Watch “Holopuni Hawaiian Voyage 2025”

In our current issue, author Chris Cook tracks Kauaʻi waterman Nick Beck’s Hawaiian island exploits. The Holopuni, a sailing canoe that Beck refined from traditional Polynesian sea vessels, is a ubiquitous craft in modern canoe clubs. “Today,” Cook writes, “hundreds of Nick’s sturdy, stable, and simple three-man, 30-foot canoes are sailed off beaches around the world.” 

“Beck has very much filled a Tom Blake role here,” surfer/shaper Dave Parmenter says about the Holopuni, “just doing with outrigger sailing canoes what Blake did with surfboards: bridging the ancient to the modern, and initiating decades of refinement that, while honoring and remaining faithful to traditional roots, somehow ends up with a singular, innovative, modern design.”

Now in his eighties, Beck led a 10-day voyage from Maui to Kauaʻi via Kahoʻolawe, Molokai, and Oʻahu last year. Above are Parmenter’s video field notes. The film captures the voyage’s impetus as Beck explained to Parmenter: “An utterly fascinating look at an attempt to understand what the greatest seafaring people in human history, the Polynesians, achieved, and to experience their constellation of islands and atolls as they did, you have to follow their pathways in a traditional outrigger sailing canoe.”