiki Bay has its own distinct vibe, shaped by differences in location, reef structure, parking access, and proximity to oceanfront resorts.

Sunrise view of Kuhio Beach and its walled ponds all the way to Natatorium and to Diamond Head
Kuhio Beach and its two walled-ponds at sunrise (7am)
A view of Kuhio Beach and its walled ponds all the way to Natatorium and to Diamond Head at midday in November
Kuhio Beach and its two walled-ponds at noon (1pm)
Alpenglow with a view of Kuhio Beach and its walled ponds all the way to Natatorium and to Diamond Head after sunset in November
Kuhio Beach and its two walled-ponds at sunset (6pm)

Surfers begin gathering at Kuhio Beach well before sunrise, paddling out to Canoes, arguably the most popular surf break along all of Waikiki beaches. Long before swimmers arrive at the walled ponds, surfers are already catching waves on the reef just outside the west pond. Even after sunset, silhouettes of surfers can still be seen braving the break, moving against an ocean painted with the fading afterglow of dusk.

Surfers catching waves at Canoe surf break outside the west walled-pond at Kuhio Beach at sunrise in November
Surfers already catching waves at Canoes before beachgoers show up (7am)
Surfers catching waves at Canoe surf break outside and swimmers enjoying the safe water within the west walled-pond at Kuhio Beach in the early morning in November
Everybody that wanted to be at the beach was at the beach (11am)
Surfers catching waves at Canoe surf break outside and swimmers enjoying the safe water within the west walled-pond at Kuhio Beach at sunset in November
Everybody was still at the beach as the sun sets (5:40pm)
Alpenglow with a view of surfers catching waves at Canoe surf break outside and swimmers enjoying the safe water within the west walled-pond at Kuhio Beach after sunset in November
Surfers linger well past sunset, with only afterglow remaining to guide them (6:10pm)

I don’t know what Kuhio Beach looks like in summer or during the holiday season, but I can describe what it feels like to stay beside it for a week in November. The experience was noticeably different from influencer videos that highlight midday crowds during peak months. It also felt less touristy than portrayed by websites written by people who have something to sell to you.

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Life around Manhasset Bay

Posted on December 28, 2025 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

I have been taking pictures around Manhasset Bay for quite some years now. Except for a few that I uploaded to Wikimedia as an Wikipedian a decade ago, most have never seen the light of the day. I dusted off a bunch of these and re-processed them. I hope they capture a glimpse of the life around the bay that fictionally separated Jay Gatsby from Daisy Buchanan.

A sailboat zooms by a kayak on Manhasset Bay (2009)

The truth is that many people around the bay have very little idea how their towns look from the water. And those not addicted to examining satellite pictures are often unaware of expansive waterfront properties.

Most water-fronting mansions are shielded from unwanted street views. But all of them are clearly visible from the bay, for obvious reasons. After all, if you can’t see someone’s bedroom window from a kayak, then they can’t see the water either from their bedroom.

An original windmill house transplanted from the Leeds Pond out to to a waterfront location at Leeds Pond Beach
An original tidal mill house transplanted from Leeds Pond to waterfront (2010)

The bay comes alive in summer. Sailboats, kayaks and all sorts of watercraft abound. Yacht clubs hold races that draw sailors from all around the bay, and often beyond.

A sailboat race as seen from within a kayak facing the mouth of Manhasset Bay
A sailboat race as seen from a kayak facing the mouth of Manhasset Bay (2010)
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Hanauma Bay for the chronically overprepared

Posted on December 22, 2025 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

I enjoy writing about things I can’t find online. Here I wrote a snorkeling guide to Hanauma Bay for those of us that must obsessively research before our trips. I wish someone had written one before my trip.

Snorkeling at Hanauma Bay in November
Snorkeling at Hanauma Bay in November

This essay would have been much longer if I had not stumbled upon Jordan’s travel blog on Hanauma Bay. You should take a detour and read it first. Watch the narrated video at the top of his blog. Scroll down to look at pictures and accompanying descriptions. He covers almost all basic questions a normal person may ask, including hours, booking a reservation, paying for it, driving to the bay, parking, renting snorkeling equipment onsite, and fish you will find. The blog includes great pictures showing what you may see. You’ll also find majestic views that you unfortunately won’t see in person, unless you were a bird or a drone.

Jordan’s narrated video is also available on YouTube. Go like it and subscribe to his channel. Also read the FAQs on this semi-official website. Find documentation from the park itself which answers even more questions. Come back if there are still unanswered questions on your mind.

If you are still reading, then I assume you are one of us, the chronically-overprepared. Here is a list of additional questions I tried to answer before my trip.

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Kayak to Kaneohe Sandbar – sunken at high tide

Posted on December 18, 2025 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

On a windy and rainy day in November, I rented a kayak from Go Bananas, and drove to He’eia Kea Boat Harbor. I launched off towards where I thought the legendary Kaneohe Sandbar would be.

