Nainoa Thompson

Nainoa Thompson has made his mark on history several times over, and he’s not done yet.

The 60-year-old Thompson, president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, is about to embark on another deep-sea voyage aboard the traditional Hawaiian sailing vessel Hokule‘a, this time around the world.

It was in 1976 that Micronesian master navigator Mau Piailug showed Native Hawaiians it was possible to sail from Hawaii to Tahiti by traditional navigation methods — that is, by the stars and other natural indicators. That was aboard Hokule‘a, and Thompson was a crew member on the vessel’s return to Hawaii.

Four years later, Thompson recreated the trip to Tahiti and back, this time as its navigator, becoming the first Native Hawaiian in centuries to sail by celestial navigation. He followed up with voyages throughout Micronesia and Polynesia, including New Zealand and Rapa Nui, along the U.S. West Coast, including Alaska, and Canada, and even Japan, including Okinawa.

The plan to circumnavigate the globe has been five years in the making, and is set to start within a few weeks, although it will be at least a year before Hokule‘a actually leaves Hawaii waters for Tahiti and beyond. Thompson, who is planning to be onboard for about four of the 18 legs of the trip, said the purpose of the voyage is to inspire young people and help people around the world learn about Hawaii and the Earth’s environment overall. The event already has inspired local tourism executives, with Hawaiian Airlines offering to cover any air fares or cargo costs in areas that it serves.

Thompson’s own inspiration was the late Herb Kane, the Native Hawaiian artist, historian and mariner whose idea it was to build the Hokule‘a. And just as Kane encouraged Thompson to learn the ancient navigation skills, so Thompson has been working to pass on those skills to young people today.

He is a graduate of Punahou School and the University of Hawaii. He also is a UH regent emeritus, a trustee of Kamehameha Schools, on numerous boards of directors and the recipient of many community awards.

He grew up in Niu Valley, where he still lives today with his wife, television newscaster Kathy Muneno, and their two 41⁄2-year-old twins, son Na‘inoa, and daughter Puana.

Question: So you’re going around the world, leaving June 1, right?

Answer: In many ways we left already. We’ve been training for five years. The voyaging leadership statewide came together April 1, 2008, to look at, collectively, this idea of should we go around the world. It was an intriguing question because our experience in Japan (in 2007) was so amazing. …

When we reached outside of Polynesia to another country, it just seemed Hokule‘a was magic to this other country. So then it was the idea that we should go. So we had a meeting — all the leadership was there — and hundred-percent consensus said in concept we should go. Well, I tell you, we had no idea what that meant. We’ve been training five years now.

Q: You say all the leadership was there. How many was that and who?

A: At the time there were 10 voyaging organizations in Hawaii, from the Big Island, Maui, Molokai, Oahu. And that meant probably about 22 people. The necessity was we have to do things in a unified way; we have to be together, especially for something this large. We couldn’t even imagine how big it was. But instinctually we knew this was not going to work unless we came together.

Q: So why the trip around the world?

A: Just the need to continue to sail and the importance for Hokule‘a and all she represents, that we’re still exploring.

But the trip around the world was a real test. It was a test to raise a number of questions. The biggest question, I think, was whether Hokule‘a is still relevant in the 21st century. After 135,000 miles of sailing, why? Is it still meaningful? So there was a mandate made at that meeting saying, let’s see whether this worldwide voyage has value to young people. And when we say young, we mean those in their 20s, primarily 20s and 30s. So we mandated that as of April 1, 2008, 40 percent of the crew — which we had no idea of what the numbers were going to be — had to be under the age of 30 as of that date. And, Mark, we have amazing, brilliant, balanced, strong, courageous (young people) … And they’re not like my generation, who know the sense of being the victim, the Native Hawaiians, that come from a sad story. That story doesn’t exist anymore. They weren’t there. It’s a different generation.

We’ve got one navigator who’s in her 20s, last Saturday graduated in mechanical engineering, born in Utah, lived in New York as a child, came to Hawaii, went to Punana Leo (a Hawaiian language immersion program), speaks Hawaiian fluently but she speaks 41⁄2 languages, plays the violin, is an engineer — and she can find Tahiti. Yikes! Makes us old guys look like dummies, I tell ya!

Q: How did she learn navigation?

A: Just training. She’s been here for years. And we got another one. She’ll graduate next semester in geology. Her whole thesis is on sea level rise, climate change and where the shorelines in Hawaii will be in 15 years. And she’s Hawaiian, a Kamehameha Schools graduate, speaks Hawaiian, and she can navigate to Tahiti. This story is really about that generation and the strength and balance of it.

Q: Haven’t you and the Polynesian Voyaging Society already proved what you set out to prove? Why keep at it? It seems that if there’s not a particular theory you’re trying to prove, you might just be risking disaster, putting people at risk.

