Also, I'm Anna, by the way.

Lehua.

Nice to meet you.

I met with Lehua Kamalu, one of the captains and primary navigators of Hokule'a.

We are about to take Hokule'a out of Waihi Harbor on a short sunset sail.

It's a beautiful afternoon, and I think, you know, invite the whales and, in the ocean to listen to something maybe they haven't quite heard before [laughs] from the deck of a canoe.

Gonna be super amazing with Yoyo on board, a number of our elders and kupuna and practitioners, and so-

In fact, your natural surroundings provide a lot of data that can be used to figure out where you are and where you're going.

It's not that you are traveling from point A to point B with absolutely nothing in the middle.

[laughs] There's an ocean that is pointing you in the right direction.

There are wave patterns.

There are animals.

There are wind directions.

There are clouds in the sky.

... that, that tells you something, and it means you're in the radius of some kind of land.

Hundreds of years ago, this was how Lehua's ancestors crossed the ocean.

Hawaii is traced back through the migration route to Tahiti in French Polynesia.

It's over 2,000 miles to the south, and the idea that we are so deeply connected to a place so physically far away to the point where we can understand each other in the languages we speak is pretty astonishing.

And so we start to learn this, I'd say, as early as, you know, six, seven, eight years old.

We get to go visit the canoe itself, um, and this canoe is called Hokule'a that I'm referencing, and it was the first to be built in centuries here in Hawaii, and it was launched in 1975 as something that demonstrated both the ability and the genius to construct a vessel that could sail the ocean and the very, you know, high seas, as well as the skill of the people who would've been sailing these canoes, you know, 500, 1,000 years ago to actually intentionally find their way across those 2,000 miles.

Mm, mm-hmm.

It's actually a return.

[laughs] It's a return to something we have maybe not intended to escape from, but because of the way that we, we all live on this planet and the way that, you know, the course of humans have evolved our daily lives, uh, we, we are very protected and, and sometimes removed from, from a space that I think gives us incredible peace and incredible introspection and, and reverence.

That's coming up.

[instrumental music] Being on a voyage forces you to unplug.

It is emotionally challenging for some people to disconnect in that way.

All you really need in that moment on a canoe is to know your job right there, right then.

We are all just there to get this canoe from the beginning to the end as safely and quickly as we can, and absolutely everything else falls away.

My name is Lehua Kamalu.

I'm a captain and navigator of traditional Hawaiian voyaging canoes, and I work at the Polynesian Voyaging Society.

Hmm