Kayaking in Hawaii has been a dream of mine for several years, though the Road to Hana specifically has been a personal goal of mine and a project I have been working on for several months. You can imagine my stoke once the day finally arrived, and we board the plane to head to Hawaii in hopes to paddle some epic whitewater.
Though the project hasn’t been as simple as I had originally dreamt. Our problems arrived early into the trip, even before we got to the airport, with a simple text message from United letting me know that my flight for the next morning was cancelled. The south east was getting slammed with a winter storm and flights were delayed and cancelled all up and down the east coast. After spending over an hour on the phone with United we had a new flight for the next morning several hours away in a small airport in Alabama. So we spend the night driving, checked in early and got all our bags and boats checked in, though while dropping our boats off at the oversized luggage area we got denied and were simply told that non of the airplanes could possible fit the boats.
We then spend the whole day organizing with several different United employees to organize a flight for us to take our boats to Hawaii. Though with the huge storm up the whole east coast there were three days of cancelled flights added to a total of 1600 cancelled flights, and 6400 delayed. We were stuck, and after exhausting all options, including driving to any possible airport that flies to Hawaii, the only option was to wait out in Atlanta for the next two days calling to check if any possible flights had been updated.
Finally our day arrived and we made it to the Island paradise, with kayaks and all. It was a quick celebration with the whole team, many of which had been waiting for our arrival in Hawaii for a couple days now. After the quick regroup, we started our focus on the project at hand with an early flight to the island of Maui, home to the famous Road to Hana Highway.
The Road to Hana Highway is a extremely narrow and twisted road that is littered with hundreds of streams and creeks. This one road gives access to a plethora of creeks and waterfalls and was our main focus and draw to Maui.
Upon arrival in Maui, everything seemed to be going in our favor. All the boats and gear made it on our inter island flight, we got our rental car set up with racks, the team was in high spirits and ready to go. Though after our first long and wiggled drive down the Road to Hana, we realized that to run the drops we had hoped for we would need some more water.
We always knew that the whole trip was rain dependent, and that it is always a bit of a gamble when dealing with the weather. So while waiting for the rain we decided to spent our next couple days scouting out our river options. We found many epic rivers, and narrowed our focus down to four main options that we would focus our time and energy. After studying every possible weather channel, online weather website, different apps, and doppler radars we came to realize that not only is it hard to rely on weather, but that the weather forecast continually changes on these small islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We could look up the weather and see a forecast for 4 days of rain, then see the same forecast about an hour later with an update of a week of sunshine, then an hour later, scattered showers, and then back to all days sunny. It almost seemed the harder we tried to find accurate weather forecast, the more it would change.
So with an Island filled with sunshine, we continued our search for runnable whitewater, driving around the whole Island, multiple times, and looking at every possible stream and dry river bed. Eventually after still no water and stir cray team we realized that the best thing we could do was to hit the surf.
With some of the biggest swells of the year Dane and I thought it would be a bright idea to take our Jackson Kayak Karmas to the ocean and try to surf some waves, and launch some kick flips off the back sides. Though once out in the ocean, we realized we were a little out of our element. We had some fun, though after a couple beatings, we can to the conclusion that a creek boat wash’t the proper tool for the ocean. We went back to our house, picked up the rest of the crew, rented some surf boards and headed back to the coast.
After two days of surfing our long awaited rain finally came. We got up before the break of dawn and started our search for flowing rivers. We were all excited after several days of scouting and waiting for this moment to come together, though our dream drifted away as we continued to drive of dry creek bed one bridge at a time. We drove past every river with nothing high enough to actually kayak down. Feeling a bit disappointed and almost cursed, we decided to sit up the two cars and each drive back home on the opposite side of the island, to possibly find water that we could have missed, or see if any of the creeks were late to rise.
We drove the back side home, though the whole way I had a gut feeling we needed to head back to Hana. As soon as we were about to turn around and drive the island again, we got the call from the other car reporting that they had found the water. Our team, watched as dry creek beds flash flooded to form raging brown whitewater. Though in our speedy return to Hana we found that these rivers would drop as fast as they had risen. With little to no access for takeouts, flashing flooding and dropping rivers, angry locals and less rain then we had hoped for we finally came to the conclusion that Maui might not be all that I had dreamt of for a kayaking destination.
It was time to head to the Big Island of Hawaii. This area seemed much more promising, and it was, but that story is for the next chapter.
