Why are we still in Hawaii? We leave in the morning.

Hanalei Bay, Kuaui, HI, 25-JUN-2020 — If you’re asking why are we still in a Hawaii, it is the proper question.

We were to have left Tuesday, but will leave tomorrow instead.

I’ve wriiten that in a cruising boat, you, the skipper/owner/crew are the weak point: the boat will protect you. I am the weak link. I have been injured and then suffered from Vertigo. We waited while I healed.

I dislocated the #1 rib from its vertebrae a few weeks ago, apparently. According to the very good chiropractor I used, it takes about seven days for the pain to really build, which it did. Danny Angulo, described in amazing detail each of the previous seven days of my vertebral and discomfort life, repairing the damage in a few minutes by snapping the rib back in place, followed by aligning a few things that set up the injury.

Sunday night, I jerked myself out of a bad dream and apparently knocked some of the small rocks in my inner ear from their home. None of the accepted remedies worked. A very nice Physician’s Assistant, originally from Peachtree City, GA, who we visited in Princeville, told me they never do. It will just repair itself, which it has. The PA also gave me some antihistamine to reduce the fluid in the inner ear, which should get the crystals back in place quicker. While we were speaking she asked whether we’d like larger prescriptions so we’d have them at sea. Nice woman.

Nobody goes there any more. It’s too crowded.

Yogi Bera

Like every tourist place I have ever been, Hanalei Bay is perfect with no tourists. The bay, when we arrived, had twelve boats. Four, including us, were not local. Friday was the first day restaurants could open and the town of Hanalei was empty except for attractive, expensively, simply, well-dressed locals. A decent-sized, beach-front house here is $12MM. Three million will get something small.

The town is a few restaurants and bars, take out and bikini, surf, dive, and trinket shops. In the bay are many empty mooring balls that should have charter boats attached. The visiting boats are all headed to various locations in Alaska and the PNW.

James, from Zingaro, showed up Monday in Ko Olina to skipper Mark McDade’s Te Vega.

Like most people with big dreams, James has been trying to put a group of people to buy the 60 ft trimaran, which looks like it came out of Buckaroo Bonzai’s Adventures Across the Eighth Dimension. It is a rich person’s toy. New, it would probably cost around $5MM to build. It still needs a new mast. A proper, carbon-fiber mast would cost around $250K.

The numbers are hard to make work. Currently, it sleeps six. Two crew, getting paying customers down to four people, though it could be easily reconfigured for six people by sticking the crew in the forepeak. It needs sails, but rumors are the boat can be purchased for about $250K. Another $350 to get it ready for charter, and we’re looking at $600K startup.

If you can get $10K/week, then you can probably make this work. It would take finding a very special clientele.

The charters we see in AK are $100K per week, so the money is there, but those boats are 100 ft, sleep twelve and provide high-end amenities. I suspect at speed this is a teeth-jarring experience. It is said that this tri was used to take high-end surfers to sites in the middle of the Pacific where there are no islands, just shallows.

Our sail up from Ko Olina was fast. We sailed to Makua and anchored for a few hours. Just before dark, we weighed anchored and sailed at three knots for about 40 minutes before we got clear air from around the point. Then we sailed between 6 and eight knots the rest of the way, averaging 6.2 kn for the trip from Makua to Hanalei Bay. Total time, from Makua to anchor, about 14 hours.

We didn’t reef that night, against the common wisdom. The wind was supposed to be steady and was. We used the wind vane for part of the trip, but though the wind speed was steady, the heading was not. It was easier to set the autohelm and adjust sail as necessary. The night passed easily with Jennifer and I taking turns to sleep. Not a single boat on AIS was visible the entire trip.

Coming into the bay we see boats we know and are greeted by boats we don’t.

Mid-day, a man rows over in his Walker Bay plastic dinghy. He’s seventy, been in HI since he was 19, and is a wealth of local advice. We speak for a while and before he rows off, Jennifer asks his name: Robby Buck.

We each yell out his name. Robby looks up and says, Yep, the famous Robby Buck.

We know Robby. We spoke to him when we were deciding where on Oahu to anchor. He told us about Ko Olina, about Alo Wai and the yacht club.

The next day, Robby walked into town with us. He’s living on $500/month and, though he never said anything, wanted us to buy him a meal, which had been my intention since Robby started walking with us.

Robby told us about meeting Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, back when they were a couple, partying with the famous names of the day.

We settled on a taco place called Federico’s, where we met friends from Ko Olina, Fran and Jeff on Solpare.

The days progressed while I healed. I continued to work on the boat’s to do list, knocking off items I thought I’d never get to.

James finished prepping Te Vega and sailed her up here overnight, arriving this morning giving updates to his seventy-thousand followers along the way.

We rowed over, sat with James, Mark, and Mark’s daughter’s boyfriend, whose name escapes me now (I apologize).

Later we rowed in, intending to go to dinner, but we just couldn’t justify the $130 it would cost to go somewhere posh. Instead, we went to L&L Barbecue, a Hawaiian chain, and learned we should just order a single meal. We sat at a picnic table eating Hawaiian versions of Japanese food with root beer.

Life can be good.

We’ll rig the pudgy as a life raft, place it upside down on the deck and sail off tomorrow morning. Landfall somewhere in the Aleutians.

Love from John and Jennifer