Kela a me Keia

When Norma Correa was seven years old, her grandmother bought a beachfront lot in Kuliouou. “In the late 1920s, Joe Paiko decided to lease the lots on Paiko Drive,” she recalled. “Grandma told him she wanted her lot in fee, and he agreed. Later, she bought another lot next to the first one. At that time she lived in Puunui [in Honolulu], so she built a one room house on Paiko Drive and used it as a beach house. To reach the house, you drove on a coral road from Kaimuki.”

Mrs. Correa’s family spent a lot of time at their beach house, and she remembered the abundance of fish on the reef flats. “We used to call the point by the Paiko house ‘Sandy Beach’. It was all white sand, and grandpa would take us up there to swim. He’d talk stories with Mr. Paiko, and we’d catch crabs and pick pipipi from the rocks at the point. There were kumu holes all over the reef, and lots of manini. Mullet were all over in the shallow water. There were lot of other kids, too, and everyone was always in the ocean. The whole neighborhood would congregate, and everyone would have dinner at the homes on the beach.”

Limu was one of the favorite seafoods of the Paiko Drive residents, and Mrs. Correa recalled the different varieties that grew on the reefs. “There was limu kohu on the outside reef, and limu wawaeiole and limu manauea on the shallow reef flats inside. All the women, including the young girls like me, went out to pick it. Then everyone cleaned and washed it. We would chop it, mix it with chili pepper water and alaea salt, and bottle it. Then everyone took a bottle home.”

Mrs. Correa made the Paiko Drive house her home when she and her husband, Lawrence Correa, were married.  That’s when she noticed that things in the ocean had started to change from her younger days. “When I was 15, the family rented the house, but I came back in 1947 when Larry and I got married. We saw that the ’46 wave [the tsunami of April 1, 1946] had filled in some of the fishing holes, but there were still lots of fish. The big change, though, came from Kaiser’s dredging.”

In the late 1950s, Henry J. Kaiser dredged the former Kuapa Fishpond and converted it into Hawaii Kai Marina. As part of the same development he dredged the entrance channel to the marina and the access channel to Hawaii Kai boat ramp in Maunalua Bay Beach Park. During this massive dredging project, ocean currents and the prevailing tradewinds carried huge plumes of silt over the reef flats fronting Hawaii Kai and Kuliouou. “Kaiser’s dredging filled in all the reefs,” Mrs Correa said. “Foreign limu came and piled up in huge piles on the beach. It was really smelly.”  

During the early 1900s, the south shore of Oahu from Koko Head to Kalaeloa was one of the most productive areas on the island for food from the sea. One of the keys to the productivity was the large number of streams that flowed into the ocean from all of the south shore valleys. Native seaweeds like limu lipoa, limu eleele, and limu manauea, better known today as ogo, thrive on reef flats where fresh and salt water mix. There they established the foundation of the marine food chain. When inland and shoreline development in the 1900s altered stream flows and destroyed coral reefs, many of Oahu’s marine resources disappeared. Stories like Mrs. Correa’s are still told from one end of the south shore to the other.  

Glenn Magbanua and his sister Angelina “Angie” Rodgers grew up in Kalihi Kai, where they spent a lot of time at their grandparents’ house on Mokauea Island in Keehi Lagoon. “Our grandfather, Filameno Patacsil, moved to Mokauea in the early 1930s.He was one of the original squatters on the island,” they said. “He was a gill net fisherman and mostly he fished for mullet. They were the easiest to get off the net, and they were good eating. He gill netted on the reef fronting Fort Kamehameha and along the edge of the Pearl Harbor entrance channel. Sometimes poachers stole his nets and his fish. Sometimes hammerheads and black tip sharks came after the mullet and tore up the nets. We had long racks on Mokauea where we dried the nets and patched them.”

They recalled that their grandfather had a lot of superstitions. “We weren’t allowed to jump over the nets or the fish would jump out”, they said. “If we did jump over them, then he made us jump back. He didn’t allow any of us to whistle at night because the wind might come up and make the ocean too rough to fish.”

Besides mullet, Filameno Patacsil caught other fish and harvested ogo that he sold to the markets in Chinatown. “He went for tako at Fort Kamehameha and dived for manini and other reef fish. He trapped for lobster in deeper water between Keehi Lagoon and Pearl Harbor and caught white crabs in the same area.”

The shallow reef between Keehi Lagoon and Pearl Harbor was extremely productive for ogo, and when Glenn was older, he was one of his grandfather’s divers. “That reef,” he said, “had long ogo that grew about six feet down, so we had to dive for it. We called it “golden” ogo. My grandfather would always tell us to pick above the root. If we picked with the root, he would scold us and throw it back in. The grounds were so productive and widespread that you could go everyday and pick five bags, and when you picked above the root, it grew back quick and full. We used to go with a flat bottom boat and poll across the reef. When we picked up limu, we always looked for tako, and speared some fish.”

“Everytime we went,” Glenn continued, “we would try to get four or five bags of long ogo. The bags were burlap bags, and they weighed about 60 pounds when they were full. My grandfather got about $60 a bag, about a dollar a pound, so he made good money. As soon as the bags were full, we’d take them straight to Oahu Market in Chinatown. We’d drive the boat right into Nuuanu Stream and tie up at the delivery pier. One person would stay with the boat, and the rest of us took the ogo to the market. Then we’d go shopping.”

The end of the family’s commercial fishing and ogo harvesting came in the 1970s when the Reef Runway was built on the reef off Honolulu International Airport. The massive reclamation project buried most of the reef that had supported them since the 1930s, and what remained to the west of the runway was placed off limits to civilians.

Hawaii’s marine ecosystems are a vital part of our island heritage. The stories from the Correa and Patacsil families show the dramatic impacts of urbanization on these ecosystems from the loss of fresh water flowing into the ocean, the death of native limu, the proliferation of aggressive alien limu, and the loss of certain fish species and other marine life. These marine ecosystems are complex and fragile and deserve the restoration efforts that community-based groups are providing today to keep them healthy and pollution-free.