New canoe honors legacy of Mo‘olele, burned in the 2023 Maui wildfires

Timi Gilliom, captain and builder of the voyaging canoe Mo‘okiha o Pi‘ilani, awoke from a midday nap in Hui O Wa’a Kaulua’s Front Street shop on Aug. 8, 2023, to the sound of a homeless man rattling his gate — and the smell of smoke from the devastating Lahaina wildfire. “He said, ‘Jimmy, Jimmy!’ and I was thinking, ‘How many times do I have to tell this guy my name is Timi?’” Gilliom said. “He said, ‘There’s a fire, get your tools.’”

Gilliom, who was resting on a futon after an early morning shift at his construction job, quickly gathered all the tools he could carry, his pair of work boots and a large kukui nut necklace.

While the ever-growing body of fire chased him, Gilliom did not run to the exit. Instead, he dashed to the shop’s garage where the 50-year-old coastal canoe Mo‘olele was being restored for the fifth time, and placed the kukui necklace around its manu ihu, the nose of the canoe, just as he had done dozens of times before embarking on a voyage.

“I looked at her and I knew I’d never see her again,” Gilliom said. “I knew for sure.”

The fire that killed 102 people and scorched 2,000 acres also burned the Mo‘olele, rendering the 42-foot, double-hulled coastal canoe unusable. Gilliom and his crew at the Maui voyaging organization Hui O Wa’a Kaulua are now continuing the Mo‘olele’s legacy by ramping up construction of the Naleilehua, a nearly identical vessel to the Mo‘olele. They want to make it as close to the Mo‘olele as possible without actually replacing it, Gilliom said.

“Nothing can replace Mo‘olele,” Gilliom said.

Gilliom said he, along with freelance artist and Naleilehua crew member Matt Agcolicol, Makaio Lorenzo and others, is working to finish Naleilehua by the end of the year, though an exact launch date is still undetermined.

Agcolicol said this process of putting together the Naleilehua from scratch is itself a rediscovery of what the Mo‘olele represented. When the Mo‘olele burned, Agcolicol said Maui’s voyaging community not only lost physical blueprints and designs of the Mo‘olele’s original construction, but also the legacy of the Mo‘olele’s builders.

“When we’re rebuilding this, I think Naleilehua will represent the rediscovery and another symbol of it’s still here, we’re still here, we’re still trying to do this, we’re still building these connections,” Agcolicol said.

The Mo‘olele was built by the late master carver LeVan Keola Sequeira. Roughly 30 years ago, Gilliom was enlisted by legendary mariner and former Hokule‘a captain Leon Sterling, and Hokule‘a crew member and Hawaiian feather lei-making master Jo-Anne Kahanamoku Sterling, to finish building the canoe.

Gilliom said Sequeira initially began building the coastal canoe Naleilehua as a gift to educator Edwin “Ed” Lindsey Jr. and his wife, Puanani Lindsey. The voyaging canoe even bears Ed Lindsey’s middle name.

Undergoing on-and-off construction, Sequeira built the Naleilehua’s spar, curve boom and mast before he died in 2022 — the hardest parts of a canoe to make, Gilliom said.

Shortly after the fire, Gilliom said, he offered to buy the Naleilehua from the Lindsey family for $50,000, which he admits he did not have. He said the Lindseys initially told him that the voyaging canoe was not for sale. But after the news broke that the Mo‘olele had burned in the fire, the Lindseys’ granddaughter Sharon Balidoy donated the Naleilehua to Gilliom.

The gesture was fitting. By the time he was 29, Gilliom was the youngest crew member on the Mo‘olele and sailed across Molokai, Lanai and Maui in its early years, eventually becoming its captain and sailing across the state. The Mo‘olele, a coastal canoe, Gilliom said, was built for travels within the Hawaiian archipelago, unlike those made for deep-sea voyages like the Hokule‘a or the Mo‘okiha o Pi‘ilani, lending to its unique ride.

“Once you go on Mo‘olele, you never forget it,” Gilliom said. “There’s no ride like it.”

