NORWEGIAN STAR DIARY
Calm blue ocean

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Travel Editor

Advertiser travel editor Wanda Adams is on a Norwegian Star cruise around the Islands. This is the fifth of her daily diaries.

"Calm blue ocean," my brother always says, conjuring up a soothing image when things get stressful. There's been little stress on this trip but we've certainly been in the midst of a calm blue ocean. "So malie (calm)," Bonnie has said at least a dozen times.

After several days of buzzing around picking up stories, checking out activities and touring the ship, yesterday we had a "calm blue ocean" afternoon, a time Bonnie compared to a book she once saw that purported to be a diary of a cat: "Yarn. Nap. Food. Yum," read the entries, day after day.

While others visited Kona, we did an hour or so of journaling in the Reading Room, then had a long lunch in Versaille, the everyday restaurant that has become our favorite because it's relatively quiet and offers table service rather than a buffet line. Then we napped. Until 5. Saw a couple of shows. Ate dinner. Slept. The human equivalent of "yarn, nap, food, yum."

I ka wa mamua, ka wa mahope ("The future is the past")

Today, we dropped anchor off Lahaina, my one-time hometown, and boarded one of the ship's nifty shuttle boats (they also serve as lifeboats in case of emergency and are hoisted up several decks when not in use) for the five-minute run to Lahaina Harbor.

I spent the morning immersed in a blend of past and future, on the Kahili Award-winning walking tour organized by the Maui Nei company and also visiting the canoe carvers who are preparing for the week-long International Festival of the Canoes, which started May 10 and continues through May 24 in Lahaina.

For both, the theme is the same: preserving the past in order to assure a future for the culture.

I'll write in detail in a future Travel section story about the walking tour and the efforts to rescue, renovate and revive Moku'ula, a compound in a network of ponds that was the onetime home to the Kamehamehas in Lahaina. Tour leader Ke'eaumoku Kapu offered insight into Lahaina's past that was intimately entwined with the geneology of his own family, who not long ago returned to their ancestral lands in the valley of Kaua'ula above Lahaina, where they have built homes, planted taro and are creating a contemporary life on a traditional foundation.

All in the same canoe

After the morning's walk, Kapu introduced me to carvers from Majuro in the Marshall Islands, Pukapuka in the Cook Islands, from Tonga and Tahiti and all over Hawai'i who are in the midst of two weeks of frenzied carving in order to create eight traditional canoes of various sizes and from various traditions.

Co-founder Jerry Kunimoto said the festival, which began as a three-hour event in which canoes were dispalyed and is now a 14-day celebration during which canoes are built, is rife with extraordinary moments.

He recalled one year when a group from tiny Duff Island -- so remote they had to paddle almost all day to reach an air strip -- sat with fesival planners. One after the other, the people spoke in their native language, and the Hawaiian speakers in the group realized they could understand much of what was being said -- a surprise to all. As they spoke, the Duff Islanders wept and otherwise showed signs of great emotion. Kunimoto, awaiting the translation, worried that something was wrong.

But then the interpreter, an anthropologist who was studying the Duff Island culture, spoke: "The king is without words," he said. "It is beyond his understanding that he would be sitting on the 'aina of their creator, Laka."

Everyone was stunned to learn that Laka, a goddess often associated with Maui, and with the hula, would be considered the central goddess of a culture so far away. "This kind of thing is at the core of this event," said Kunimoto, "forming connections."

Kapu, an expert in protocol, will conduct a moving "birthing" ceremony on May 23 for the canoes on the beach at Kamehameha Iki off Front Street in Lahaina. Also to be blessed there: a redwood papa he'e nalu (surfboard) under construction now by master canoe shaper Bob Olson of Ole Custom Surfboards and a coconut pahu (drum) being carved by Uncle Bill Kuamo'ohelelani Kapuni of Moloka'i.

When I dropped by, Uncle Frances "Palani" Sinenci and his crew were at work erecting the scaffolding of stripped tree limbs for a traditional canoe hale (house), wrapping each joint with nylon cord instead of the authentic coconut cording called sennet. Sennet is too expensive, Sinenci explained, and, in any case, few know anymore how to make it strong enough.

Like the canoe-builders, who are hollowing out logs of albigia wood, considered a weed plant, Sinenci's crew is using trash invasive species, such as ironwood and inkberry. The idea is to make use of the non-native species, and plant or other native trees in their place, Kapu explained.

This year, there's considerable excitement because more young people are involved: both Baldwin and Lahainaluna high schools are building canoe under kupuna (elder) guidance and a 11-year-old Sitiveni Fe'aofehoko of Tonga is well on his way to completing his own 7-foot canoe alongside the larger project of his father, master carver Sitiveni Sr. Event co-founder Theo Morrison explained that this is at the wish of the carvers, who told the committee that there wasn't a lot of point in them coming out to demonstrate carving if there was no one to continue the art after them.

Michael Tavioni from the Cook Islands, a self-taught carver who is also an artist, said this event is important because it's the only one in the Pacific to showcase the carving of the canoes, as opposed to canoe racing or merely exhibiting the vessels. He has told the committee that organizes the event: "Our future is in your hands."

All through this week and next, the carvers will be at work from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, and available to talk story in the shade of the famed block-square banyan tree, the equivalent of the town square in Lahaina.

To learn more, log on to www.mauicanoefest.com. On Maui, complete schedules of activites are available at the old Courthouse on Wharf Street.