Wai'anae harbor near brink
By Will Hoover
Advertiser Leeward O'ahu Writer
Twenty years after the Wai'anae Boat Harbor was hailed as a fishing haven, with seven launch ramps and slips to accommodate 146 boats, it is falling into the water.
Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser
The concrete docks started cracking in the early 1990s and have reached the critical stage. One-third of the 73 catwalks in the harbor have been taken out of service because they are too dangerous. Since 1999, a half-dozen have collapsed into the harbor, and state officials can't decide whether to use appropriated money to fix the damage or build a new pier.
Signs warn of a cracked pier, one of many danger spots in the Wai'anae Boat Harbor, once hailed as a fishing haven.
In the meantime, more catwalks could fall.
"That's the last one to go this year," said harbor master William Aila, pointing to a vestige of a catwalk laden with rubber tires, poking out of the water off C Pier. "I've been screaming about this stuff for years."
Boat owner and diver Jack Pauli is screaming, too. His complaint is that facilities with higher visibility, such as the Ala Wai Yacht Harbor, get attention about static electricity while this remote, rural harbor is allowed to fall to pieces.
When it was new, Pauli said, "It was celebrated for its support of the local fisherman and promise of recreational opportunities for the coastal youth. Now it stands as a collapsing monument to the state's support of the local population."
Aila said the launch ramps at the state's largest trailer boat harbor are still so popular that the weekend line to use them frequently backs up past the harbor entrance and snakes along Farrington Highway for more than a mile. But even with a third fewer slips, he still has vacancies, he said.
"The economy is one of the reasons we're not filled to capacity," Aila said. "Before Desert Storm, we were filled to capacity. So when the economy goes up again, it stands to reason that the demand will return as well."
"The thing is, there isn't going to be anything here to fill to capacity," said Pauli, who has kept a boat at the harbor every summer. "I mean, you get to the place where deferred maintenance simply overcomes you.
"I worry that it might get to the point where it won't be feasible to keep it going."
In the past, emergency money has been allocated to repair catwalks at both the ramps and slip, and last year $850,000 was appropriated for design and construction at the slip. More than a year ago, Steve Thompson, O'ahu boating division manager for the state
Department of Land and Natural Resources, predicted the design work would soon begin.
But last week Thompson said DLNR engineers had reported the project had not progressed past the planning stages and that no decision had been made on whether to build a new pier or fix the one that's falling apart.
"I do know the engineers are examining whether the bigger bang for the buck is a new pier or the repair of existing piers, or both," Thompson said. "It's a question of how far the money will go."
So far, the money has gone nowhere.
"The money is there," said Sen. Colleen Hanabusa, D-21st (Barbers Point, Makaha), who successfully fought to save the financing after it was slashed from the budget in 2000. "There's about $100,000 for design and $750,000 for construction. I'm not quite sure what's stalling the whole process. I was hoping they'd be further along than what they are.
"Once we've appropriated the money, it's sort of out of our hands. We can't force them to move quicker."
Hanabusa, who comes from a Leeward fishing family, said fishing is a big part of the Wai'anae Coast culture.
Aila said some 80 percent of people who use the harbor are local residents. Approximately 60 percent are part-time commercial fishers who catch what they need and sell extra for profit. Another 20 percent are full-time fish professionally. The remainder are pleasure boaters and divers.
Originally known as the Wai'anae Small Boat Harbor, the facility was built to provide local fishers with access to the rich offshore waters along the Wai'anae Coast.
People such as Pauli remember it as "a great facility; a beautiful place to meet others and a center of lots of activities. Compared to Pokai Bay — which had one boat-launch ramp and practically no place to tie a boat — it was an unbelievable improvement."
But the harbor, which cost $8.5 million in state and federal money, was beset with problems from its beginning. In 1981, James McCormick, deputy state director of transportation in charge of ports, questioned the wisdom of spending so much on a facility that would have slips for only 146 boats.
Five years later, half those slips were empty. Critics claimed the harbor was unsafe because a breakwater designed by the Army Corps of Engineers was inadequate to protect it from south swells.
The catwalks, which may have been poorly designed, were expected to last longer than 20 years. Full-time fisherman Richard Cansibog said he would like the state to remove the stationary docks and start over. He also suspects the breakwater may have contributed to the rapid deterioration.
"I think they should tear it all out and put in floating docks," he said. "But instead they come out every so many years and fix the steel and concrete in the docks that have rusted and crumbled."
Reach Will Hoover at 525-8038, or e-mail at whoover@honoluluadvertiser.com.
