Jennifer Allen, the author of two previously published books, has been a journalist for over twenty years. Her reporting has appeared in various publications including Rolling Stone, The New Republic and The New York Times Magazine. She has also been an on-air reporter for the NFL Network and NFL Films. Jennifer feels deeply honored and humbled to witness and document the Worldwide Voyage of H’k’le’a. 

John Bilderback was a SURFER Magazine senior staff photographer for twenty years on the North Shore of O’ahu, and has dozens of covers and hundreds of magazine page credits to his name. When H’k’le’a came to Hale’iwa in 2013, he became deeply captivated by M’lama Honua and the mission ultimately drew him in, and he became a crew member. He also participates on the board of directors for the North Shore Community Land Trust.

Founded in 1973 on a legacy of Pacific Ocean exploration, the Polynesian Voyaging Society (PVS) seeks to perpetuate the art and science of traditional Polynesian voyaging and the spirit of exploration. We use experiential educational programs that inspire students and their communities to respect and care for themselves, each other, and their natural and cultural environments. PVS has taught thousands of people through its education, training, research, voyaging and communication programs. The organization teaches in multiple forms of classrooms while seeking innovative methods of outreach to today’s and tomorrow’s children. Currently, a large part of PVS- mission-focused activities are centered around the organization’s voyaging canoes, H’k’le’a and Hikianalia, and the M’lama Honua Worldwide Voyage. The canoes serve as models of island sustainability, and their crews seek to share – Island Wisdom, Ocean Connections, Global Lessons- both in Hawai’i and around Island Earth.

John McCaskill is an award-winning artist and printmaker who works out of his studio on the Big Island of Hawaii and the Honolulu Printmakers’ Studio in Honolulu. His original prints have been purchased by the State of Hawaii, the Honolulu Mayor’s office and by private collectors worldwide. John is the former president of Jomac Graphic Communications, Inc. and is currently an instructor at the Honolulu Museum Art School.

Desmond Mpilo Tutu, CH (born 7 October 1931) is a South African social rights activist and retired Anglican bishop who rose to worldwide fame during the 1980s as an opponent of apartheid. He was the first black Archbishop of Cape Town and bishop of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa (now the Anglican Church of Southern Africa). Since the demise of apartheid, Tutu has campaigned to fight HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984; the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism in 1986; the Pacem in Terris Award in 1987; the Sydney Peace Prize in 1999; the Gandhi Peace Prize in 2007;[1] and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. He has also compiled several books of his speeches and sayings.

“This voyage is sailing on the core set of values we believe in. The sail plan of humanity is off course. But there’s a movement of kindness and compassion that’s happening around the world in response to the damage of our home, our Earth―and that’s why we go, that’s why we sail.” ― Nainoa Thompson, President, Polynesian Voyaging Society E Ola Mau ‘o Hōkūleʻa―Long Live Hōkūleʻa THE WIND IS QUIET. The waters, still. The only ripples are those following children on paddleboards, making large, awestruck circles around the double-hulled sailing canoe, Hōkūleʻa. Orchid lei drape the hulls. Ti-leaf garlands hang on the bow. Sails remain wrapped and tied around the masts. In full wind, those sails will billow into a fifty-foot spray of crimson, the color of a Hawaiian king’s robe. Hōkūleʻa has been harbored here in Palekai, a spring-fed cove near Hilo for nearly a week now. Merchant ships, cargo containers, and petroleum tanks surround this lava-rock girded bay. Hōkūleʻa seems like an island unto herself, undaunted, anchored, awaiting the winds to sail. It has been a big-sun day, with a sharp horizon, and no sight of clouds. Her captain is barefoot in blue jeans, adjusting the lines that swing the boom. His name is Charles Nainoa Thompson. He’s known as Nainoa. Nainoa has been navigating Hōkūleʻa for thirty-five years now, more than half his lifetime. “You do not tell the winds what to do,” Nainoa has told his crew. “The winds tell you what to do.” Right now, the winds say, wait. The