July 9, 2003
Learning to Huli
New experiences are what make us grow. We learn more about ourselves when we push our limits, test our boundries, or make complete asses of ourselves. For example, I spent a year on a 2 mile by half mile strip of sand and coral called Johnston Island.
I was there to clean up some stray plutonium.
It wasn't a big deal. A test rocket malfunctioned and was destroyed while on the pad, which spread bits of warhead all over the island, which was a bit inconvenient for the crew performing the tests. At the time, they went around with geiger counters and shovels and buckets, and any time they found a hiot spot, they dug it up, and took it to the launch site. Once the island was cleaned, except for the 5 acre area around the launch site, they put up a fence, and carried on with business. 30 years later, somebosy decided that it would be nice to collect all the bits of warhead and get rid of it.
That's why I was there.
But that's not what I want to tell you about.
While there, I got to do some things I never did before, like learn to huli.
Now, huli sounds a lot like hula, but isn't. Hula means some pretty little thing in a grass skirt and very little else, shaking her hips at you in a mildly to strongly suggestive manner depending on the dance, beckoning to you gracefully as you stuff yourself with roast pig and poi. Huli, on the other hand, means you stand an excellent chance of drowning.
It's important to note these small differences.
One of the new experiences I tried while on JI was learning to paddle a Hawai'ian war canoe, or wa'a. You've seen them before, the canoes with outriggers on one side? You'd think that the outrigger would add stability to the thing. I know we thought that.
You'd be wrong.
We took a lesson from a Samoan, who taught us how to paddle (turn from the hips, not the shoulder), taught us the timing and how to call changeover of strokes ("Hut, hut, HO!"), and how to carry the 400 pound boat to the water.
And so we set off, 6 men and a boat, off to paddle the two miles to the next island over. Things went well for a while, and we bagan to sink into the rhythm of paddling. Now the hull of the wa'a is shaped so that once you achieve a certain speed, the boat planes out, and rides on top of the water, making paddling much easier. While this makes the canoe much faster, it also makes it less stable, which is why the outrigger or ama is there. Sadly, we never achieved that speed; instead of gliding over the water, we plowed through it.
You see, the 6 paddlers paddle on opposite sides of the wa'a alternately. OK, that's confusing. To put it another way, each paddler paddles on an opposite side of the wa'a, until they switch. Hmm. still not clear. OK, try this. Number the people in the wa'a from 1 to 6. Odd numbers paddle on one side, while even numbers paddle on the other side. This provides a good balance for the wa'a, but causes intense fatigue for the paddlers, so you have to be able to switch sides to even up the strain. In order to accomplish this without disaster, everybody has to switch at the same time. The man in the number two position calls out in time to the strokes "Hut, hut, HO!" On "HO!", each paddler lifts his paddle from the water, and shift to the opposite side of the wa'a. By moving in perfect harmony, balance is maintained and no speed is lost.
In theory.
And it worked that way several times. Of course, like I said, we were wallowing through the water instead of gliding, so we were fairly stable. But we were getting better at maintaining our rhythm, and at one point, we did plane out and began to glide through the water. Then it was time to chageover.
"Hut, hut HOLY SH..!"
It was amazing how quickly it happened. One instant we were paddling along, and the next, we were all in the water wondering what happened to our boat. It was floating beside us, upside down.
That's a huli.
We had to right the wa'a by lifting on the ama, then the lightest one of us climbed in and started bailing. Once we got enough water out, we could climb back into the wa'a, which was a bit easier said than done, since we didn't want to rehuli. Evnetually , we figured out that we had to approach from the ama side, and we all got back into the wa'a, only to discover that we;d forgotten one important factor.
Paddles.
Two of us went back into the water to recover the paddles, and then we were on our way back to the safety of the plutonium infested island. We made it back without a repeat huli, and our instructor congratulated us on our recovery. He said we did very well for first timers, and convinced us to enter the races coming up in 6 weeks.
But that's a story for another night.
Remember, a hula is a hot dance; a huli is a cold bath.
Who said blogs aren't educational?
Posted by Rich at July 9, 2003 12:58 AM | TrackBack