The hui owns and built the 62-foot Mo‘okiha o Pi‘ilani, which was salvaged during the 2023 fire due to its docked location at Maalaea Harbor. Still, since the Naleilehua and Mo‘olele will be nearly identical, Gilliom said building the Naleilehua represents a restoration of the Mo‘olele’s place as a pillar of Maui nui’s voyaging community.

The Mo‘olele — which means leaping lizard — was built in the 1970s, around the same time as the famed voyaging canoe Hokule‘a, and represented Maui’s participation in the larger movement that sought to reconnect Native Hawaiians with ancestral ties to Polynesian voyagers. The Hokule‘a celebrated its 50th birthday March 8, and the Mo‘olele would have celebrated its 50th this September, six months later.

When Gilliom received the parts of the Naleilehua to continue constructing the canoe, he found that the mast step and a curved yoke piece for the boom were missing — the only two pieces of the Mo‘olele that had not been destroyed in the 2023 fire.

“The only parts I didn’t have were the two parts that survived,” Gilliom said. “That is like an act of God.”

While Gilliom said it is unclear whether Sequeira’s intent was to one day replicate the Mo‘olele, Sequeira created a mold of the 1970s-era Mo‘olele by coating parts of the canoe with three coats of mold release. Those molds were then used to create a set of hulls for the Hawaii island voyaging canoe Makali‘i, which was launched in the water in 1995. Gilliom said the molds are now creating the Naleilehua’s hulls.

Following the fire, procuring the parts and supplies to build the Naleilehua took time, as many resources burned with the Mo‘olele. However, a large part of the canoe’s construction came together with community effort, according to a news release from the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.

Koa wood, for example, was an integral part of the Mo‘olele’s build, which Gilliom wanted to reflect in the Naleilehua’s construction. Fifty years ago, Gilliom said, the cost of koa was less, unlike today where koa wood is harder to aquire, especially for a reasonable price.

But Gilliom reached David Tsuchiya, Kauai Branch district superintendent for the DLNR Division of State Parks, who then sent him 22,000 pounds of koa that were salvaged from downed trees at Koke‘e State Park. According to DLNR, the excess koa would normally be put up for public auction.

DSP Administrator Curt Cottrell said in a statement, “There was no question that (the Division of) State Parks preferred to donate this koa for Naleilehua.”

The koa was then en route to Maui with the help of local trucker Timmy Lopez, who drove the long shipping container to the harbor, where oversea cargo transportation company Pasha Hawaii loaded it onto a container ship, according to DLNR.

“The trucking was free and the shipping was at the discounted employee rate,” Gilliom said in a statement. “It was overwhelming.”

Now the raw koa wood is being processed by artist Agcolicol, whom Gilliom recruited because of his extensive background in design, woodworking and fiberglass.

Agcolicol, who is from Waiehu, Maui, said he felt a calling to work on this canoe from the late Herb Kawainui Kane, a prominent Hawaii artist who is largely credited with having the vision to design and build the Hokule‘a in the 1970s.

“For his kahea, his calling, to tell me, ‘Hey, Matt, we need people to build this canoe’ — as an artist from Hawaii, I couldn’t turn that down because one of my idols had gone through that passage as an artist of Hawaii to contribute to our waas (canoes),” Agcolicol said. “I instantly knew that it was bigger than me.”

For Lorenzo, building the Naleilehua means creating a new legacy within the history of Maui’s canoes.

“I get to be what Timi was to Mo‘olele, to this canoe now,” Lorenzo said in a statement. “And it doesn’t stop with Timi and Mo‘olele. It goes further with his teachers, Uncle Leon (Sterling), and it’s continuing that genealogy through our canoes.”

Lorenzo said in a statement, “I dream about it every single night, and I just keep thinking about her.”

As the crew works on the Naleilehua, Agcolicol said, they seek to merge the foundation of what the Mo‘olele was in its design and function, while incorporating updated features for safety, structure and storage functions. Ultimately, though, Gilliom said the Naleilehua is a reminder of what the Mo‘olele was and a symbol of moving forward.

“I want to make sure, when you look at (the Naleilehua), you think of Mo‘olele,” Gilliom said.