wait has allowed many things. It has allowed locals to stream into Palekai, dawn to dusk, with offerings. Busloads of school children have come, gifting garlands, candied ginger, and poi for the crew. Paddlers have come by outrigger, just to have a look, all sharing the venerable greeting of honi with captain and crew, touching forehead to forehead, breathing in the same breath, sharing h, sharing spirit. A pastor brought a hand-sewn silk flag that reads, Hae O Ke Aloha―His Love Is The Banner Over Us―to wave alongside the flag of Hawai’i on the mast. The Hawaiian flag has yet to be raised. It, too, awaits the winds. The wait is teaching patience. Patience is key when you are about to launch on a three-year global voyage. First stop: Tahiti, two wind systems and 2,500 nautical miles away. In sailing to Tahiti, Nainoa will trace the same path Polynesians sailed centuries ago when they explored and settled these islands. Like his forefathers, Nainoa will rely on the wind, moon, swells, birds, fish, and stars as guides. Using traditional wayfinding skills, Hōkūleʻa will be sailed through and eventually beyond Polynesia, crossing the Indian and the Atlantic Oceans, to connect with communities who care for the health of the oceans and our shared island, Earth. The mission is aptly called Malama Honua―to care for the earth. “Caring for the earth is in the traditions of Hawaiian ancestors for the world to use,” Nainoa says of his homelands. “Hōkūleʻa is the needle that collects the flowers that get sewn into a lei by Hawai’i and gives it to the earth as an act of peace.” This act of peace continues to pour into Palekai even as the sun lowers over the mountains. The limping man with the koa-branch cane, the mother with the baby saronged to her hip, the fisherman steaming oysters, the farmer offering fresh kalo, the woman giving lomilomi massages―they continue to come, paying respects to Hōkūleʻa, the mana, the spirit of the Islands. Hōkūleʻa is the Hawaiian name for Arcturus, the star that sits at the zenith above Hawai’i. The fisherman opens the oysters and places them onto a tablecloth-covered card table. It is dinnertime, and another captain, this one named Bruce Blankenfeld, has just now stepped ashore. Bruce shares ha with the fisherman before diving in, dousing his with chili-lime sauce. He smiles, nods, eats. Island-born and ocean-bred, Bruce has the broad build of a long-distance paddler and the steady gaze of a man who has studied miles of horizons. His palms are wide, worn, and strong from years of building and restoring Hōkūleʻa. From the hulls to decks, crossbeams to booms, his hands have worked and sanded and seamed her into a watertight vessel. Bruce will captain and navigate Hikianalia―just behind Hōkūleʻa to Tahiti. Hiki is a hybrid canoe, half-tradition, half-modern, sailed in the ancient navigational way but with sixteen solar panels that can run motors in case Hōkūleʻa gets in trouble and needs a tow. Hikianalia is the Hawaiian name for Spica, the star that rises alongside Hōkūleʻa in the Hawaiian skies. In the low-lying sun, Hikianalia glides into Palekai. The crew is returning after practicing safety drills through the afternoon. Bruce watches as a crewmember tosses a rope to Nainoa and his crew aboard Hōkūleʻa. They bind the canoes, side-by-side, like sisters together, for the night. There will be a hilo―a new moon―tonight. The skies will be dark, the stars, bright. The wind remains unchangingly still. “We just need a little bit of wind,” Bruce says, with a knowing smile. “A bit of wind to give us a good push.” IF YOU ARE LOOKING for the Southern Cross, just ask Nainoa. North Star, Hoku-pa’a; Sirius, ‘A’a; or Procyon, Puana; all you have to do is ask. Nainoa can show you where these stars and hundreds more rest in the nighttime sky. He can show you how he measures their movements, using his palm like a sextant along the horizon. He has been “calibrating” his hand for many seasons now, long before he was married and the father of five-year-old twins, Na’inoa and Puana. “I am old,” he says, but hardly seems so, with an agile grace that allows him to walk hands-free along the narrow safety rails, the palekana, of the canoe. For Nainoa, wayfinding has become a journey into his ancestral past. “We must now sail in the wake of our ancestors―to find ourselves,” Nainoa says, of the crossing to Tahiti. Hōkūleʻa was originally built with the clear desire to help Hawaiians find their path. By the 1970s, the culture of sailing