A lot has happened since our last update from the Hōkūleʻa. The crew made it safely to Tahiti where it met up with the Hikianalia - ending the worldwide voyage that started in 2014.

Now both canoes are sailing through French Polynesia before heading back home. We caught up with Nāʻālehu Anthony on board the Hikianalia.

Things are going pretty well, the conditions are better than they were 12 hours ago. We’re just kind of working our way back to Papeʻete, Tahiti from a couple of days in Raiatea at Taputapuatea Heiau.

For the crew, everyone’s actually in really high spirits. The conditions have been really good. Certainly, this is now like a meeting of old friends in that many of these individuals who are on board the canoe right now have sailed multiple, multiple miles across different seas. And so it’s almost like a reunion now when we get together, which is really nice. And also, the food and just the general environment that we’ve been in has a lot of this really partaken in some really great times and some great experiences.

And so what’s the plan now?

We’re in the last stage of getting back to Papeʻete and that’s pretty much it in terms of sailing around. There’s another couple of weeks before the leg leaves, the crew leaves from Tahiti to Hawaii. We may hit the Tau te tau [sic], which is one of the places that has hosted the canoes and crews over the last 40 years. But that’s still on the island of Tahiti. But we’re not sailing anywhere else, we’re going to get the canoes back to Papeʻete and just get them and re-stage them to be ready to go in a couple of weeks up to Hawaii.

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