We didn’t get off on the right foot sailing into Hawaii. It was our own fault, of course. We should have known better. It’s never a good idea to assume that just because procedures were a certain way one year, they will be the same the next. It was an especially bad idea given the world was still in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, “Go away!” shouted through a megaphone, didn’t seem like the most constructive way of handling the situation.

Not to say my husband, Seth, and I was entirely surprised. Having lived in the islands for a number of years now, we knew sailors often don’t get much of an aloha from the authorities in this part of the world. We also knew the reasons for this attitude, having heard the stories of sailors being polluters, creating eyesores both above the surface and sewage below, as well as sailors who contribute nothing to the economy while making use of the state’s infrastructure and paying no taxes. Then there are that handful of entitled cruisers who have behaved rudely to local officials over the years, sealing the deal, as it were. The result is a kind of official obstruction to sailing here, as well as poor services for boaters, both local and transient, which is a shame. Hawaii has one of the greatest seafaring histories in the world, and yet it’s very difficult even for locals to cruise the islands. One of our good friends—a Native Hawaiian, no less—was recently run out of an anchorage on the island of Lana`i with no reason given. The official antagonism toward cruisers is all the more bizarre because the rest of the people who live here don’t seem hostile to sailors at all.

Knowing all this, and despite being Hawaiian residents, Seth and I had decided against sailing directly home when we’d left North America aboard our cold-molded sloop, Celeste, deciding instead to sail to French Polynesia—an area we had both wanted to go back to ever since our circumnavigation a dozen years earlier…

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