canoes had “been asleep,” as Bruce likes to say, for over four hundred years. But in 1973, three men founded the Polynesian Voyaging Society―artist and historian Herb Kawainui Kane, expert waterman Tommy Holmes, and anthropologist Ben Finney. They wanted to prove that Polynesians were once master ocean navigators who purposely found and settled the Hawaiian Islands. They wanted to dispel the myth that Polynesians had happened onto Hawai’i by drifting aimlessly along currents. They wanted to resurrect navigational knowledge and to revive the culture that had been diluted by colonization. Hula was forbidden in schools. Songs of the sea had been translated to suit tourists in Waikīkī. The native language was a whisper. When people lose their dance, songs, and language, they risk losing their history and narratives―a part of their collective soul. The Polynesian Voyaging Society wanted to help Hawaiians rediscover their strength, wisdom, and spirit. The plan was to build a replica of a voyaging canoe and sail her across the trades to Tahiti. They researched the massive double-hulled sailing canoes of eastern Polynesia, designed to transport several thousand pounds of people and goods. They looked to oral, written, and drawn historical records in Hawai’i―including petroglyphsto study the shape of the canoe and its sails. From this, they built Hōkūleʻa, a sixty-two-foot long double-hulled canoe, using plywood, fiberglass, and resin, with twin masts, claw sails, no motor, a sweep as a rudder, and a twenty-foot broad deck, all held together by eight cross beams and five miles of lashings. But to make the passage authentic, they needed to sail without modern navigational instruments. They needed someone to lead them, someone who could, as Bruce explains it, “pull us through the curtain of time” so that Hawaiians could relearn what had been known centuries ago. Opening that curtain of time meant traveling to a coral atoll in the Central Caroline Islands of Micronesia, Satawal. There lived Pius “Mau” Piailug, a master navigator known as a Pwo. Only a handful of Micronesians still knew the art of wayfinding, and none, other than Mau, were willing to share it outside their community. Mau knew a navigational system that modern sailors had never before seen. It was something that Nainoa, then a twenty-three-year-old crewman, yearned to understand. “If you can read the ocean,” Mau would say, “you will never be lost.” Mau could read and discern eight separate patterns of ocean swells. Lying inside the hull, feeling the various waves hitting it, he could know the direction of the winds and the direction to steer the canoe. At dawn, he would study the horizon and predict the weather for the day to come. At dusk, he would predict the weather for dawn. And in the midst of a gale-swept, stormy night, days away from any safe harbor or land, Mau could steady the mind of any novice navigator―he could look the man in the eye, and with an unflinching gaze, tell him, “You are the light, you have the light within you to guide your family home.” Some called it magic. Bruce calls it being maka’ala―vigilant, observant, awake. In May of 1976, Mau safely guided Hōkūleʻa to Tahiti in thirty-one days. Upon entering the bay of Pape’ete, the canoe was greeted by more than 17,000 Tahitians, over half the population, welcoming her and her crew―home. Two years later, Hōkūleʻa embarked on another voyage to Tahiti―but without Mau. Both Bruce and Nainoa were on board when she capsized in thirty-foot swells, only hours after her launch out of Ala Wai harbor in Honolulu. Without an escort boat, the crew sat on upturned hulls from midnight to sunset the following day, lighting flares in hopes that ship or airplane captains might see them. One crewmember, the legendary big-wave rider and lifeguard at Waimea Bay, Eddie Aikau, convinced Captain Dave Lyman to allow him to paddle on a surfboard to find help on Lanaai, some fifteen nautical miles away. Nainoa can still see Eddie taking off his life vest in order to freely paddle into a wind so fierce that the salt from the waves was blinding. The crew was eventually rescued. Eddie was never found. Nainoa understood why Eddie wanted to voyage to Tahiti. Eddie’s passion was not for his own glory but rather a reflection of his reverence for the past and his hope for the future. “Eddie had wanted to go to the land of his ancestors, to educate new generations, to bring dignity back to our kapuna, our ancestors,” Nainoa remembers. Eddie’s