How Pau Hana Came To Be
It was nearing the end of 2018 and I was burnt out as a sales and marketing executive for an organic feed company. I had recently been in a car accident and although I walked away, it had deeply affected me and was THE event that made me realize it was time to change things up. My fiancé Jason and I had been living on his 32 ft sailing monohull for the past year. We had a sweet mooring spot in an area called “The Old Fuel Dock'' at the far end of Waikiki on O’ahu. It’s a gated off area in Hawaii’s largest state marina. Once you pass through the gate, you enter into a Hawaii from long ago that you just don’t see much today. A community of sailboats and owners surrounding a large common area with a grill, picnic tables and hammocks and in the middle is an old run down building with storage for surfboards, SUPs, laundry, private storage lockers, shared power tools and an outdoor shower overlooking a famous south shore surf break. It’s a cruiser’s paradise and very unique. We loved it and hated it all at the same time. As magical of a place as it is, the whole area is under a revocable permit, meaning we could lose our slip at any time. In a place with 7-10 year waiting lists and no available slips, that kind of instability was wearing on both Jason and me. As a newer couple, we had been dreaming about several different ideas and what we might pursue together. I had a passion for local food and cooking and had gone through culinary training a few years back. Jason loved being on a boat every day, working on the water and just has mad skills with anything boat. We had been shopping for catamarans for a little over a year, but hadn’t found the right boat yet. About the same time I got into the car accident, we had two other opportunities pop up. Jason found an interested buyer in our 32 ft monohull and a luxury yacht operation running trips between Sitka and Juneau was looking for someone to purchase the business and run the boat for the summer. Within the month we had sold our 32ft monohull and secured working as a captain and chef on a 100 ft luxury yacht for a summer in SE Alaska. We had no interest in purchasing the vessel, but I wanted more boating experience before purchasing a catamaran and we thought it would be fun to spend a summer in beautiful SE.
Toasting the name change of our new boat Pau Hana at “The Old Fuel Dock”
Jason and Mariah getting married at “The Old Fuel Dock”
In preparing for the transfer of ownership of our boat and spending a summer in Alaska, we moved everything off the boat, gave away most of our belongings and packed the rest into 8 bags totaling about 400 lbs of luggage. We had an emotional goodbye to our O’ahu Ohana and flew to Bellingham, WA where our summer gig began as soon as we arrived. We would have just over a month to prepare Alaskan Song for the 3 week journey to Alaska and train with our staff for our summer running trips between Juneau and Sitka. Working in Alaska was an experiment. We wanted to know how well we would work together as a couple running a vessel. Jason was interested in exploring the idea of working summers in Alaska to fund cruising on our own yacht the rest of the year. I knew I loved sailing and the water and I also was trying to decide what I wanted to do next professionally.
Arriving in Bellingham with all our belongings
We had a great summer in Alaska. Jason and I worked really well together. We dreamed of owning our own catamaran and knew that we would name it Pau Hana. Pau Hana means done working in Hawaiian. We use the phrase to mean happy hour in Hawaii. It’s my favorite time to gather with friends and share food. Alaska was fun for a season, but I had no interest in going there year after year. I was shocked by the cruise industry and the impact it has on the Alaska residents and our natural environment. While Alaskan Song was a beautiful vessel, we also had no interest in purchasing a 1944 wooden boat with a mind boggling amount of maintenance needed to keep it operating smoothly. Back in Bellingham and boatless, we decided to visit Spain and Portugal to walk a Camino and plan our next move. We had been offered another captain/chef gig in the BVI, but I hadn’t been feeling well post car accident and was really missing Hawaii, so we declined and headed back to Honolulu.
It’s a blessing that we declined the BVI gig as COVID set in a few months after we returned to the island. Hawaii literally lives on tourism and it was 100% shut down during COVID. I had started working with a small start up local food distributor helping to transition their business from a wholesale model to a direct to consumer one. Jason had been captaining a large 400 passenger dinner cruise vessel, but their operation shut down very early on during COVID. So, while I was listening to customers freak out everyday about how they were going to stay healthy and still put food on the table, Jason was shopping for boats and dreaming about getting out of the very small apartment we were stuck in. He kept asking me about this boat he had shown me months before. What about this Catana, it’s perfect on the outside. It just has a terrible interior layout. I said no again, I’m not interested in that boat. Also, it was in French Polynesia and getting there to look at the boat seemed about as likely as landing on the moon during the pandemic. A few weeks later he dropped by The Old Fuel Dock to say hi and found out that an end spot that would be big enough for a catamaran was going to open up. He got home that night, let me know the news and asked me about the boat again. I had had a particularly tough day at work and I said, yeah, send them a low ball offer and see what happens. Almost immediately, Jason said, holy shit, they accepted the offer. Now what?!?
