By Bob Krauss

What does Benjamin Franklin have in common with three tugboat skippers, 150 canoe paddlers, a deep-sea diver and kids on a pirate treasure hunt? The answer: Honolulu's Fourth Annual Harbor Festival on Saturday.

This may turn out to be the liveliest celebration on the waterfront since King Kalakaua's Regatta Day blowouts in the 1880s. It starts at 9 a.m.

Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Paul Revere will be on hand at about noon to conduct the Boston Tea Party. They will throw boxes of tea off the Falls of Clyde in protest of taxation without representation. Actually, Ben, Alex and Paul are Shriners who like to dress up in cocked hats and march to fife and drum.

At 9:30 a.m., the 150 canoe paddlers will compete in the Sand Island Challenge, a race from Aloha Tower around Sand Island and back. Last year, they were supposed to start when the fireboat Mokuahi blew its whistle.

While the canoes were lining up, the Star of Honolulu tooted its horn as it backed out of Pier 8. The canoe paddlers charged from the starting line at the wrong whistle. This year, race officials may shoot off a cannon.

Sometime in the afternoon, for the first time in the history of Honolulu Harbor, a pontoon plane will land and take off in front of Aloha Tower, recalling the glamorous days of the China Clippers that splashed down to unload millionaires and movie stars at Pearl Harbor.

The deep-sea diver is a member of the team attached to the Mobile Dive Salvage Unit. He comes with a tank so big it takes a fire hose three and a half hours to fill it up. There's a window where kids can stand and play tick-tack-toe with the diver. Narrators explain how divers find sunken ships and keep out of danger.

Kids should steer to the Hawai'i Maritime Center for nonstop games like painting with colored sand, learning to scrimshaw like old whalers, making a paper Hokule'a, tying sailors knots, and running around the exhibits on a treasure hunt.

Three boats will take people on free harbor tours. It's a rare opportunity to see the waterfront from the water at no cost. The narrators have been studying up on harbor history.

The big attraction, of course, is the morning tugboat hula, the only event of its kind in the world. Imagine a 296-ton tugboat powerful enough to pull over the Aloha Tower swaying in rhythm to the music as gracefully as a Hawaiian tutu. Three tugs are entered this year.

I'm not allowed to tell you what the skippers have planned but Capt. Kaipo Pomaikai Sr., of the tug Tira Lani, said that in 2000, he and his family spent three days unraveling miles of nylon rope to make a one-ton hula skirt. The tug wore a flower lei 160 feet long around her wheelhouse and a 110-foot-long head lei. "She was dressed to kill," Pomaikai said.