By Jan S.N. Furukawa
With the winds filling their sails, a star chart painted on deck and a line of reference to follow, the Tahitian traditional oceanic canoe Fa’afaite i Te Ao Moahi and her crew launched into the vast Pacific for their return voyage two weeks after the close of the 13th Festival of Pacific Arts & Culture in Hawaii.
“We were blessed with winds east-northeast, a good start for our line to Tahiti. We were met with group winds, but the sea state, clouds and rain made it challenging to hold a good line,” crew member Kainalu Bertelmann said. “For me, this is also a blessing because this is where the learning takes place.”
With a Wi-Fi connection on board, the seafarers could communicate their progress to followers onshore. The vessel’s real-time movements were tracked by satellites. Digital tracking images had been posted on Facebook, allowing followers to see their actual location.
Crew members uploaded photos and posted their blogs, sharing their musings and creating virtual experiences for those following the voyage from afar.
“Fa’afaite makes me experience things I never thought I would experience. The other night for example, India who was on shift woke us all up to see mermaids swimming by the va’a. Actually, these were dolphins (at least twenty) swimming among the bioluminescent plankton. It really looked like mermaids or sea fairies. It was magic. Since the beginning we’ve been living magic,” reads one post.
“The closer we get to the equator, the more nature's little miracles multiply: clouds shaped like giant walls under which we pass, dolphins leaping and following us, sunsets, bioluminescent organisms around the va'a that glow even brighter in the world. more at night, breathtaking milky way when the sky is clear,” reads another post.
Ten female and six male seafarers crossed 2,600-plus miles to reach Hawaii. For the Fa’afaite’s return to Pape’ete, two more men from Hawaii and Rapa Nui joined the crew.
Polynesian voyaging clubs throughout the Pacific have embraced the teachings of Pius Mau Piailug for more than 45 years. Hailing from the tiny outer island of Satawal in the Federated States of Micronesia, Piailug worked with Hawaiian seafarers in the mid-1970s while they built the first Polynesian oceangoing canoe in 200 years, the Hokule’a. He devoted years to teaching the science of traditional navigating to a cadre of new, younger voyagers.
Kaleomanuiwa Wong, a longtime member of Hawaii’s Polynesian Voyaging Society and educator, called Piailug “the master” of navigating, who primarily used ocean swells to read a canoe’s location. He also used the rising sun, the stars, and the rise and fall of the canoe based off the swells, Wong said. “He was the connection to our collective oceanic ancestral knowledge – that of how to do this navigation.”
Piailug’s motivation was rooted in his beliefs. Wong quoted the elder navigator as saying, “If I have courage, it’s because I have faith in the teachings of my ancestors.”
Traditional navigating, or wayfinding, is the science and interpretive art of knowing stars and constellations, the telltale positions of the sun and moon, ocean swells and their meaning, wind speed and patterns, marine life and birds, and creating mental maps of what they all signal.
A wayfinder notes the rise and fall of a canoe throughout a journey. When the sun’s going down, look at it again, “adjust your course if you need to, confirm if you’re on course or not, and then sail like that all through the night,” said Wong.
“At nighttime, the stars help especially with determining your latitude,” he said, adding, “There’s no way to tell our longitude.”
The Hawaiian seafarer noted that when the PVS’s Hokule’a was preparing to push off for Tahiti in 1978, “Mau’s island is north of the equator, while Tahiti is 17 degrees south of the equator.” Piailug had to “navigate in oceans he’s never been in, with stars he’s never seen, on the longest voyage he’s ever done,” he said.
Each long-distance voyage through the vast and unpredictable Pacific is an adventurous and daring undertaking.
“As you may have understood, we are in navigation mode at estimation and neither the crew nor the navigators have access to the navigation instruments since we left Hawai'i: no GPS, no compass, no sextant,” reads a blog from Manuarii. “For obvious security reasons, only one person has access to our actual position through the AIS, and therefore this is the role I have been entrusted with.”
The double-hulled, 72-foot-long Fa’afaite and her crew – mostly female seafarers, including a captain alongside a male colleague – overcame the challenges they faced. They endured windless seas (.5 knots) and drifting for days, but also trade winds recorded at 7-9 knots and waves that pushed their vessel off course.
“Our canoe is heavy, we see that wave that pushed us West every time it came to slam the front of our dock hull,” said co-captain Moeata Galenon, a celebrated seafarer with decades of experience and the first female Maohi navigator on the Fa’afaite.
Nearing the islands of French Polynesia, the crew had sighted an islet and birds appeared overhead, including ones they did not recognize. Galenon said they had “short wings and a fat belly.”
She thanked the Pacific waters, “which with each trip has this therapeutic effect on my thoughts,” adding that she was “clinging to the reality of this planet sea as much as possible before landing on planet Earth.”
Their 22-day voyage was an overall success. After brief stops in Bora Bora and Huahine, just 66 miles northwest of Pape’ete, the Fa’afaite and her companions reached their final destination early Sunday morning, July 21and were feted at a homecoming ceremony the following morning.
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