Kauai Woman Magazine Winter 2005

Water Women: Making a life on the ocean

By Pamela V. Brown

On Kauai we're surrounded by beautiful azure seas which are full of life and life-giving properties. Several Kauai women share their connection to the ocean and how its cleansing and energizing properties shape their lives.

Teaching Caterpillars to become Butterflies

Spend one moment with Celeste Harvel and you know she loves her life. You'll probably first hear her - her hearty, free laugh or her exuberant exhortations to her windsurfing students at 'Anini Beach. Combine that with her smiling face surrounded by tight ringlets of hair, and you know you've met a woman who is happy to the core.

A 20-year Kauai resident, Harvel has operated Windsurf Kauai for 15 years, teaching visitors and residents how to skim across the ocean standing on a board while holding a sail full of wind. A sailor since she was in her teens in California, she was hooked on windsurfing the first time she saw the sport.

Windsurf teaching tools have come so far over the years that what Harvel's students learn to do in three hours, it took her two months to master back then. Once she mastered it, she began windsurfing competitively, winning open ocean races up and down the California coastline.

Windsurf instructor Celeste Harvel 

shows her form and enthusiasm 

at 'Anini Beach. 

Photo by Ron Kosen / Photo-Spectrum

An expert at encouraging people, Harvel can usually be found by the water's edge at 'Anini hollering advice to students, helping them overcome their initial fear, finding their balance, teaching them to fly on their own.

The entire process is inspiring to spectators, too.

"I notice people like to come down to 'Anini and watch the classes. They're cheering and 'yaying' us," she said. "It's like a good football game. People cheer because a lady made it back into shore without falling."

Happy to sometimes be the student, Harvel tells of the time she had a blind customer, Michael, who had apparently windsurfed before. He could determine where the sun was, but had no other visual abilities. He told Harvel about beeping buoys from which he could determine his position. "I didn't have one but I said I'll be the beeping buoy," she said. "He could feel the ocean bottom, could feel the shade from trees to know he was near branches. I think he was incredible."

Later when another blind student asked to take a class, Harvel knew she could teach him. "Michael had taught me to be confident teaching blind people."

Harvel's teaching spot at 'Anini Beach fills all her needs, personally and professionally, being near the ocean that she feels cleanses and purifies her and charges up her energy. "That place is so sacred. It's so alive and the conditions there are so magical for what I do," she said. "Over all these years it's nourished me like family. It's given me my livelihood and so much."

Believing that it's important to donate time to causes close to your heart, Harvel paints 'Anini Beach picnic tables, picks up trash, rakes the leaves and never operates her school on weekends out of respect for local residents who want to use their park on their days off.

In her spare time, Harvel plays drums and sings in three "practice bands," writes song lyrics and poetry and appreciates the joy of her life.

"I think attitude is everything. Some people aren't having as much fun as they should because they don't look at things in the bright light. If you do, you'll find everything's pretty amusing," she said. "My life is pretty fun."

As the tenth of 14 children in her family growing up on Kauai's North Shore, Kainoa Forrest learned about teamwork at an early age. "If they don't go, you don't go, so there has to be lots of love so you can tag along," she said.

It's a similar concept in the 300-member Hanalei Canoe Club which was founded in 1973 by Forrest's parents and about a dozen other Hawaiian families. It's an extended family in which people of all ages and skill levels are welcome to feel the healing power of love through unconditional acceptance and the magic of washing your worries away on the water.

"When you go on the water, it's awesome. You throw all your burdens away," she said. "You don't think of what's happened or what's to come. Just sit in the river or ocean and in the canoe with yourself or with five other people."

Canoe club leader Kainoa Forrest 

near Wailua River. 

Photo by Pam Brown.

Forrest said that the connective power of paddling cuts across all boundaries including age and ethnicity, and since her small kid days has been effective in steering children clear of troublemaking activities. One of her brothers credits paddling with keeping him out of jail as a child.

"In the 1970s on the North Shore there were no movies, no bus transportation. The only thing we had was the beach or school. So paddling was it," she said. "That's where we met a lot of friends. That's where a lot of interracial connection happened outside of families."

Just lounging at the beach can lead to boredom which can lead to trouble for kids, Forrest said. "They want to do something for kicks or laughs and sometimes it's not real good the things that they do." That's why paddling, which requires both mental and physical focus is so effective, and why she's worked so hard over the years to keep the Hanalei Canoe Club vibrant.

Though club members enter into and are successful in many competitions, Forrest says the club is really more about families, biological and hanai. With members ranging from eight to 76 years old, there are all kinds of connections to be made. "Half of our paddling program is single people or kids from single parents. Some of them have never been exposed to families. Here's everybody's an aunty or uncle," she said.