It was October 2020 and traveling to French Polynesia was not going to be easy. In normal times, there was a weekly flight on Hawaiian Airlines from Honolulu to Papeete that took about 6 hours. That flight had been canceled and now the only option was to take a red eye to San Francisco with an 8 hour layover, get on a 9 hour flight to Papeete, spend the night in Papeete and fly to Raiatea the following morning. It was going to be A LOT of travel for a quick trip to check out the boat. Because it was so early on with COVID, the testing and travel protocols were still completely in flux. We had to show United Airlines a negative COVID test 72 hours prior to our destination, but no one at United could tell us 72 hours prior to what destination. Our arrival into San Fran, into Papeete or into Raiatea? The testing center said it would take 72 hours to get our test results back. In the end, we met the criteria by about an hour. The guy in front of us at the airport check in wasn’t so lucky. He had tested too early and the ticket agent wouldn’t give him his boarding pass and said he needed to reschedule and provide a new test. We almost missed the San Francisco to Papeete leg of the journey because we hadn’t completed the contract tracing info. We had to provide all the info on where we were staying in French Polynesia with addresses and contact names. Luckily we had a contact name and address for the marina. As soon as we had the info entered, we were provided with a QR code and welcomed onto the flight. Getting through customs in French Polynesia was a breeze. They provided us with a COVID test upon arrival and asked that we test 5 days after entering the country, send in the mail and that was it. We were only going to be there for 3 days and then returning to the states as I needed to get back to work. We walked up the hill to the hotel next door to the airport to spend the night before heading back to the airport the following morning to fly to the neighboring island Raiatea.
The next morning was beautiful and we decided to walk around to find coffee and breakfast. We stopped by an ATM to get some Pacific Francs. My card was denied. Jason tried his card and he was also denied. In the same moment we realized that we had left the country without contacting our bank. I had $4 in my wallet and Jason had $60 in his. Holy crap, did we really just leave the country with $64 between the 2 of us?!? Well, we just needed food for a couple of days and could go to the currency exchange and use what we had. We walked to the airport and then realized it was Sunday and nothing is open on Sundays in Polynesia. Well, hopefully a credit card would work at the grocery store. It did.
We arrived at the marina Sunday afternoon and got our first look at Albinoni, a 2009 41ft Ocean Class Catana Catamaran. I loved the boat from the moment I walked on to the back cockpit. I knew we were going to buy the boat. By now, we had been on several dozen boats in person and had looked at thousands of boats online. I didn’t like the feel of so many of the boats. They were crowded, awkward designs, dirty, smelled musty and moldy. Upon first impression, this boat was clean, had good lines and smelled good. We walked to the market to pick up groceries for the next couple of days and headed back to the boat to start our sea trial. A sea trial is usually a quick sail to verify that a boat meets the standard of what was advertised. Jason had negotiated a deal with the charter company that we could take the boat out for a 48 hour charter and if we went through with the purchase, it would just be a part of the deal. If we decided to back out, we would pay for the 2 day charter. We were both exhausted after traveling more than 24 hours and just wanted to find a good spot to anchor for the night. We dropped anchor, suited up and jumped in. OMG, the water felt amazing and the colors! I have never seen such brilliant colors. So many fish and bright colored corals. It took my breath away. I snorkeled around and Jason started going over every square inch of the vessel below the water line. He was really pleased with how clean the hulls looked. We were getting more and more excited about this boat. Now we needed to see how well Albinoni sailed. That would be tomorrow’s adventure.
The rest of the trip went really well. This boat was everything we had hoped for and we were going forward with the purchase. Jason was making note of everything that needed to be addressed before setting out to sea for the sail back to Hawaii. He was going to need A LOT of supplies and knew that much of it wouldn’t be available on the island. Christophe Citeau, our local surveyor, came down to meet us in person. Unfortunately, we would not be there during the survey, but it was good to meet him in person as this man was going to be an essential part of our boat buying process. We settled up with Dofre, the general manager at Dream Yacht Charters Raiatea, and walked back down the road to the airport to fly home.
