Restored Hokule'a ready for new voyages

By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer

Hawai'i's restored voyaging canoe Hokule'a restores faith in the personal voyages of individual men and women and the planetary voyage of mankind, said local and international leaders at a new blessing yesterday for the 27-year-old vessel.

Guests join hands for Hokule'a blessing ceremonies at the Honolulu Community College Marine Education and Training Center. Jeff Widener • The Honolulu Advertiser

"I had doubts," Cousteau said, as much of the underwater playground his father showed him at age 7 had long since been polluted.

But many of those doubts fade, he said, with achievements such as the creation and explorations of Hokule'a, a voyaging canoe modeled on those that brought the first people to Hawai'i hundreds of years ago.

Hokule'a is an ambassador not only for the environment, Cousteau said, but for worldwide diversity enriched by the survival of Polynesian culture.

"Diversity is synonymous with stability," Cousteau said. "I can only bow and be thankful" to Hawai'i for protecting that diversity through a rebirth of Hawaiian values, he said.

Bill Brown, president of the Bishop Museum, said canoes embody the spirit of the first Hawaiians, but also "belong to each individual, no matter what race or how old — each individual whose life continues to be a voyage."

Brown said the two years he spent doing research on Rabbit Island off Makapu'u gave him a sense of what it must be like in the middle of the ocean for Hokule'a crews, who put more than 90,000 nautical miles under her keel on expeditions throughout Polynesia.

Brown became so accustomed to his camp on the island, he said, that he began to call O'ahu "the mainland," and cringed whenever he had to enter a building in town.

As a teen, he had made a family voyage in a small boat from Virginia's Dismal Swamp to Florida's Key West, so he knew how hard it must be for Hokule'a crews to stop voyaging.

For those reasons, among others, the museum gave more than $100,000 to restoration of the canoe, Brown said, and will support the Polynesian Voyaging Society's expeditions around Hawai'i.

Longshoreman Bruce Blankenfeld, who helped build Hokule'a at age 21, said the canoe had magic and mana that must be preserved, even if all but the hulls and pieces of the superstructure had been replaced over the years.

"Hokule'a, to us who sailed in her over the years, is a kupuna (elder)," with much wisdom to teach the next generation, he said.

Hokule'a was built for a voyage to Tahiti and back that would seek to recover the navigating and nautical skills that had brought people to Hawai'i from that part of the world, Blankenfeld said.

"But we have learned over the years that voyaging is a real process: As you reach one destination, a whole new horizon springs up."

So when a routine haul-out revealed that dry rot had riddled the wooden parts of the canoe, the question was not whether to repair Hokule'a, but how.

"When we all looked at it, at the beginning, everybody just looked at each other. We didn't know what to do," Blankenfeld said.

The sailors discovered what the builders had known — that a canoe is a puzzle with many pieces, all of which must be assembled in a certain order.

The lashings — roped connections whose rough texture visitors felt beneath their bare feet when they came aboard yesterday — involved five miles of line, he said.

But as with the voyages, completion left the restoration workers "kind of sad to see it get done" after almost a year, "because they were having so much fun."

Some of that fun flowed through the vessel yesterday for Swiss-born Su Reed, 74, a retired pilot.

"I can't imagine what it must be like to be on the ocean like that," said Reed, who came from Makiki with friend Mary Miller to see the canoe. "At least in an airplane you have the air holding you up."

On shore, members and graduates of the Hawaiian studies programs at Wai'anae High School said they had volunteered to work on Hokule'a to connect to their culture.

"It's the kinds of values that I first learned from my grandmother when I was little," said Sam Kapoi, 16, a junior, passing out pieces of breadfruit and banana dried as for a canoe voyage.

He said his grandmother had told him the culture and the canoe would teach him to have more respect for life and nature.

Reach Walter Wright at wwright@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8054.