For the entire trip to the sandbar, I paddled alone in a foreboding ocean. Perhaps “bay” is a more accurate description. But from my low vantage point, it looked as if I were in the middle of the wide wide sea under dark clouds. I aimed for Kapapa Island as told. And that was good advice. Because from my kayak, all I could see were breaking waves in every direction, except for that tiny speck of an island in the distance.

At 40ft ocean between shore and Kaneohe Sandbar - looking back - Entire towns being rained on - a windy and rainy day
Watching two entire towns being rained on

I kept turning my kayak back towards the harbor, second-guessing the sanity of my choice. I saw dark clouds pouring rain over entire towns. I pivoted back towards Kapapa Island and paddled some more, all the while frightened to the core and utterly alone.

I reached the last boat in sight, hoping to find tourists having a great time. But it was empty, silent and moored in deep water. No sandbar to be seen. I swung back facing the harbor. I again turned towards Kapapa. I kept going.

After what seemed like a lifetime, I sensed a change in water color. Shortly the sun poked its head out from behind clouds. And magic happened. The sea all around me turned turquoise as soon as sunlight touched them, revealing that I was merely a foot above the sand now. I got why this place is also known as the Sunken Island.

Sun came out of the cloud, revealing the Sunken Island submerged under waist-height water - Kaneohe Sandbar
Sun revealing at first just a slice of turquoise sea
My kayak casts a shallow on the Sunken Island submerged under waist-height water at Kaneohe Sandbar
In a second it became clear just how shallow the sea was

I paddled around and found a lone standup paddler lying supine on his board, drinking from his flask. I also ran into a birthday party seated around a half-submerged table. Then Captain Bruce showed up, unloading a bunch of merrymakers who were blissfully unaware of the hardship some went through, to find and reach this sunken island.

Captain bruce unloaded tourists onto the Sunken Island
Captain Bruce unloaded tourists onto the Sunken Island
Captain bruce unloaded tourists onto the Sunken Island
Tourists mistaking your correspondent for a fellow merrymaker

Now that I know the place, I won’t have any trouble coming back and finding it again. Looking back, I can’t help wondering why I expected an immense sandbar rising above the sea, even though I knew it was high tide. Not being able to find anything jutting out of the dark water really did frighten me.

Then it hit me.

Have you ever seen a picture of the immense sandbar under dark water with the sun behind clouds? Nor have I. That doesn’t quite capture the vacation spirit. Instead you see tourists enjoying the best time of their lives, playing makeshift volleyball on an exposed sandbar under a blue sky.

I created two illustrations based on Google Earth to show you the Kaneohe Sandbar at low tide, and then its alternative personality, the Sunken Island at high tide. Yes, you can still see the sunken island at high tide from a helicopter. But the “island” really does disappear beneath dark waters at high tide without direct sunlight, as seen from the low vantage point afforded by a lowly kayak. I wish someone had written this post before my trip. Sigh.

Kaneohe Sandbar rendered by Google Earth and manually tinted - shoals are exposed above water at low tide forming an immense sandbar longer than a mile
Kaneohe Sandbar emerges at low tide from the ocean (manually-tinted Google Earth image)
Kaneohe Sandbar rendered by Google Earth, and subsequently tinted by hand - shoals are completely submerged by the ocean turning an immense sandbar into a sunken island
Waist-height sea conceals the Sunken Island at high tide (manually-tinted Google Earth image)

Read on, if you plan to visit this sunken island. Here’s essential information for a safe and enjoyable trip.

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Why does my snorkel mask fog up?

Posted on December 7, 2025 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

In the year 2025, there are plenty of resources online that answer the question: why does my snorkel mask keep fogging up? Before my 2025 trip to Hawaii, I consulted numerous YouTube videos and Reddit discussions on this topic. Chiefly I wanted to avoid repeating my sub-optimal snorkeling experiences from the 2015 cruise trip and the 2009 trip to Trunk Bay and Caneel Bay. One regrettable aspect of these past trips was that I couldn’t stop my lenses from fogging up when snorkeling, despite having done what I perceived to be adequate preparation.

Lenses in a snorkel mask fog up if one of many factors are not taken care of
Mask lenses fog up despite defogging preps

Not surprisingly, today’s online resources are actually worse than in 2009 and 2015. Blogs with insightful resources have gone dark, long replaced by either inaccessible tribal social media, or exceedingly-short clickbait clips tailored to today’s audience. Chiefly the latter peddles quick fixes showing the “hows”, but not the “whys”. The thing is, lens-defogging, like most things in life, follows Tolstoy’s law – that every happy family is alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. There’s a long list of things that each alone can fog up your lenses. You need to remediate each and every one of them, to get to the “happy path”.