legacy is why the Polynesian Voyaging Society continues to sail today. Eddie is why Bruce volunteered to help rebuild the severely damaged canoe. Eddie is why Nainoa went to Satawal to ask Mau to teach him Polynesian wayfinding. Until a Hawaiian could sail Hōkūleʻa, the quest wouldn’t be complete. Nainoa needed to learn the skills of Oceania and then share this knowledge with future generations. Mau knew that a huge part of being Pwo was passing the wisdom on. He also knew that wayfinding was on the verge of disappearing in his own islands. Mau then asked his own teacher, his grandfather, for permission to share these lessons. His grandfather agreed, reminding Mau that the Hawaiians were after all part of the Polynesian family. Positioning stones, shells, and palm fronds in the sand, Mau recreated a star compass for Nainoa. Mau taught him how to identify the stars as they rose up out of the ocean and then dove back in. Mau showed him how to decipher wind systems, how to understand sea birds flying to and away from land, how to interpret clouds. Mau taught him how to study the shape of the ocean and read the “character” in the waves. Mau taught him how to discern the varying widths and hues of the sun’s path along the waves. Mau was teaching him the language of the navigator―what Mau called the “talk of the sea.” Just as the Hawaiian god Maui is said to have fished the Hawaiian Islands out of the ocean, Nainoa would now need to envision pulling Tahiti out of the sea. In “An Ocean in Mind,” author Will Kyselka renders the multilayered teachings of Mau and their limitless affect on his student, Nainoa. “Can you point to the way of Tahiti,” Mau asked Nainoa during the last lesson of his two years of study. The teacher and student were observing the sky at Lanaai lookout, a coastal perch on the southeastern shore of O’ahu. Nainoa pointed to the direction of Tahiti. Then Mau asked another question, one that required a deeper knowing. “Can you see the island?” Nainoa couldn’t literally see the island but he could, he told his teacher, see “an image of the island in my mind.” “Good. Keep the island in your mind,” Mau told him, “otherwise you will be lost.” “See the vision of the island rising from the sea,” Mau would often remind Nainoa. “If you don’t have a vision, you will be lost.” In 1980, with Mau on board, Nainoa safely navigated Hōkūleʻa to Tahiti. In doing so, Nainoa became the first Hawaiian to make a non-instrument passage from Hawai’i to Tahiti since the fourteenth century. Since then, Hōkūleʻa has become the heart of the Hawaiian renaissance and, in the last forty years, she has sailed over 140,000 nautical miles of the vast Pacific highway, igniting a revival of sailing canoes throughout Polynesia. None of this would have been possible without the guidance of Mau. As a gesture of gratitude, “Ohana Waia built him a deep-sea voyaging canoe in 2006. Mau named his canoe Alingano Maisu. Alingano maisu is the wind that blows the breadfruit out of the tree, providing an offering the people can freely enjoy. Otherwise, people are only allowed to eat the fruit under the sole permission of the island chief. Mau named the canoe Alingano Maisu, because he saw the waia as a blessing bestowed upon all the people of Satawal. With crews from Hawai’i, Nainoa and Bruce traded navigating Hōkūleʻa, and Chad Kalepa Baybayan and Chadd O’nohi Pashion navigated Maisu, both waia sailing together to Satawal. Mau then surprised them with a ceremony inducting five Hawaiians into the Pwo. The five Hawaiian Pwo are Nainoa, Bruce, Kalepa, O’nohi, and Shorty Bertlemann. “Pwo is a model for living,” says Kalepa. Pwo is not only about wayfinding at sea, it is also about being a leader and a steward within a community, Kalepa has said. To be Pwo is to be deeply connected to all living things―birds, animals, fish, oceans, air, earth, and all mankind. “Mau’s greatest lesson,” Kalepa says, “is that we are a single people.” Realizing the global “ohana―global family”is a key element in the Worldwide Voyage. Kalepa has been sailing Hōkūleʻa since he was nineteen years old. He’s now passing the knowledge onto his daughter, Kali, a crewmember aboard Hikianalia for the voyage to Tahiti. “Pwo is a way to take care of the earth,” Kalepa explains. Taking care of the earth is why Kalepa has committed his life to this canoe, and why you can find him on her decks at Palekai, teaching the next generation of navigators how to listen to the talk of the sea. THE CLOUDS HAVE COME, lowering the sky. With them, a soft breeze blows, like a whisper over a bare shoulder. Today was the day the canoes were scheduled to launch out of Hilo. But that date was set by man many moons ago. Nainoa has let everyone here know that the canoes will not be sailing today, or tomorrow, or the day after. When someone suggests that the winds are “bad” for sailing, Nainoa is quick to correct. “The winds are never bad,” he says. “The winds are allowing us time.” The time to “deepen your understanding of why [you are] going on this voyage,” Nainoa explains. “The winds are allowing you that time.” When Nainoa says you, you feel he means everyone gathered here at Palekai is being allowed this time to deepen the understanding. Bruce has echoed this to the hundreds who have come to bear witness to the sacred blessings of crew and canoes. The ritual began in the starlit dawn, with the crew wading in the warm shallow waters of Moku Ola, a small, sheltered island known as the “healing island” where King Kamehameha would go to be cleansed, strengthened, and healed before and after his battles. There, the crew shared and drank the medicinal ‘awa juice. The crew marked their bodies with turmeric and octopus ink. They listened to the complete genealogy of Hōkūleʻa, an incantation of all the places she has ever sailed. They then sailed to Palekai where they received a procession of the Royal Order of King Kamehameha I, descendants of native Hawaiians, with royal red velvet capes, who sang a hallowed song as they bowed, offering garlands for protection to the Pwo. “Now is the time, ultimately, to be very clear about who you serve,” Nainoa explains. His wife, Kathy, and their children, Naiinoa and Puana, wait nearby. It is clear they all know what is coming―the embrace that will become the beginnings of a long farewell. Now that the rituals are complete, these are the last moments before the crew and canoes enter kapu, when the crew withdraws into a more meditative state in preparation for departure. For crewmember Noelani Kamalu, kapu will be reflecting on the first time she saw Hōkūleʻa, when she was just in middle school, and how she knew, even then, that she wanted to someday sail the canoe. For her crewmate Kaleo Wong, kapu will involve securing a jug of water from the lake atop Mauna Kea to eventually share with the equator. For Nainoa, kapu is ―a time to be with those who matter the most―primarily, family. You need to take that time. If you don’t, you’re foolish as a leader.” “I am by nature a very private person,” he says. “Kapu is my final preparation to rebuild strength that was taken away by all the things we had to do to get here today.” When Nainoa says “we,” he means everyone who has helped the voyage prepare for this day. To get here today involved hundreds of hands, hearts, and minds committed to the Worldwide Voyage. There were those who sailed Hōkūleʻa and Hikianalia 12,000 nautical miles among all the Hawaiian islands and the Pacific; those who trained and tested crewmembers; those volunteers who gave over 32,000 man hours in dry-docking―sanding, lashing, and varnishing Hōkūleʻa; those who masterminded a viable sail plan that will connect environmentalists around the globe; and those who reached out to ocean communities in the many ports that will warmly welcome the waia. In his own humble way, Nainoa feels a deep responsibility to all these people who have served and helped prepare Hōkūleʻa for this day. “I cannot find that strength unless I go to places that I trust and places that allow me to find who I am,” Nainoa explains. “In doing so, that’s how I get strong―and that’s how you lead.” That place of trust comes in the time he shares alone with his family. Last winter, he told his wife that he just didn’t know if he could leave his family to sail to Tahiti. He thought his wife would be pleased with his decision, after all, he was choosing his family over Hōkūleʻa. But her reaction was far from what he had expected. “Are you kidding? You have to go!” she told him. “The crew needs you!” “Nainoa is an ocean man, a fisherman, a teacher, a navigator, a captain,” she tells me. “All the planning for this voyage has kept him on land.” One of his favorite places on land is Mauna Kea. And so, during kapu, Nainoa took his family there. “Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa are dear to Nainoa,” Kathy explains of the two volcanic mountains that shape the island of Hawai’i. “They are the first things he sees when