Kela a me Keia

Talk to anybody in Hawaii who fishes, whether they use a net, hook, or spear, and every one of them can tell you a shark story.

If they lay net, sharks have ripped huge holes in their nets to get at fish that were caught. If they use spears, sharks have pulled fish off their stringers or even come straight for a fish that was still on their spear. If they cast from shore, sharks have munched their ulua; if they troll, sharks have left them only the head of a 200-pound ahi; or if they hand-line, sharks have grabbed every opakapaka on their hooks before the fish ever reached the boat. We’ve all been there and had it happen to us, and if not, we’ve heard the war stories from friends who lost their fish. In all these stories sharks have had the upper hand on us, but 150 years ago a popular activity took place on Oahu where Hawaiians were on top of the sharks and used them in a unique sport. It was called shark racing.

In 1933, Star Bulletin reporter Urban Allen interviewed Moses Punohu, a 72-year-old Kalihi Kai resident who lived on Waiakamilo Road. Punohu, who would have been born about 1861, had been a shark jockey and described the sport in detail. According to Allen, “(Punohu) recalled with a great deal of pleasure the days of his youth, when he, with other boys of the Kalihi district, used to compete with rival groups from Moanalua and Palama in shark races.” Prior to the races, the boys caught hammerhead sharks and held them captive in pools on the shoreline. On Kamehameha Day (June 11) or some other festive occasion, they moved the hammerheads to another pond where the water was about waist deep. Chieftans, friends, and families would line the shore, while four or five riders mounted their sharks and raced across the pool.

Before a shark could be ridden, the riders made a punuku, a rope halter, for each shark, placing a loop of rope over each of the protruding portions of the shark’s head. The punuku allowed the jockey to control his mount. Another piece of rope placed under the shark’s neck joined the reins coming from the halter. Then the rider sat astride the shark, pressed both knees against its sides and pulled back hard on the reins. For protection again the shark’s rough skin, the jockey bandaged his legs.

At the start of the race, the rider relaxed the pressure of his knees just enough to let the shark lash its tail to move. At the same time the jockey pushed off the bottom with his feet and bounced forward. Punohu said, “It was just like a sack race.” According to Allen, “Punohu made it clear that the sharks were not ridden in the sense that the shark carried the entire weight of the rider’s body”, although in deep water the sharks were strong enough to dive and take the riders with them. Punohu said that shark racing then was to the boys of his day what football and baseball are to the kids today. Losing teams would treat the winners to a luau if it was a big event, otherwise, there were smaller prizes for the winners.

Shark racing continued until the turn of the century and then faded into obscurity, but taking a look back at this unusual sport tells us a couple of interesting things. For one, it shows the popularity of horseback riding that swept the Hawaiian Islands during the 1800s and the creativity of a group of Hawaiians in applying the techniques of riding a horse to riding a shark. For another, it shows that Hawaiians weren’t worried about physical contact with sharks. And finally, it tells us that hammerheads were plentiful and easy to catch in the Honolulu Harbor and Keehi Lagoon areas, which is not the case today. Hammerheads are still found in our bays and harbors, especially after females give birth and juveniles are near shore, but not in the numbers that were common 150 years ago.

One of the main reasons for the decline in the hammerhead shark population and many other nearshore species has been the loss of marine habitat. Honolulu Harbor and Keehi Lagoon were dredged extensively and the tidal lands surrounding them heavily land-filled, destroying fishponds and some of the most productive fishing grounds on Oahu. The biggest project in Keehi Lagoon was the construction of three seaplane runways. With a $5 million appropriation from Congress, the Army Corps of Engineers started dredging them in October 1941. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Corps intensified its efforts with as many as nine dredges working at once, but the project was so massive, it was not completed until September 1944. During that three year period, the dredges removed more than 10 million cubic yards of coral reef from Keehi Lagoon, pumping it onshore between Hickam Field and John Rodgers Airport on Lagoon Drive, into Fort Shafter Flats, into Mapunapuna, and into other shoreline areas nearby.

George Clark, who graduated from the University of Hawaii in 1938 as a civil engineer, was part of the seaplane runway project. During an interview in 1984, he related the following:

“In 1941, I was working for Standard Dredging. We were land-filling in the Mapunapuna and airport areas, dredging the inner reefs in Keehi Lagoon and pumping the fill material onshore. The Damon family controlled the fishing rights in the lagoon- no one could fish there without permission- so those were some of the most productive reefs I’ve ever seen. All kinds of crabs- especially white crabs- and slipper lobsters would come up with the fill material, and there were mullet by the thousands. Lots of hammerheads, too; we’d see them chasing the mullet into the shallow water. At the outer edge of the reef, fish like ulua, papio, and nenue swarmed around Mokauea Island.

“Our dredge, the Jefferson, worked like a brace and bit. The bit rotated and cut the coral. A big pump behind it pumped the fill material onshore through a steel pipeline supported by pontoons, and the fill material went into a levee where the water was allowed to drain through spillways back into the ocean. After the war broke out on December 7, the Army Corps of Engineers contracted Standard Dredging to use the Jefferson to dredge the seaplane runways in the lagoon that are still there now.”

Today, the shoreline from Pearl Harbor to Diamond Head is almost entirely artificial, forever altered by the dredging of the seaplane runways, by reclamation projects such as the Reef Runway, Sand Island, and Magic Island, and the dredging of deep-draft and small boat harbors and the channels through the reefs that support them. In spite of it all, the hammerheads have survived and still populate our bays and harbors, but in far fewer numbers than when they served as mounts for Hawaiian shark races. So the next time one of them steals your fish, remember they’re just trying to make a living, too, in a marine environment that’s not the same as it was before.

“During the early 1930s, Filameno Patacsil moved to Mokauea Island, where he built his home and made his living as a fisherman, selling mullet and limu to the markets in Chinatown. One of his favorite fishing grounds was the reef off Fort Kamehameha, and one morning he found an 800 pound tiger shark tangled in his moemoe nets. Patacsil freed the shark, tied it up, and towed it back to Mokauea Island, where this picture was taken with him sitting on the shark’s back.”