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JAMM AQUINO / JAQUINO@STARADVERTISER.COM
Original crew member of the Hokule‘a and Polynesian Voyaging Society co-founder Ben Finney, center, talked with state senators and fellow crew members in the Senate Chamber on Monday, during a ceremony celebrating the original crew and the 40th anniversary of the vessel’s launch.
Forty years ago, before Hokule‘a sparked a voyaging renaissance around the Pacific, it was simply a daring idea that many in Hawaii doubted would succeed.
When the canoe’s original crew set sail for Tahiti in 1976, navigating by stars and swells, the group couldn’t know for sure that the idea would work — or that they would arrive safely — because no one had attempted such a voyage for centuries.
"It was exciting, and there was this leap into the unknown, but we were all very young," original Hokule‘a crew member Billy Richards quipped Monday while sitting in the state Capitol basement, recalling the canoe’s first international voyage. "And we were ready to leave, ready to go. And having people like Buffalo (Richard Keaulana) and Mau (Piailug) and trusting our canoe and each other, I knew we could pull it off."
On Monday, Richards, Keaulana and 10 other surviving Hokule‘a crew members from the original 1976 trip to Tahiti and back were honored in two ceremonies at the Capitol. The House and Senate commemorated the 40 years since Hokule‘a was first launched at Kualoa, in Kaneohe Bay.
Today, after having sailed more than 150,000 miles, Hokule‘a is renowned across the Pacific. The Oahu-based Polynesian Voyaging Society, which maintains the canoe, has become a local institution. State lawmakers said Monday that Hokule‘a’s original "seafaring heroes" made its popularity possible.
PVS co-founder Ben Finney, "pwo" (master) navigators Nainoa Thompson and Shorty Bertelmann, crew doctor Ben Young, John Kruse, Abraham "Snake" Ah Hee, Kimo Lyman, Penny Martin (one of two women to participate in the 1976 voyage), Gordon Pi‘ianai‘a and Francis Kainoa Lee were the other original crew members who attended Monday.
The 40th-anniversary festivities took place as Hokule‘a crews prepare for another leap into the unknown.
Later this month the canoe is slated to leave the familiar waters of the Pacific for the first time and journey into the Tasman Sea as part of the society’s three-year Malama Honua ("Care for the Earth") voyage around the globe. The trip will encompass more than 50,000 miles.
The canoe, along with its new escort boat, the Gershon II, will depart New Zealand for Australia en route to the Indian Ocean, which voyage leaders consider the riskiest stretch of the worldwide journey.
"Going out and leaving the Pacific is the new adventure, and there’s skeptics now relative to that," Richards said Monday. "Sometimes maybe healthy skepticism is good" to help keep the voyage’s crew members safe, he added. "This is new territory, new people, new places — some who don’t even know what a Hawaiian is."
Monday’s ceremony included empty chairs adorned with lei for the original crew members who’ve died. One of them was for Piailug, Hokule‘a’s original navigator from the tiny Micronesian island of Satawal.
He "was the calming voice in that storm of uncertainty," Richards said Monday. "He … filled that void that was there. We all just looked to him for everything that needed to happen, that we needed to learn."
Piailug would eventually teach Thompson, Bertelmann and several other Hawaiians the ancient art of noninstrument navigational wayfinding, ensuring that the practice would endure. Today Piailug is revered by voyagers from Hawaii and around the Pacific.
The early skepticism before Hokule‘a successfully landed in Papeete, Tahiti, "strengthened us," Richards recalled. "The more somebody said it wasn’t going to happen, the more we just said we’re going to make it happen. If our ancestors could do it with less than we have, then we could pull it off."
