Donations Came From Around the State

KAHULUI, Maui - A trucker, a shipping company, a canoe builder, and the DLNR are helping Hui O Wa‘a Kaulua replace a voyaging canoe that burned in the Lahaina wildfires.

The Mo‘olele was birthed 50 years ago and was in a park along the ocean, at 525 Front Street, when it burned. Timothy ‘Timi’ Gilliom is a captain and the builder of the Mo‘okiha O Pi‘ilani and the new canoe that’s replacing the Mo‘olele, the N?leilehua. 

He’d been working in Lahaina on August 8, 2023, and had gone to the boat hale where the Mo‘olele was being restored. As he was evacuating the burning town he looked back and recalls, “When I looked at Mo‘olele, I knew I’d never see her again. And she was already finished, ready to go.” 

Gilliom said it was a devastating blow. Building Polynesian canoes is a laborious, painstaking and expensive process. It’s rich in Hawaiian tradition, which explains the k?kua his group received through a series of connections and donations. 

Tons of koa, land and ocean shipping and fiberglass hulls – all donated – has Gilliom and his crew of three working to try and have N?leilehua finished this year. 

“Mo‘olele was 42 feet. This (N?leilehua) is 44 feet, a little longer, same crab claw sail, same parts, and everything. And we moved from Lahaina (to Kahului) which is where our nonprofit was. It’s called Hui O Wa‘a Kaulua, the group of the double hull canoes,” Gilliom explained. 

He said they didn’t know if they would be able to use koa for the new canoe, because it was hard to get. “Then we got ahold of David Tsuchiya (Kaua‘i Branch District Superintendent for the DLNR Division of State Parks-DSP) and he ended up sending us a container load. So, we got a lot of koa now. It was 22,000 pounds,” Gilliom commented. 

Some of the koa was salvaged from tree fall from lessees, but most of it was collected in Koke‘e State Park when it falls across roadways and other common areas of the park. It is stored for potential future public auction, which has happened in the past. DSP Administrator Curt Cottlrell said, “There was no question that State Parks preferred to donate this koa for N?leilehua.”  

From Koke‘e, trucker Timmy Lopez, drove the long shipping container to the harbor, where Pasha-Hawai‘i loaded it onto a container ship for the voyage to Maui. 

“The trucking was free…the shipping was at the discounted employee rate. The koa that we have is heavy koa. So, it’s older koa,” Gilliom said. “It was overwhelming,” he added. 

“My actual genealogy is from Pi‘ilani, from that area where Mo‘olele lived before,” remarked Makaio Lorenzo as he sawed and cut fiberglass hatch covers. He describes N?leilehua as, “Kind of riding the line, right in the middle. So, functions as traditional, looks very traditional, but we have more modernized stuff, like hatch covers for our storage. I’m sure back then our k?puna had something like storage containers, but it’s just the cleaner, more modernized way of doing it.”

But, it’s the sense of tradition and ancestry that has Lorenzo all in, “100%” he says. “I get to be what Timi was to Mo‘olele, to this canoe now. And it doesn’t stop with Timi and Mo‘olele. It goes further with his teachers, Uncle Leon, and it’s continuing that genealogy through our canoes.”

Lorenzo looks forward to sailing on the N?leilehua. One day he’d like to be its captain. “I dream about it every single night and I just keep thinking about her. I have no idea what’s going to happen. I don’t know if I’m going to cry. I don’t know if I’m going to just stand there and be like, good job. No idea,” Lorenzo concluded.