During my 2025 trip, I finally attained defogging nirvana. I experienced crystal-clear views from my mask for two hours of snorkeling at Hanauma Bay, for the first time in my life. Nobody had told me that this was the norm for snorkeling. One shouldn’t have to stand up on shallow reef mid-snorkeling to address fogs, ever. Until I had this experience, like countless new merrymakers all around Waikiki, I did not regard having to deal with fogging every 5 minutes as anything unusual.

Hawaii 2025 - Snorkeling - Hanauma Bay
Snorkeling at Hanauma Bay – book early time slots ahead of the crowd
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Waikiki & Honolulu landmarks seen from departing flight DL650

Posted on November 30, 2025 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

Delta 650 took off from runway 8R at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport due East at 5:15pm local time. Our pilot seemed to have made a point of banking the aircraft to trace the southern coast in the first 4 minutes of the flight to afford those seating on the left side a great aerial view of Sand Island, Honolulu downtown, Ala Moana, Waikiki, Kaimana, Diamond Head, Kahala, Hawaii Kai, Hanauma Bay, and Koko Head. Then the plane turned East again and flew towards the mainland.

Unlike the JFK arrival video I recorded, I was able to recognize all landmarks as I looked out of my window seat. This was largely due to my month-long research into Oahu before our trip to the island. But still, I figured I would write a post showing these famous Hawaiian landmarks. Here is the recorded video.

Here is a map showing the flight path as recorded in the clip. Open the map with Ctl-click or Cmd-click into a separate window to compare it to the video. You can also open the YouTube video in its own window.

Departing flight path of Delta 650 in late November 2025 from runway 8R at Honolulu Airport
Departing flight path of Delta 650 in late November 2025 from runway 8R at Honolulu Airport
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Actual landing flight path of Delta 650 at JFK runway 22L

Posted on November 28, 2025 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

I’ve always chosen window seats on flights whenever I could. And I never grew tired of watching my plane take off and land. Possibly I am just fascinated with flying, whether it involves model airplanes, computer simulations, or actual planes. But with only a few exceptional landmarks, I could almost never identify in realtime what the plane was flying over. It amazes me that I can’t recognize locations that should be familiar to me where I’ve driven by countless number of times.

The truth is that aerial views often looks quite different from ground views. Even though I kept thinking that I could mentally reconstruct a god’s eye view of my neighborhood, every landing proved me wrong. And my last trip was no exception. As I the plane readied itself for landing, I looked out of the window and couldn’t tell where the plane was. I put my phone against the window pane for the first time, and recorded the entire landing path.

I played the clip backward at home, and fired up Google Maps with Globe View to rotate its map to match the window view of the terrain. Painstakingly I retraced the flight path backward from runway 22L. This turned out to be the quickest way to reconstruct the landing path. In doing so, I’ve joined a bunch of nerds like Joseph Gunn who document, among other thing, flight paths. In fact, I consulted one of his blog posts on flight patterns to confirm landing paths at runway 22L.

But first, here is the video recording of the landing path of Delta 650 in late November 2025. Can you name of the golf course in the thumbnail? That’s the Wheatley Hills Golf Club. But of course, I had no idea when I looked out the window at it.

Here is a map showing the flight path as recorded in the clip. Open the map with Ctl-click or Cmd-click into a separate window to compare it to the video. You can also open the YouTube video in its own window.

Arrival flight path of Delta 650 in late November 2025 over Nassau County, Long Island, landing at JFK
Arrival flight path of Delta 650 in late November 2025 over Nassau County, Long Island, landing at JFK
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Reign Ares as big-wheel skates for urban marathons

Posted on November 16, 2024 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

As a postscript to Big Wheels on Carbon Hockey Skates, I mentioned that I discovered Powerslide Reign Ares 100. They look like carbon hockey skates. Yet they’re equipped with Trinity mounts for big wheel configurations, such as 3x110mm. These skates seemingly disproved my assertion that “you simply can’t buy skates with big wheels on full-bodied, carbon hockey shells – they don’t exist“.

I bought a pair of Reign Ares, heat-molded them, and skated on them. I replaced its frame with a Endless 90 Trinity frame, and mounted Undercover Team Blank wheels on them.

Reign Ares with Endless 90 Trinity frame and 110mm Undercover wheels (right)

I’ve examined them, and pondered on the internal structure of these skates for a week now. I’ve done all I could, to divine how they are made, short of cutting my new skates up. I can confidently say that, “they are no carbon hockey skates“.

Reign Ares – carbon hockey skates?
TRUE – the definition of carbon hockey skates

But I love them. I think they are the best answer to my quest to find big wheels on carbon (almost) hockey skates. This long post documents my journey to customize and set up Reign Ares. I turned them into the right big-wheel skates for me, for urban marathons such as Wednesday Night Skate NYC.

Reign Ares with 276mm Endless 90 Trinity frame, and 110mm wheels
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Posted in Being a Wikipedian, Inline Skating | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments