MAHUKONA — It wasn’t an obvious move for Mike Manu.
MAHUKONA — It wasn’t an obvious move for Mike Manu.
More than two decades ago, he had a good job in sales on Oahu, had never sailed before, had surfed some. You wouldn’t say he was on course for a dramatic life shift.
But then the canoe called, and the sea. And possibly the ancestors.
On Saturday, Manu stood covered in dust at a metal shed in Mahukona, helping a group of more than 100 students and community members rediscover, rebuild and rehabilitate the voyaging canoe Makalii, which he helped to build in Kohala in the mid 1990s. Before long, Makalii will take to the sea again with new life and purpose and a future of new voyages.
But first, the dirty work.
Senior captain and navigator Chadd Paishon swiped resin dust off his palms to shake hands. The 54-foot, 21-foot wide Makalii loomed above him on blocks. Like carpenter ants, apprentices of the Kuikawaa program and high school students sanded, shaped and lacquered hau wood to be used as stanchions and spruce wood that would serve as iako, the 23-foot crossbeams which are lashed to the two massive hulls and form the deck of the vessel.
The drydock began last March and is set to wrap up in December. A project of its builder and owner, the Waimea-based Na Kalai Waa voyaging society, the Makalii will have new gunnels, railings, deck, and its fiberglass hulls refurbished. In the future, the rigging could be made of the traditional fibers of the olona plant, which Na Kalai Waa is propagating along with koa trees that a coming generation may find large enough to use for hull-building.
It’s all part of perpetuating and rediscovering the ancient Polynesian voyaging and canoe-making practices.
At Mahukona, apprentices get to work alongside masters, like Paishon and Shorty Bertelmann, both of whom have roots deep in Hokulea’s voyages and maintenance. Bertelmann was crew on the 1976 maiden voyage of the Hokulea.
“The students get to learn the fine details of building voyaging canoes, and they’ll be the next ones to teach,” Paishon said. “It’s about passing on the legacy.”
“Makalii was built for this island to be a resource for this community,” he said. “If people want to learn about canoes, they can come here. The success of the canoe has always been because of the community.”
The reclaiming of that legacy began 40 years ago with the launching of Hokulea for Tahiti, a voyage that marked a turning point for Hawaiian culture. At the time, she was the only voyaging canoe around; the practice had fallen out of favor, and the knowledge of it had slumbered for hundreds of years.
Today, there are 22 voyaging canoes throughout the Pacific — eight of them in Hawaii — and not a day goes by that a voyage isn’t underway somewhere, Paishon said.
“Everyone who was aboard the Hokulea went back to their islands and started building the canoes,” he said. “We wanted to take everything we learned from Hokulea and bring it back to the community.”
Hokulea is deep into a four-year worldwide voyage, which began in 2013. She recently left Brazil, bound for the Virgin Islands. Makalii will likely stay closer to home once her hulls return to the water, Paishon said. The canoe’s past voyages have included Tahiti, the Marquesas and the Marshall Islands.
When Manu moved to the Big Island to help with construction of Makalii, people who knew him thought he was crazy to take the risk. But a voyage across the ocean without instruments had been a dream sleeping in his mind since fourth grade, when he first learned of how things were being done on the Hokulea’s trip to Tahiti.
“I wondered how you would do something like that,” he said, “and I told myself if I ever got the chance, I would do it. … I think part of it was learning how smart our ancestors were and how hard they worked. Voyages are a bridge to our ancestors and a way to honor them.”
Manu had arrived in Waimea with hopes of gaining a berth on one of the legs of Makalii’s maiden voyage. His chance came in 1995.
“I didn’t learn until the night before that I had been picked, but I already had everything packed in my car,” he said.
Chelsey Dickson, a member of the Makalii ohana, helped guide a group of students from the Kamehameha Scholars program in polishing the waa stanchions for the work day, which is generally held the third Saturday of each month. It was all about sanding. Lots and lots of it, and in the end, wood that was smooth as silk to the touch.
“It gives them a way to connect to the waa, to put their mana into it,” Dickson said.
Wearing a particle mask, Waimea resident Diane Repp worked to sand the hull of the Makalii in preparation for a new layer of fibergrass. She had watched voyaging canoes launch from the Big Island in 2007. She then moved to Oahu, but the image of the canoes remained with her.
“I moved back in November, and here I am, putting my hands on the canoe,” she said. “It’s such a group effort to put one of these canoes on the water. Many hands make light work and they’re needed, because it’s such a big job.”
But there was more than hard work going on at Mahukona. A seafaring legacy was passing invisibly from person to person, from hand to hand. Its perpetuation — its safekeeping, even — is the real objective, Manu said.
“How do we get this to next generation?” Manu asked. “The biggest challenge is to get this to next generation, so we don’t forget this again.”
Info: https://www.nakalaiwaa.org/