Kawakiu Nui, Moloka’i

[Kyle]Climbing up the big hill at Kaluapapa turned out to be a lot harder than we had hoped. The National Park Service requires a permit to be obtained from the private company (Damien Tours) that runs donkey tours down to the village, even if not riding a donkey. No problem, but you have to sign up to get a permit months in advance, even if we weren’t going into the town, just walking from the beach to the top of the hill and back. So that was scrapped.

Instead, I did something almost as fun: I rebuilt the secondary fuel filter assembly on our starboard engine. The ring that tightens the filter bowl is hard to tighten because of its location. Since we changed the filter the last time, it has had an annoying leak. It really needed to be unbolted completely to get it tightened up. I figured I might as well just redo everything since it was now in my lap. Fun! No more leak, though.

So, having enjoyed the view, thus exhausting what we could get out of the anchorage, we set sail the next morning for the west coast of Moloka’i.

With the wind behind us, we had a quick sail in seas that grew the further we got from the protection of the Kaluapapa peninsula. As the waves got bigger, we started spending more of our time surfing down their faces. By the time we rounded Ilio Point and turned into the flat seas in the lee of Moloka’i, we were spending most of our time comfortably above ten knots flying only a single-reefed mainsail.

Kawakiu Nui: beach, rocks, and a cliff

We anchored along the beach at Kawakiu Nui behind the only bluff along the shore at a place the locals call Make Horse beach. The bottom composition is less than ideal, so it took us a while to find a spot that looked like sand. When I dove on it later, we discovered the bottom was just a huge slab of lava covered by about 3mm of sand. The tip of the anchor had a firm hold on a 3” hole. We both had long reconnaissance swims and could find nothing better. Well, the wind was forecast to be steady for a while, so we should be fine. Plus, if we dragged, we’d have a couple thousand miles to sort it out before we would hit anything.

We spent a full day and a half aboard in windy conditions before we decided to chance leaving Begonia unattended for a few hours while we went ashore to see what was around.

It seemed a little odd that this beach was so quiet

We started on the reddish/tan beach. The first thing we noticed was that the beach below the surf line was very steep and made up of very deep, soft sand. Dragging the pudgy above to the flat sand above was quite an effort. From our landing point, we wandered past tide pools in the a’a lava breaking up the beach. Some even formed natural salt flats, where crystals were accumulating.

After taking the dinghy ashore we spent some time scrambling about in the rocks and found plenty of natural salt pools - easy pickings

We scrambled along a little further. We were looking for a path to the top of the bluff at Make Horse beach. We couldn’t find one, but located a very rough four-wheel-drive road leading away from the shore into the countryside. We joined that and walked into hot grassland punctuated with stunted looking trees. It looked like the kind of place where we wouldn’t have been surprised to see an elephant picking through branches in the distance.

The road never even went off in the direction of the bluff. Instead, it went way around the back, taking maybe a mile and a half to deposit us just on the other side of the bluff from where we started. We continued on toward the only infrastructure in the area, referred to in our guidebooks and on Google Maps as the Kaluakoi Hotel and Golf Club.

Looking for the road to the hotel... Hmm, it doesn't look like we are on the right trail

We passed a few people on the beach, but not nearly as many as we would have expected from such a large complex. Perhaps golf really was the main focus of the clientele.

As we got closer, things started to seem definitely strange. There was almost no one around. We walked into a complex of mostly boarded windows, with a few others revealing rooms full of dusty furniture arranged willy-nilly. The place was closed down. Then we saw a couple sitting on their balcony eating breakfast, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the units on either side of theirs had their doors falling off. We were now in Scene 3 of a Stephen King movie.

We probed further and found a perfectly functioning pool with clean, bubbling water next to a clubhouse apparently owned and operated by an extended family of spiders, judging by the cobwebs visible through the grimy windows.

Further along, we found a well-stocked convenience store existing seemingly oblivious to an almost total lack of customers, apart from the breakfast couple. We couldn’t resist asking the friendly guy behind the counter what was going on. We got a whole history.