A: There’s always risk. Every day’s a risk. So we train to mitigate risk. But I think from our lens internally, the value of Hokule‘a was not just finding islands. The value of Hokule‘a was in many ways shifting how society sees the world. So back to my point: If you go back to pre-Hokule‘a, and if you go back and look at where Native Hawaiians were within the society — second rate, inferior, died younger, made less, worse health … all those kinds of negative statistics — then you have Herb Kane build a voyaging canoe, you have the navigator Mau Piailug find Tahiti, and then you have these successive voyages, and fundamentally what it did, it changed the foundation of the well-being of Native Hawaiians, because, at the core, being well is about how you see yourself and the issue of identity.

Now you see the measurable change, in every mission statement in every school. … It changed how society saw and valued something very important that was going extinct.

Q: And that was due to the Hokule‘a sparking the renaissance?

A: Hokule‘a was just one part of the renaissance; Kahoolawe, clearly, was another part of the renaissance. Punana Leo and the Hawaiian language is another renaissance. Hula is another renaissance. But Hawaiian things are being valued in the world because the way we see the world has shifted.

The worldwide voyage is about the next shift that I think has to happen. And it’s about the Earth. If anybody takes a hard look, an honest look, at the last 30 years of peer-reviewed, legitimate science, and looks at the Earth and what we’re doing to it, and really is honest about it, if that person is not moved by that data, either they don’t understand it or they don’t have a pulse. So our next movement is to make sure we figure out ways to rethink about our relationship to the Earth. The reason we go around the Earth is to connect with it, and be with it, and learn from it about the diversity of culture and the special places around the planet.

Our campaign is really about looking at culture again, with another generation of having Native Hawaiians have the canoe … that will be a flashlight in the darkness, because young children today don’t know Hokule‘a, because Hokule‘a hasn’t really conducted any deep-sea voyages since 2008.

This kind of voyage is supposed to create that kind of inspiration.

Q: What stops do you have planned?

A: It’s 36 months once we leave. It’s 46,000 miles, 28 countries and 62 stops.

Q: Are there people expecting you at each stop?

A: The Pacific is notified, and the connections are made, because we have strong relationships there. The Indian Ocean is something we have to work on, and we have two years to get ready for that.

Q: That’ll be happening while you’re out at sea, right?

A: No. Our voyage actually begins the end of this month, but we’re going to spend one year just in Hawaii.

Q: Going from island to island?

A: We’re going to go to 23 ports. We’ll engage 30 communities. We’ll bring 7,000 school kids to Hokule‘a. We will send our crew members to half the schools in the state of Hawaii. And we will do 30 presentations for those 30 communities, and the rationale and the philosophy is that before we can go around the world, we gotta go around our home. We need to make connections by paying respect and honoring our special places in Hawaii first. And to make sure that schools, teachers and children are at least notified about the voyage, and if, by choice, they could follow us through our third canoe (aside from Hokule‘a and Hawaii Loa), which is really the Internet. And we’ll be engaging about a thousand teachers.

Q: What kind of mental and physical training have you been doing for this?

A: There are a number of things we had to do in the last five years. One was, we had to do leadership training. We’re going to change crew 18 times. And the thing about fatigue is on primarily the leadership; they’ve gotta carry all the safety decisions, so you have to rotate them. … So we’re targeting in succession 12 new captains and 12 new navigators. So the length of voyage and the amount of miles that we are going to be sailing is really to our benefit in terms of having Hokule‘a and the ocean really be a school for the next generation of leadership in voyaging. … The worldwide voyage, at least in my head, was going to be like a magnet, to pull together multigenerations of leadership. So this is really about young people.

Then in September 2010, we pulled Hokule‘a out of the water and she was really, really tired. So again, given that magnet of bringing people together, the next question that we needed to raise was, really, could we restore Hokule‘a so that she’s in a condition that she can go around the world?

Q: You’re going to have to do that probably during the trip, right?

A: New Zealand, Capetown and Miami will be places where we will haul the canoes out. But — this is an important point — the question was, and this is an issue of relevancy: Does the community still care about the canoe? So we pulled her out. And the mandate was, we take out all rot, we take out all damage. And what we ended up doing was taking everything out. There’s nothing from the original canoe except the 1-inch of the hulls. Everything else is changed. That took 18 months and it took 28,000 man-hours of volunteer time. And we had over a thousand volunteers come down and help repair Hokule‘a. So on one side, it took the community to repair Hokule‘a, but Hokule‘a rebuilt the community.

Q: How do you find these people who are going to be crewing for you? Are they volunteers?

