Micronesia hosts its first outrigger canoe festival

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An ancient, nearly forgotten form of sailing is revived on the island of Yap.

By Justin Nobel — Special to GlobalPost

Published: November 6, 2009 07:02 ET

YAP, Micronesia — A fleet of handcrafted sailing canoes navigated by chanting men in loincloths raced toward Yap’s palm-lined coast.

Chief Bruno Tharngan stepped ashore, along with Ali Haleyalur, one of the last master navigators in the Pacific. A crowd that included VIPs from Guam and the president of Palau erupted in cheers.

This remote Pacific island’s first-ever outrigger sailing canoe festival, which occurred two weeks ago, had begun, marking the revival of an ancient craft that motor boats nearly eliminated.

“We forgot about canoes when the fiberglass boat was introduced,” said Haleyalur. “But then we found out it leads us into a miserable life. If you don’t have money, you can’t get gas. If your motor stops, you idle and drift away.”

Yap is the most traditional of the four states that compose the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), a nation of more than 600 tropical islands scattered across the western Pacific. Stone discs weighing several thousand pounds served as currency for hundreds of years and still have value and most village women go topless, but cars, cell phones and Budweiser are common too. Modernity brings modern troubles. Last year, gas prices spiked at nearly $6 a gallon on the hilly main island of Yap and climate change threatens the very survival of an arc of isolated atolls known collectively as the Outer Islands of Yap.

“We’re at a crossroads where we look to the West and still hold the traditions of the past,” said Larry Raigetal, Yap’s director of youth and civic services, who served as the emcee for the festival, wearing a traditional white loin cloth called a thu and a garland of ginger flowers. “People are beginning to see that canoe sailing is something very valuable.”

Chief Bruno Tharngnan and a crew of navigators sail one of his newly carved canoes into town to kick off the festival.
(Justin Nobel/GlobalPost)

Outrigger sailing canoes are how early Pacific mariners crisscrossed the world’s greatest ocean three-thousand years before Magellan and Columbus ever set sail. In the 1970s, a group of academics wanted to prove such a crossing was possible but could find no Polynesians who remembered traditional navigation. The group found their man in a master navigator from the Yap Outer Island of Satawal named Mau Paialug, an uncle of Haleyalur. Relying on the stars, magic and an uncanny ability to detect the distance to land from wave movement, Paialug navigated their craft, called the Hokule’a, from Hawaii to Tahiti and back, some 5,400 miles.

After Paialug's epic crossing, canoe sailing took off across the Pacific. The Marshall Islands hold a yearly race sponsored in part by Mobil Oil and Palau Community College offers a canoe sailing course; Palau President Johnson Toribiong’s brother was a student, as President Toribiong pointed out in a speech the first day of the festival.

You can learn to sail a canoe in a classroom, said Haleyalur, as he smoked a Winston under a hibiscus tree beside his humble, tin-roof home a few weeks before the festival, but you can only become a master navigator through years of training and induction in a four day-long ceremony called a pwo.

Students memorize stars on a map of stones and learn chants for opening channels, parting storm clouds and warding off rival navigators. They ingest medicinal plants that aid memory retention, bathe with salt water and drink nothing but coconut milk. A pwo ceremony must be led by a master navigator, and one can only become a master navigator by going through a pwo.