Those poor palm trees - an early sign that the hotel complex was no longer being cared for

The whole complex was built in the early ‘70s as a Sheraton. Ten years later, the Japanese bought it, just before their economy collapsed. It was shut down for a couple of years before the Moloka’i Ranch bought it. Their plans for the property raised the ire of the locals, who felt they were being denied access to important spiritual and cultural sites. The golf course was last maintained in 2008 and all but a small portion of the property was closed down. All that apparently remains is the convenience store and the unit of the one couple on earth determined to get the full value out of their time-share.

So, now we know we’re not going to be blowing all of our money on mai tais at the club.

Kaluapapa, Moloka’i

[Kyle]The anchorage at Wailau Valley was beautiful, but it was starting to get a lot of swell as the wind picked up and moved a few degrees further north of east. We decided to leave in order to spare us having fitful nightmares about dragging onto the beach at night.

We planned to move a few miles along the coast to Okala Bay, which seemed like it may offer a little bit more protection behind a couple of giant rocks protecting the little indentation. It was only five miles away and we could see it from the anchorage at Wailau Valley.

There wasn’t enough time to even shut down the engines between anchorages, so we unrolled the jib to help with our speed and fuel economy as we motored, leaving a reef in for gusts. We hugged the bottom of the world’s largest sea cliffs (about 4,000’, 1,600m). Overhead, several helicopters flew by, darting in and out of valleys that looked like where they filmed the opening scene for Jurassic Park III. Wait a minute; this is where they filmed the opening scene from Jurassic Park III! Well, that’s just super cool!

Enjoying the stunning views of the worlds tallest sea cliffs and this beautiful, wild, coastline.

Along the way, Maryanne got a signal on her phone for the first time since leaving Maui, and was able do download her email. We got half a message from Fountaine Pajot. Our rudders were finished and ready to be shipped, but it was unclear whether they actually had been or not. We got a tracking number from DHL, but the message also said the charge didn’t go through and they were holding the rudders for shipment.

Ugh! Our credit card company is always trying to protect us when some suspicious charge comes up from some weirdo location. The thing is, that’s the only kind of charging we ever do. Apparently other people don’t buy groceries a thousand dollars at a time, or place charges from multiple states and even countries on the same day. The card companies have been pretty good lately. They seem to have finally figured out we’re in Hawai’i, but now somebody has tried to buy a jet ski or something from some boat company in France, so they put a stop to that. They actually have an automated system that calls us within a few seconds and asks if the charge is legit but, of course, we had no signal to receive the call.

All of this meant our nice downwind sightseeing tour was put on hold as we rolled up the jib and turned upwind into the waves trying to maintain our elusive cell phone signal. We both did a lot of standing on tippy-toes on the cabin top waving our phones way over our heads with no effect.

We tried for a while and then gave up and headed back downwind to Okala. We figured we might be able to get a message out on our ham radio later to at least keep the rudders headed this way.

The anchorage was gorgeous, with a big valley curving up and away behind the beach and several towering rocks to seaward. We stopped and hovered for a bit. There was a lot of swell here, too. The anchorage was smaller and the bottom looked like it had only patches of sand here and there. We wanted to stay, but decided it would be more prudent to skip this one and head to the next one at Kaluapapa, which lay on the west side of a two-mile long peninsula that would be sure to protect us from the swell.

We were not allowed to land at Kaluapapa, so we continued on and tucked ourselves as far as we could into a deserted sandy beach just beyond. We found flat seas, plenty of sun and wind and long views of Moloka’i’s northern cliffs as well as the village of Kaluapapa.

Landing at Kaluapapa is restricted because it still houses a number of patients with Hansen’s disease, formerly called Leprosy. The town used to be a colony. Now the Park Service runs it and even today is only accessible by aircraft or a very steep mule trail that switchbacks up the cliffs behind and then only with a permit.

As I tidied up after our sail, Maryanne found a weak phone signal and was able to sort out our rudder problem. It appears they had been sent even though the charge had not gone through. That was very good of them to do. The same thing happened when we gave them the initial deposit for the order, so I’m sure they think it will be sorted out quickly like the last time.

Sitting in the cockpit afterwards, we spotted a line of horses and donkeys walking along the beach carrying what appeared to be guides and a few tourists. They were starting the journey back up the hill toward the road that runs along the ridge. Way at the top, I could see through the binoculars where it emerged at a scenic pullout, where people were standing on the edge snapping photos. I may have to try to figure out how to get up there…

Visitors leave the settlement on foot, or in this case on donkey/horse to climb back up the mountain. All were gone by Sunset.

