Hanalei is a hippy surf town on the north shore of the garden isle of Kauai, it’s the northern most and the oldest of the 8 major Hawaiian islands and it is the most perfect place on earth.
Over two thirds, is covered by mountains and dense tropical rainforest, most of the island is only accessible by air or sea. It is home to the wettest place on the planet, and part of one of the most isolated inhabited island chains in the world.
I really want to live there.
Hanalei Bay is a perfect crescent of golden sand. The water is still, and calm as a lake in the summer. In the winter, Pacific swells roll in, breaking on the sand bars far out to the east side of the bay.
As we sit at the end of the pier, built over 100 years ago, our feet swinging over the crystal clear water, watching the sun set, I slowly reach into my backpack, pull out a Cuban hand reel, cut up some squid, bait my hook and throw in a line….
It’s really hard to get Alice to fish. As we sat in the dark using the light of our phones, drinking Kona beer and talking endlessly about how much we fucking love this place, we hear the turn of heavy wheels and see a shaky light coming straight towards us.
As the cart comes to a stop and as the man who has been pulling it comes into the light, we kind of already know that we have made our first Hawaiian friend. We ask him if he minds us fishing here and he replies by asking us what we have caught. When we tell him that unfortunately we have yet to catch anything at all over 7 days and across two Hawaiian islands, he brings us a lantern. He ties it to the corner post of the pier and tells us that the light will attract lots of fish for us to catch. He chums the water for us every now and again and the three of us set ourselves to catching fish and chatting about presidents and places in paradise.
Others join us after a while, locals and other tourists also, and we quietly fish catching snapper and mackerel as beautiful green turtles swim beneath us.
I feel a strong pull, strike hard and shout ‘Fish on!’. This time it’s different, I reel in my line and a really heavy weight is securely hooked and pulling against me.
We look down into the water, schools of fish circling the lantern light and as my catch breaks the surface and we pull it up, what lands on the concrete of the pier at our feet is the biggest fucking crab we have ever seen in our lives. Alice is screaming for me not to hurt the crab, I’m screaming for our Chinese fisherman friend to help me and the two Americans now with him are screaming for someone to Snapchat!!
Supper!
He holds the crab by it’s back legs, I take out a set of long nose pliers, he is hooked by the mouth, everyone is shouting at me to stay away from his huge, snapping claws. I have the hook by the pliers and I look up. I ask a question….’Would he be able to chop my fingers off with those claws’, the reply I get are three solid ‘Yes!!’s and a huge amount of laughter. I unhook him quickly and really bloody carefully and my Chinese friend asks me if I want to hold him. Of course I want to fucking hold him! Alice takes some pictures and I give him to our new friend for supper (We did not have a pot even half big enough to boil him in and Alice thought that he was far too beautiful to cook), he is very happy, our crab would have been worth quite a few dollars I should think, and gives us two snapper for our own in return. He tells us we are welcome to use anything in his cart that we need whilst his companions talk about my crab for the next two hours detailing my epic catch, the Snapchat story they made out of it, and how much their grandma would have loved to have been here. Apparently she would be eating crab sushi right now, straight out of the cool box, and this was the exact moment I fell forever in love, with Hanalei Bay.
Whilst we fished we saw the US government, or just Trump I guess, launch a lone missile from the west coast of the island, preparing for war with North Korea. The trail of fire blazed through the distant tropical clouds and as Alice pointed it out to us, the entire Pacific horizon became engulfed in a strangely beautiful yet eerie orange glow.
We left that night having made new friends, amazing memories, smelling strongly of dead fish and absolutely covered in squid ink.
I really fucking want to live here……