"We keep it strong so the next generations can come in and find a family, hold on to it and continue to pass it on."

Beyond forging personal connections, Forrest says that joining the canoe club helps teach people their own value - girls and boys, men and women. "Don't come for someone else. Know that you are an asset always. "When you show your light, only then can other people attach their light to you," she said, showing her light.

As the only woman aboard the Polynesian voyaging canoe Hokule'a, sharing 45 feet of living space with 12 men as the crew sailed from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to Tahiti, Nalani Kaneakua's deep love for the ocean was tested. Though she grew up on and around the water, specifically Kauai's Anahola Bay, for this vibrant and bubbly woman, 30 days at sea on a canoe was a life-altering experience for her.

The Hokule'a, a fully functional replica of ancient canoes, was designed to discover how Polynesians arrived in and settled islands in the Pacific Ocean using "way finding," navigating using the sun, stars, clouds, wind and wave patterns instead of modern instrumentation. The Rapa Nui to Tahiti journey was the last long sail the Hokule'a has taken.

Other than several safety features, life on the Hokule'a is simple and sparse, just as the ancients experienced. "You leave the comforts of home and there's really nothing. There's no land, no nothing. Just the sea around you," she said. "You bathe in salt water. It made me more humble."

Nalani Kaneakua in her chef's smock near her home on Anahola Bay. 

Photo by Ron Kosen / Photo-Spectrum

"You just want to go back on the canoe. But you search inside and become really thankful for all the things you have," she said. "It probably took two months to adjust, to get back into the groove. I was sidestepping as if I was still on the canoe for a couple weeks."

A self-described tomboy, Kaneakua's life has always revolved around the ocean since the day her father, a commercial fisherman and farm manager, tossed her overboard when she was barely old enough to walk. Her father, who is about 80 years old now, still dives and fishes every day, throws and sews nets. "It's all about the ocean. The ocean has more to offer," she said.

"We grew up diving, fishing, getting our food. We didn't do the supermarket thing. It was just second nature to go to the ocean to get fish, to the rivers to get the crabs. I have total love for the ocean."

Today, Kaneakua, 47, whose family has lived on Kauai for 16 generations, is the owner with girlfriend Summer Woolsey of Café Aina in Hanamaulu, where she serves breakfast and lunch, specializing in local food with a vegetarian flair. A trained chef, Kaneakua says emphatically that "local food" isn't Spam and Vienna sausage. It's fresh fish, fresh produce including taro - gifts from the land and sea.

Kaneakua believes it was her cooking ability combined with her years on the water that helped her be selected for the Hokule'a voyage from among thousands of applicants. She served as cook and quartermaster on the canoe, responsible for loading, storage and unloading 45 days worth of provisions and inventory including non-food items.

She worked from a "kitchen" that consisted of a stove mounted in the center of the canoe where she sat on a cushioned 2½ gallon bucket. A far cry from conditions at Papaya's Natural Market and Café where she was chef before and after the canoe trip. "I got my butt bruised for 30 days on the canoe," she said laughing.

It was on her beloved ocean in 1999 during the Hokule'a voyage that Kaneakua gained a deeper appreciation for life than she'd ever had before.

During rough seas on a windy, rainy, pitch black night before Thanksgiving, the co-captain climbed up to fix an entanglement on the mast when suddenly he lost his balance and fell between the twin hulls into the water. Thanks to intensive safety training before the voyage, the crew rescued him and brought him back on board.

"It really made you appreciate life after that," Kaneakua said. "Thanksgiving became even more special."

Kaneakua made sure that the crew's Thanksgiving dinner was one to remember. She whipped up what was maybe the most sumptuous buffet a voyaging canoe crew has ever had at sea: canned turkey, stuffing from crackers, canned cranberries, mashed potato buds and a chocolate tofu pie using granola bars and candy bars.

These days Kaneakua communes with the ocean daily, the steady sound of rolling waves wafting into her Anahola Bay-view home. She intermittently works on a cook book recounting her meals prepared aboard the Hokule'a, tentatively titled "29 Days at Sea."

"When I'm away from the water I'm always looking for the water. It's very cleansing," she said. "If I've had a bad or hard day at work, the first thing I do is go in the ocean and take a dip. I fish and crab on a daily basis and pick limu mostly for my own use. I only take what I need to eat, not to be greedy at all.

"I grew up simple. I have no desire for tangible things. I just think that's not what life is all about," she said. "Life is about working the land because that's where we come from."

Contact Information:

Pamela V. Brown

(808) 651-3533 cell

(808) 821-1027 fax

pam@writepath.net

"Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art."             --- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Proverbs in Prose

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