Back home, the following week the survey was completed. We found out that several features of the boat in the listing weren’t correct - thank you Christophe. Jason also found out that Albinoni’s sistership was also available for purchase and was a year newer. Because we found the boat on YachtWorld, we were assigned a boat broker named Gerry in France. Gerry knew nothing about Albinoni and didn’t seem to know much about catamarans in general. We figured an international boat purchase was going to be complicated, but we really had no idea how complicated things were about to get. We contacted Gerry to counter the offer with the new pieces of info from the survey. He came back with a hard no. Either take the boat at what we had offered or no deal. We said ok, we would keep our offer in place, but we wanted a chance to look at Tchaikovsky, the sister ship before we finalized the sale. About this time, we heard from our Fuel Dock neighbor Josh Munoz who was in French Polynesia, that France was announcing a complete shut down due to rising COVID numbers and was likely going to shut down their other territories as well. I spun into a complete panic. We needed to get Jason back to French Polynesia stat or who knew when he would be able to get back into the country. We had already wired our 10% down payment to France and didn’t want those funds to get held up or lost or who knows what. We found a reasonable ticket to Raiatea and Jason headed down the street for another $250 COVID test. We got news later that day that Tchaikovsky was out on a 3 week charter and wouldn’t be available for a survey until then. Jason was also waiting for more parts to come in and bumped his ticket back a couple of weeks. 72 hours before his flights, he got yet another COVID test, the price had dropped to $225.
I took Jason and several large plastic bins to the airport and we had an emotional goodbye. It was November 2020 and I had no idea how long Jason was going to be gone. We were relieved that the country was still open and flights were still running. He had a full week before Tchaikovsky was due back into port and there wasn’t much happening in Raiatea. Jason rented a moped and toured around a bit. He was also shopping for a dingy and nothing was coming up. The day Tchasikovsky returned, Jason met Christophe at the marina for the out of water survey. As soon as they pulled the boat out of the water, Jason could see the hull was covered in huge blisters and some of them were even soft spots. He turned to Christophe and said, I’m not interested in having this boat surveyed. I'm sorry to waste your time and gave him $100. Christophe said, go for Albinoni, it’s a solid vessel. So Jason called me that night and we talked over our options. We were going to finalize the deal on Albinoni. On November 23rd, I went to the bank to start the wire transfer. Buying a boat internationally is a high risk and somewhat sketchy adventure. Knowing that Jason was in the country and on the boat we were buying, made me feel a little better now that I was about to wire a couple hundred thousand dollars to a guy named Gerry in France. We had some hiccups along the way, but got the purchase finalized within the week.
Now that we owned the vessel, Jason was able to start digging into a very long list of projects to get the boat ready for a 15 day ocean crossing. About this time, a long time friend of Jason’s named Brandon reached out to say hello. He had seen the You Tube videos Jason had been posting while sitting at home in Seattle with nothing much going on due to the pandemic. He asked Jason if he could use some help getting the boat ready to sail back to Hawaii. Jason was thrilled to have the company and the much needed help in addition to his new local resources. Christophe had helped him find a very old reconstructed Caribe dingy and Dofre offered any supplies he had readily available and pointed him to local contacts for everything else. Brandon wasn’t sure that he wanted to do the ocean crossing, but Jason needed a crew. Ideally, he and 2 other people would sail back to Hawaii. Our friend KK had also expressed interest in the journey. She had never done an ocean crossing, but was in the market for buying her own boat and wanted the experience. I was trying to secure insurance on the home front for our new vessel and was running into all sorts of road blocks. Even though Jason had an extremely impressive sailing resume and is a professional boat captain, most insurance companies were quoting exorbitant rates. No one, and I mean NO ONE would offer us blue water insurance for the crossing. After weeks of quoting with as many insurance companies as I could find around the world, I found a reasonable policy that would give us coverage as soon as the boat arrived into Hawaiian waters.
Jason had been watching the weather and it looked like they had a narrow window of good weather. KK booked her flight to FP. On December 16th, after rounds and rounds of communication with the French Polynesian government, Albinoni set sail bound for Kona, Hawaii. The government office in Raiatea wasn’t set up to deal with departing vessels into international waters. Boats don’t depart the country from Raiatea, they go to Papeete, the capital. Jason had been trying to find a weather window for weeks to sail to Papeete and it just wasn’t feasible. They needed to leave from Raiatea and he finally convinced the French Polynesian government to let them go. About an hour after they had set sail, Jason received a phone call from FP customs. They had forgotten to get a copy of KK’s passport and they wanted the boat to turn around and come back. Jason said, it’s not happening. That ship has sailed. And so they headed north. They had an inreach device on board meaning I was in constant communication with them via text and I could see on a map exactly where they were. For the next 15 days, I checked the weather every couple of hours and based on their location gave Jason an update. Just as the NYE fireworks were finishing up on Jan 1, 2021 I got a phone call, it was Jason as they were very close to the Big Island. They had dropped the main sail several hours earlier as there was a large storm system blowing over the Big Island and they had been sailing in gale force winds. The seas had been big, but all was good. I had booked them a slip in the state harbor in Kona. They would be there in a few hours. I shed some tears of relief. After a long and stressful 2 1/2 months, my honey and our new boat were in range and almost home. A few months later we had a group of friends join us at The Old Fuel Dock for a hawaii blessing of our vessel and to officially change the name to Pau Hana.
Dennis performing a boat blessing for the name change of Albinoni to Pau Hana
