Adapted from: 2011. The View From Lazy Point. Henry Holt Co. New York. Perpetua Tmetuchl goes by the nickname Tua. She’s been farming taro in the same place in Palau since the early 1980s. People have grown taro for about 5,000 years, and here some areas might trace an unbroken line of cultivation back fully [...]
Dieter Paulmann, founder of Okeanos, and the man who’d conceived of an audacious Pacific voyaging project (see PacificVoyagers.org), had invited me to lunch just before I left the Hawaiian isle of Kauai. The setting—overlooking Hanalei Bay and the seven traditional-style Pacific voyaging craft called vakas that had just arrived the night before (including the one [...]
Throngs of people awaited our arrival at a land called Hanalei. And in keeping with the spirit of tradition, locals and our crews observed traditional customs of arrival and protocol—and a little theater. The natives threatened and dared us, asserting firmly that this was their island. And after our crews offered gifts, it was all [...]
For boats and crews that came over a thousand miles to get here, the overnight passage was a simple shot. Up to the northwest corner of Oahu, then westward. For me it was serene, yet shadowed always by thoughts about my own work and how it might fit in with this voyaging project: What next? [...]
After the Kava Bowl Summit closed, I was given a tremendous privilege: to sail with the fleet of seven magnificent traditional voyaging catamarans—called vakas—overnight from Oahu to Kauai. Wow. A large crowd of several hundred gathered as we spent several hours prepping for departure from Honolulu. The crews had crossed the Pacific to converge on [...]
What is the ocean worth to you? That was the question posed as we convened for the Kava Bowl Ocean Summit Conference in Honolulu this week. The spiritual power of our convening came from the seven traditional voyaging canoes that had sailed in the ancient fashion—no GPS, no compass—with master Pacific navigators using the stars [...]
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