Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Here Comes Hōkūleʻa!


Quick update midafternoon on the 31st: If you look at the Halawai event list and find yourself torn between the screening of "Hawaiian: The Legend of Eddie Aikau" and the event with Hokule'a navigators at the American Museum of Natural History, here's a way you can sort of do both - there's a screening of the film at Videology in Williamsburg tomorrow night, June 1. Eddie's brother won't be there, but there will be a silent auction and a raffle and all proceeds will go to support the Hokule'a, which was so important to Eddie. Details and tickets here. 

Done with a very good visit to Washington, D.C., where they were hosted by the venerable Washington Canoe Club (est. 1904), received a message in a bottle from John Kerry, which they'll deliver to the UN on June 8th, World Oceans Day, honored King Kamehameha I with a lei draping ceremony for his statue, and doubtless inspired hundreds of school kids (because that is how they do!), Hokule'a travels on towards us here in NYC, where preparations are nearing completion, the welcome ceremony has been being practiced, lei are being strung, and all of us who have connections with Hawai'i are getting very excited. This weekend, Hokule'a arrived in Cape May, New Jersey - click here for the crew update from there.

There's a whole string of public events while the Hōkūleʻa is visiting; somebody at Halawai has done a terrific job of keeping up with the events as they are announced, click here to see everything that's going on!

Unfortunately, the giant human-powered boat welcome flotilla in which I'd hoped to participate had to be let go of, as major paddling events require a good bit of advance planning and there just wasn't any way to get the level of details we would've needed to get the appropriate permits at the time we would've needed it - however, you lucky paddlers and rowers who keep your boats in the Upper Harbor, North River stretch of the Hudson, and the East River, she'll be here and there in your home waters from the 5th to the 18th - keep an eye out for her, and you can follow her activities at Hokulea.com.

I'm looking forward to a very, very special two weeks! 



(these are the first lei that I have strung in many, many years - I made them the night before the screening of The Navigators in the Brooklyn Bridge Park for our guest of honor and others who'd helped get the evening to work. No plumeria to be had, so I used hyacinths!)

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3 comments:

Haralee said...

How exciting! Hawaii and NYC cultures all at once!

Frankie Perussault said...

Great news! wish I was there. How will they get back into the Pacific? A lei with hyacinth, very innovative idea :-) and it must smells lovely!

bonnie said...

They'll go back through the Panama Canal. Actually the other big voyaging canoe from Hawaii, the Hikianalia, will be doing a tour down the West Coast as Hokule'a heads for Panama, and the idea is that they'll meet at the lake in the middle.

The lei idea just hit me - it was so funny, I was having this event and it's traditional in Hawaii that if you have a guest of honor, they get a nice lei. We had a small event at the club in the wintertime and I'd given some shell leis that I'd had from trips back to O'ahu, but those were all I'd had. I kind of had it in my head that I couldn't make leis because I didn't have the right kind of flowers - but a couple of days before the even it very abruptly dawned on me that one of the things that make the right flowers the right flowers is that they are the flowers that you can get. The next time I passed a flower stand I stopped and looked over their stock with an eye to things that came with enough flowers of a stringable shape to make a lei, and the hyacinths sort of jumped out at me as a possibility. They worked very nicely and yes, they smelled lovely, which is always valued in a lei!