A: Everybody’s a volunteer, because we’d never be able to afford it. About 40 percent of the crew will be experienced crewmembers from before. And then the other 60 percent is mixed. About 40 percent is going to be targeted for succession leadership. They’re going to be all young people. Then the other 20 percent will be specialists: medical doctors, ambassadors from different countries who will come with us, international journalists who will be writing for us, to promote our education program.

We’re going to have scientists on board, focusing on ocean health. That kind of stuff. So rebuilding Hokule‘a and getting that larger diverse community together was what we did in the last five years.

Q: How did the sponsorship with Hawaiian Airlines come about, and what exactly is it going to do for you?

A: Hawaiian’s amazing. You know, a good friend of mine, Mike McCartney, from the Hawaii Tourism Authority, he’s a very good friend and supporter of the broader values of the voyage. … Here’s the interesting thing: In the time that we do the voyage, millions of visitors will come to Hawaii. So the world comes here. And Mike’s vision is this (voyage) is Hawaii going out to the world. And it’s being sailed by its own core values as a tool to help other countries understand who we are.

So Mike said you need to meet this guy, Mark Dunkerley, the CEO at Hawaiian. … So we met for two hours; it was an amazing meeting. We talked about family more than anything else. … We never talked about a partnership, we never talked about funding opportunities, none of that. We just met each other. Just me and him. And then, Mark went out and talked to his staff and said, “We’re going to help them.” …

Q: Do you have a cost you expect this voyage to total?

A: Yeah, it’s high. (Laughter). It’s an expensive thing to do, and we’re still working on the budget. But we have a team of people that are working on fundraising. We don’t really know how to do this well. … But we have this external team that is helping us, not just in Hawaii but also in the continental United States as well as around the world. So fundraising is a big issue, but we’re doing this because we believe it’s the right kind of project — and we’re learning along the way.

Q: How many navigators do you have now? I mean, you learned from Mau (Piailug), then it was just you, and then more people learned from you? How has it rippled out and how many are there now who can do this?

A: Mau did two amazing things: He found Tahiti in 1976, then came back and trained us for three decades. But in the three decades, there have been waves of different generations of navigators, so I would be like in the first school, and basically from there, my generation started to train the younger generation in Hawaii as well as in the South Pacific.

Mau has graduated in the Micronesian ceremony called Pwo, and it’s recognition of deep-sea navigators. So in that recognition, there’s five in Hawaii and there’s six in the South Pacific. But they’re all kind of … they’re all students of Mau originally, but they were trained at different times. So now, in many ways, we’re trying to get at least 12 more. And we have a handful of young people right now. They’re good enough. What they need is opportunity. So the worldwide voyage creates that.

Q: How many go on at one time? I saw something you wrote about how sometimes the navigator needs to stay up for up to 22 hours at a time sometimes. So what have you got — two or three on each trip?

A: As the trip is so long, we’re almost forced to get the training in and have an allowance for multiple navigators, so people can sleep more. But the real deep learning is when you gotta do it by yourself.

So in the beginning, like the first leg, Hawaii to Tahiti, to me, is the best school for navigation training.

You gotta go through the world’s biggest wind system. You have to be able to use seabirds and sea life. You need to know so much. And what the navigation does, it really gets you in nature, in the wild, and a gives you a great appreciation. So we’re not just trying to create and train navigators, we’re trying to create and train teachers through the navigating.

What we’ll do in the beginning of the voyage, like on the trip to Tahiti, there will be eight student navigators on board. So the trip to Tahiti is where we will train and give them experience but they won’t have the issue of fatigue. But in the Pacific, in the first year, after we get to Tahiti and we train these eight navigators, then we’ll send them off in teams of two to do 22 legs in the Pacific — Tonga, Samoa, … so it’s going to be progressive.

Q: How many legs of this round-the-world voyage are you going to be on?

A: Oh, I’ll probably be on … out of the 18, my guess is I’ll be on maybe four.

Q: In the Pacific or around the world?

A: I’ll do the first trip to Tahiti to train the navigators. I’ll do a leg around New Zealand, but it’s coastal. Then I’m slated to be the captain for the leg to go around South Africa, because of the risk. Then I might do another leg up the East Coast.

The thing is, my most important voyage right now is not on Hokule‘a, it’s with my two children. I don’t look forward to leaving them. When we voyage up the East Coast or in New Zealand, I’m going to bring them with me.

But the two long ones that I know I have to do are the one to Tahiti, the first leg, to train the navigators, and the trip around South Africa, because of the danger.

Q: So basically you’re going to go west.

A: Basically. We leave next year in May for Tahiti, and you’re correct. We’ll be in the Pacific for about a year. We’ll go down to New Zealand; we’ll stay there about six months. We’ll go around the north of New Zealand, the marae — they’re the cultural centers in New Zealand; that’s going to be an amazing trip.

Then from New Zealand we go up to Australia, around the northern tip of Australia, then into Indian Ocean.

