Hokule'a crew steers its way to Nihoa
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Science Writer
ABOARD HOKULE'A — Novice navigator Ka'iulani Murphy, 25, found her island about noon yesterday, a dim gray outline in the distant horizon 150 miles from Kaua'i.
Jan TenBruggencate • The Honolulu Advertiser
She found it, working on the rolling deck of the voyaging canoe Hokule'a, without the use of any modern instruments, without a clock, without a compass. And she found it despite winds she hadn't expected and being forced to sail a course that wasn't the one she had been studying for weeks.
Navigator Ka'iulani Murphy scanned the horizon yesterday for Nihoa island.
Her mentor, master navigator Nainoa Thompson, was the first to spot Nihoa, which lies 280 miles from Honolulu. Murphy and crewman Na'alehu Anthony saw it next. It took other crew members another 15 minutes to make it out.
The crew set aside a lunch of tuna and crackers to jibe the canoe toward the island, and when Murphy left her post at the canoe's bow, the crew applauded.
The wayfinder's art is a weaver's art, finding tendrils in nature — a gust, a swell, the sighting of a bird, the sun's position as it rises, the moon as it sets, a star's twinkle — and weaving them into a tapestry that rolls out before the canoe and leads to an island.
The voyage was troubled from the beginning by storms, rains and overcast skies, and the lack of tradewinds. It was delayed two weeks, and at its start Sunday, the trades were blowing from the southeast, not the normal northeast, and they were lighter than expected.
Thompson in 2003 established a route to Nihoa he called the Pani'au line, which called for the canoe to arrive at a point off northwest Ni'ihau at sunset, and then sight the night's first stars with Ni'ihau's cliffs still visible astern.
Jan TenBruggencate • The Honolulu Advertiser
"But we didn't have the right winds to get to the Pani'au line," Thompson said. "We had to establish a new line."
The voyaging canoe Hokule'a coasts past the western cliffs of Nihoa island after a 32-hour passage from Hanalei Bay on Kaua'i. Ka'iulani Murphy, 25, is navigating the canoe without modern instruments.
He talked Murphy through the process of coming up with a new route, an imaginary line that took into account views of Kaua'i and north Ni'ihau and ran from between them to Nihoa.
"We used a combination of a Wai'ale'ale line and the Pani'au line. We did sort of a guesstimate," Murphy said.
Last year, Thompson had good winds for his crossing to Nihoa and spotted it at dawn. But the canoe's speed was a third slower this time, accounting for the longer passage and creating more opportunities for error because of steering and drift.
Murphy navigated all day Sunday, all night and half the day yesterday.
"It was a little nerve-wracking that we couldn't get to the course we had planned to sail, because that's what I had been studying," said Murphy, a graduate of Kamehameha Schools and the University of Hawai'i. "Then there was the challenge of light winds and cloudy skies with long periods of time without being able to see the North Star," a key navigation star, since unlike most others, it moves very little in the sky.
In the morning, she stood just in front of the canoe's forward mast for hours.
"I'm feeling like I'd like to see an island. I'm anxious to see what it's going to look like on the horizon," she said.
At mid-morning the crew began seeing white terns, known in Hawaiian as "manu o Ku," which return to the land each night.
"Those are Nihoa birds," said Hokule'a sailing master Bruce Blankenfeld, himself a noninstrument navigator.
He said he was impressed by Murphy's demeanor.
"There is so much information to digest. She's working hard. She's taken the responsibility on herself. She's working tirelessly to find that island.
"For all navigators, until you find the island — actually see the island — there's a bit of emptiness. But she's calm. She's persistent. She embodies all those things that are important," Blankenfeld said.
The canoe's navigator didn't know quite what to expect. She has sailed with Hokule'a before, though never as navigator, and she has come up on islands before, but never one nearly as small as Nihoa, which is just a half-mile wide and 900 feet tall.
When she found it, she sat and stared, exhausted but soaking in the experience.
"Hoo," she said. "It's awesome."
Thompson said he expected to spend most of the afternoon sailing up to the island, and would anchor for the night. At dawn today, Hokule'a, with Murphy navigating, was to sail for a second, even smaller landfall: the rocky spine that is the island of Mokumanamana.
Advertiser staff writer Jan TenBruggencate is a crewmember during Hokule'a's trip through the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. He will send regular dispatches during the trip.