Wailau, Moloka’i

[Kyle]The weather forecast for crossing the Pailolo Channel between Maui and Moloka’i was not the best. The prediction was for 20-25kt winds and nine-foot seas. A small craft advisory was being extended every half a day for another half day. I really wanted to pass by Moloka’i on its rugged northern side, but I wasn’t sure any of our planned anchorages would offer sufficient protection from the weather.

As a strategy for dealing with this, we decided to leave during the daily lull in the winds that occurs before sunrise. This would also give us enough time to pass by any anchorage we deemed unsuitable and continue to the next, and then the next, continuing all of the way to the island’s protected lee on its western end if necessary, before running out of daylight.

We planned to leave Honolua Bay around five a.m., but we were awake and ready at four, so we decided to just get an early start since we knew the route into the channel was free of hazards and could be safely navigated in the dark.

The anchor came off of the bottom. I put Begonia’s engines into reverse to back away from our anchor trip line floats and CLUNK! The starboard engine failed. I had wrapped the trip line around the prop. I put the port engine into forward, hoping to get enough speed to make the starboard rudder effective, but into the wind, all that happened was we turned toward the beach. Reverse would turn the bows away from the beach while still backing us toward it. Alternating forward and reverse was only succeeding in zigzagging us closer to danger that we could not see in the dark.

Maryanne saved the day by jumping in with a headlamp and a knife and cutting the line free. I restarted the starboard engine, putting us back in control, but it was a hair-raising few minutes while we inched our way back into water we knew for sure was sufficiently deep.

{Maryanne: Since the loss of Footprint we always going to have extra stress attached to such a situation, we had to do something fast, we needed the boost of the 2nd propeller so I stripped off and dived in (glad of the dark!). The problem was solved quickly and we were soon out of any danger, but it was a while before we both really lost that feeling of high anxiety, it felt like way too close a call. Hopefully I redeemed myself after my inaction after hitting the whale.}

We cleared Maui and entered the unbroken wind in the Pailolo Channel. It wasn’t so bad. Our early departure had kept it relatively mild. The rain came shortly thereafter. It was a cold, soaking rain that came in waves, falling about two thirds of the time.

Moloka’i first appeared as a slightly darker gray blob emerging from a gray sky. Often, even though we were only ¼ mile away, we couldn’t even see the island at all. We would get hints of its majesty from the height of the blob, which would be regularly interrupted with the white line of foaming waterfalls.

We reached our first intended anchorage off the beach at the base of the Wailau Valley (Wailau translates to water crater). The big ocean swell was slightly attenuated by the rocks jutting out from Lepau Point, but the sea was still pretty active in the little indentation along the coast. Compounding the problem was that we had no hope of seeing the bottom structure in either the low light of morning or the heavy rain and choppy sea surface. We hovered for a bit to get a feel for the motion and decided we would give it a try. The depth sounder seemed pretty steady, so we tried the anchor in a random spot. It held fast the first time. When I dove on it to check, all I could see was a uniform layer of dense sand. The anchor and the first 100’ of chain were completely buried. Sand is our preferred bottom because its holding power is only surpassed by sticky clay, but clay is much messier when the anchor comes up.

A damp and misty passage, has us arriving in this idyllic little cove surround by stunning cliffs and a glut of narrow, high waterfalls

We went for a nap to make up for the early start. When we awoke, we were stunned at what we saw. Cliffs from a Norwegian fjord had been plopped down behind the beach. Huge sides of impossibly sheer mountains towered overhead with waterfalls plunging out of the thick carpet of green. A couple of the bigger ones would occasionally be blown completely into mist by the winds whipping by outside our cove. The beach had half a dozen or so makeshift three-sided shelters. A small boat was leaving and three people were now taking shelter in one of them. I thought they might be fishermen, but on closer examination, it looks like they may be some sort of eco-tourists {we eventually decided, with no real evidence at all, that they were most likely locals from the very hard to reach but nearby town of Kalaupapa} . I hope we aren’t spoiling their view. What am I saying? We were here first, at least today. I’m sure they’ll outstay us, so they’ll have the place to themselves soon enough.