The Indian Ocean is where we still haven’t figured it out. Initially we’re going to go up to the Red Sea area, but the piracy issue is so intense that it’s too dangerous.

Q: They’d probably like to meet you guys, I bet. I mean, how could they not be good to you, if they met you?

A: We look like them, yeah? (Laughter)

Q: Oh, I don’t know. It’s just that how often do you see something like a Hokule‘a going through those waters? I would just expect that anybody you ran into would be kind and helpful. But who knows — they could hold you for hostage or something like that.

Q: Yeah. So the Indian Ocean has two hurricane seasons, five monsoon seasons, It’s got the highest incidence of piracy on the planet. It has the highest incidence of rogue waves, around South Africa.

They break tankers in half. So we may, if we can’t find the right kind of security, and we can’t get the accurate enough confidence in forecasting these storms, ship the canoe from someplace in the Indian Ocean to Capetown, because of safety reasons. Our highest priority in any voyaging is safety.

Q: What kind of foods are you going to take with you?

A: Well, we’re doing projects that are trying to be reflective of our core values. We do believe that Hawaii needs to grow more food, so we’re working with the Peace Gardens project and school-to-farms project with the DOE (state Department of Education). …

The voyage is trying to be connective to many different community organizations that are doing good work to increase our ability to have some way to deal with food sovereignty. So even though it’s symbolic on the canoe, to the best we can, we’re looking at ways to grow our own foods and be able to pack them in a way that can protect them and keep them safe and nutritious.

We’ll also be going to countries and buying and purchasing and supporting their economies by taking their local foods, too. … We are going to … bring foods from Hawaii as much as possible, or local foods from the islands that we go to. But I will be honest, it’s very difficult to do, primarily when you get out of the Pacific. So in those countries that are very very poor, we’ll have to do whatever it takes to make sure that our crews are safe.

Q: Where’d you get the passion to get into all this to begin with?

A: Well, the passion came when I was really young. I was born and raised close to the ocean.

Q: In Niu Valley?

A: Yeah, in Maunalua Bay. I was taken to Maunalua Bay when I was 4-years-old by a milk man from my grandfather’s dairy. So he was like my first teacher.

My grandmother was pure Hawaiian and spoke Hawaiian, so she was very influential — my father’s mother — about being Hawaiian when I was young. But there was no way to connect to it in the larger society. It wasn’t in the schools.

So then you have Herb Kawainui Kane, who comes and has the dream of building a voyaging canoe, and just by luck, I happened to be in right place at the right time, and he told me about the idea of building Hokule‘a. He told me the idea. He took me out to look at the stars and said, these are the stars we’re going to navigate by. I was prepared for the voyage from being a young boy, but there was no voyage until Herb created it. So the inspiration really came from Herb.

Q: What were you doing exactly when you met Herb. How did that come about?

A: This is a long story … I’ll make it short. I was always trying to seek out Hawaiian culture connected to the ocean. So I paddled for Hui Nalu canoe club in Hawaii Kai. We’d launch our canoes at this little canal and go to practice.

Right across the canal were old wooden houses, back then, and Herb lived in one. Nobody knew who he was. And then he had these two hulls, like surfing canoe hulls. They were 22 feet, fiberglass, rigged together, Hobiecat sail, on the beach. He would come over to the canoe club and ask for volunteers to help paddle outside the reef to go sailing. I had no idea what the canoe symbolized to him. All I knew was, wow, I’m going to go play, that’s a way to have fun. So every time he’d come I would go. And I was a novice B paddler, like a banana banana. I didn’t know anything. But what Herb was doing in that time — that was 1974, before Hokule‘a was built — Herb was recruiting the top waterman, and that wasn’t me. That was two coaches: Kala Kukea, a top waterguy, and then Billy Mitchell, one of the champion paddlers.

Herb invited them to a dinner to his house. But then, for some reason — I don’t know, I guess he feel he needed to feed me at least one time, cause I’d helped him so many times — he invites me to the dinner. And then you walk into this old wooden house and there was — I know the power of a mentor, I know how your mind can be transformed — I walk into the house and there’s 19 oil paintings of voyaging on the walls and I had no idea where they came from. I had no idea what they represented. I had no idea that it was ancestral family. But it was inspiring. You’re inspired. And that’s what I hope Hokule‘a does, is continue to inspire the minds of young people.

And so then we sit down and he starts telling this story, about building a voyaging canoe and sailing it to Tahiti. And then he takes us out into the yard after dinner, and that was the moment, that was the single moment that my whole life changed. It was like, he took our eyes and our imagination up to these 7,000 dots of light in the sky, this chaos, and he starts to tell stories, and he takes us all the way to the Southern Cross, and at that single moment, my whole life changed.