It’s time to take Hawai’iloa sailing again

After years of exhaustive repairs, the Hawai‘iloa has returned to the water — and local voyagers hope the Polynesian vessel can help fill a void left by its popular older cousin, Hokule‘a, as that canoe traverses the globe on a goodwill mission.

“It’s another resource for the voyaging family,” original Hokule‘a crew member Billy Richards said of the Hawai‘iloa on Friday.

Later, Richards would slip into the turquoise waters off Sand Island, where he and about three dozen other volunteers carefully guided the 57-foot-long double-hulled vessel, complete with giant hulls of 400-year-old spruce, back into the sea.

In some ways, local voyagers say, the Hawai‘iloa goes a step past the famed Hokule‘a to help connect with the ancients who once navigated the Pacific Ocean. The Hawai‘iloa is not just designed after traditional Polynesian canoes, but is also built almost entirely with natural, traditional materials.

“It’s a very important canoe,” said Joy Ancheta, whom others described as one of the Hawai‘iloa’s most dedicated volunteers. “This canoe is built by the people. It’s built by the community.”

That authenticity has made the Hawai‘iloa difficult to maintain, however. The distinct Bishop Museum-owned voyaging canoe is 23 years old, and it’s spent nearly half of its life out of the water in need of repairs.

Ancheta, Richards and their fellow members of the nonprofit Friends of Hokule‘a and Hawai‘iloa hope that the  hours they’ve logged in recent years working to restore the unique vessel will finally pay off. The group leases the canoe from the Bishop Museum for $1 a year, according to Richards, who serves as the Friends’ president.

They’re optimistic that the Hawai‘iloa will pass its upcoming inspections, where it will prove seaworthy again, and can stay in the water for good.

If it does prove OK, it would be great timing for Hawaii’s voyaging canoe family. Interest in voyaging on Oahu is growing precisely as the Hokule‘a sails around the world on its three-year and more than 50,000-mile Malama Honua (“Care for the Earth”) voyage. Veteran voyagers back home aim to use the younger Hawai‘iloa, with its similar size and design to the Hokule‘a, to help train the future crews.

Already, “we’ve been able to fill a void for educational purposes,” said Ancheta. While in dry dock the canoe has recently hosted tours, she said.

The Hawai‘iloa might symbolize ancient Polynesian craftsmanship, but to some the challenge of finding suitable tree logs for its hulls also reminds them of the scarcity of some of Hawaii’s once-abundant natural resources.

The hulls originally were supposed to be carved from Hawaiian koa wood. However, an extensive search by land and helicopter of the island’s koa forests in the late 1980s failed to find any suitable trees. For many, including Richards, that search showed just how much the timber and ranching industries had helped to trim Hawaii’s koa forests.

“It was a big turning point,” said Richards, who had assisted in the search. “There were so many areas that were cleared to make room for cattle, ranch lands.”

“You realized how small that patch of forest was because everything else was cleared,” he added, describing koa forests on the slopes of Mauna Kea.

Eventually, tribes from Alaska donated two spruce logs stretching 200 feet tall and 7 to 8 feet wide to build the Hawai‘iloa, Ancheta said. Using the Alaskan Sitka spruce logs still made sense historically, she and Richards said, because records show that ancient Hawaiians also used massive logs that had drifted to the islands from North America to build some of their largest canoes.

The late master canoe carver Wright Bowman Jr. carved out the Hawai‘iloa’s spruce hulls. Bowman and his fellow builders did use koa for the canoe’s manu — the points that extend from the bow and stern and cut through the waves, and they used ohia wood for the crossbeams, according to Jerry Ongies, a Hawaii island native who helped build the Hawai‘iloa and lead its yearslong restoration.

In 1995 crews sailed the Hawai‘iloa to Alaska to thank those tribes, and the voyage helped the young members of those tribes rediscover their traditions and make them “proud of who they were,” Ancheta said.

During its mid-1990s voyages to Tahiti, Raiatea and the Marquesas, the Hawai‘iloa sailed smoothly and quietly, prompting its original crews to nickname the canoe “The Cadillac,” Richards said.

“She just seemed to have more buoyancy and a real pleasant drive over the waves,” original Hawai‘iloa crew member Kimo Lyman recalled Friday.

However, after those voyages and the journey to Alaska were finished, cracks started to appear along the bottom of the Hawai‘iloa’s hulls — and they were exacerbated when the canoe was displayed outside at the Bishop Museum, Ancheta said.

“She developed these huge cracks,” Ongies recalled. He said he tried to fill the cracks with wood but that it didn’t work. The canoe’s owners opted to take it out of the water and seal the wood hulls with  Fiberglas before the damage got any worse.

Richards said there was a huge debate over the move. Purists wanted to keep the hulls in their native state, while others thought that if they didn’t coat with Fiberglas, “they would be repairing the canoe more than they would be sailing it,” he said.

The canoe was pulled from the water in the mid-2000s, and it would stay out of the water for 11 years until it was returned for initial tests earlier this year, Richards said. The effort to repair and restore the Hawai‘iloa started in earnest about six years ago, he added.

Before that “there just wasn’t enough funding to keep it up,” he said.

Hokule‘a captain “Nainoa (Thompson) and them, they talk about navigation,” Richards added. To repair the Hawai‘iloa “you needed somebody leading this that can see the canoe in the water,” he said, crediting Ongies among those leaders.

“It’s just a lot of work,” added Ancheta as she sat in the netting laced across the Hawai‘iloa’s stern and hovered over the water.

“People laugh at me, saying, ‘You’re going to be sanding and varnishing for the rest of your life,’” she said. “But for me, I feel like it’s something that’s so worthy of it. I feel like this is a truly a living legacy.” Ancheta’s Friends colleagues credit her with helping to lead the past several months of particularly hard work to get the Hawai‘iloa across the finish line.

The Friends aim to add the Hawai‘iloa’s mast and rigging soon, Richards said. The group also aims to raise funds for the equipment to keep the canoe from falling back into disrepair.

“For now the main thing is, let’s go sailing,” Richards said.