he is sailing home from Tahiti.” “It is such a sacred place, so peaceful, so raw,” she says. It was their children’s first time to the volcano. The walk was long. Puana rode on her father’s shoulders as they hiked past steam vents in the lava-bedded earth. Reaching a high plateau, they could see the ocean below. Nainoa stretched out his palm to show his children the way of “measuring the heavens.” “I think for a little while we were in heaven,” Kathy says of the family’s time together that day, so private, so uninterrupted, so kapu. Seeing him with their children reminded her of when their children were babies. They were restless sleepers, and Nainoa would carry them outside and calm them by reading them the stars across the nighttime sky. Puana is named after a star. She can show you which one is hers in the sky. Puana, the star, rises just ahead of the sun. You can see Puana at dawn off of Cape Kumukahi, the first place Hawaiians welcome the sunrise, the last spot of land Hōkūleʻa will see when she launches to Tahiti. The voyage needs to begin from a place that symbolizes light, Nainoa has said, and this light will help find the way. “Finding a way” is one of his son’s favorite expressions. When young Na’inoa meets a problem, a maze, a puzzle, he is patient to find its solution and often talks about “finding a way.” Kathy says Na’inoa is much like his father. She once found Na’inoa in the backyard, staring up at the sky or maybe the trees or maybe even the clouds. When she asked him, “What are you looking at, Nainoa?”, he replied, “The wind?” THE FLAG OF Hawai’i has been raised on the mast. The winds are here, sending waves through the flag, and shivers across the waters of Palekai. The rains have passed. The sun is breaking through the clouds. A conch shell is blown, calling all to come, come now. Sol Aikau, Eddie’s brother, has come. All Pwo have come. All families have come, too. It is time. Hundreds line the rocks of the bay and, even more, the shores, where crates of fruits and vegetables are being passed, arm-to-arm, in a long line to the crew making its final load onto the canoes. “The crew is good,” Bruce says to a local reporter. “They’ve asked all their questions, all their concerns. We told them this is what it’s all about. This is an expedition. An adventure. By its very nature, there’s supposed to be some unknown around every corner.” “We are just conduits,” a crewmember says. She wears a ti-leaf garland, like a halo, around her head. “All of Hawai’i is sailing with us.” On the shore, Nainoa’s wife, Kathy, weeps. She cannot help herself. She remembers the first time she saw Nainoa standing on the deck of Hōkūleʻa and how it was the most beautiful vision she had ever seen. She is overwhelmed, she says, by it all. “The incredible embrace of love from the community for Hōkūleʻa, Hikianalia, Nainoa, and all the crew members.” Nearby stands Nainoa’s sister, Lita, wiping her eyes. Lita is Bruce’s wife. She has organized the purchasing and and packing of all the provisions for the long leg ahead. A small dingy carries the last of the crew to the canoes. Someone calls out, “Enjoy the ride!” Someone else calls, “A hui hou!” IN THE COMING DAYS, the apprentice navigators will practice, alongside Nainoa and Bruce, guiding the canoes the ancient way. The canoe will be hit by relentless squalls. There will be shouts of “All hands on deck!” There will be seasickness. They will learn, as Noelani says, the things that teach you where you came from, what you’re made of, and who you are. They will speed through the usually stagnant doldrums. They will drop sails at the equator. Here, in the place known as Ka Piko o Wakea, the diaphragm of the ocean god Kane, they will pour the waters of Mauna Kea in an act of reverence and pure gratitude. And they will reach French Polynesia in record time―just sixteen days. But none can see this far into the future. Not even Pwo. As Hikianalia leads Hōkūleʻa out of Palekai, Nainoa gathers the crew into a circle on the deck. All hold hands. On the shore, his wife pulls their children close. “Take them with you, take your family with you,” Nainoa begins in an open prayer. “Take everybody with you. Be strong!” Nainoa motions the crew to begin moving the sweep to turn the canoe away from shore. The conch shells are blown, steady and strong. You can hear them long after the canoes have left the bay, long after you can no longer see Hōkūleʻa, but only her sails, unfurling, freed in the breath of the winds.