I found her on a Thursday, at Keʻehi Boat Harbor, on the western edge of Honolulu near the airport — a part of town where the boats are older, the slips are cheaper, and nobody is trying to impress anyone. She was sitting in her berth with the settled resignation of something that had been waiting a very long time and had stopped expecting rescue.
A Pacific Seacraft 25.
The boat was designed by Henry Mohrschladt and first built in 1976 — the same year the original Rocky won the Oscar for Best Picture, which tells you something about the era. Only 157 of them were ever made. The hull was hand-laid fiberglass, modeled after the double-ended workboats of the 19th century, the kind of vessels that hauled cargo and fishermen across the North Atlantic before anyone thought to make boats comfortable. Reviewers had described it as a cross between a fishing vessel and a ship's lifeboat. One sailing magazine called it a "sea snail." It displaced nearly three tons, carried almost 1,800 pounds of lead ballast in its keel, and had a hull speed somewhere in the neighborhood of six knots — which is to say it would never win a race, but it was also unlikely to be beaten by the ocean. These boats had crossed oceans. Grandmothers had singlehanded them to New Zealand. They had survived things that ended larger, newer, more expensive vessels.
The Pacific Seacraft 25 was the nautical equivalent of a very old, very stubborn mule: not beautiful, not fast, but deeply, almost aggressively, alive.
This one was wearing several years of neglect as a full-body accessory. The hull below the waterline was armored in oysters — not the little decorative ones, but the serious kind, the ones you'd see on a bed of crushed ice at a seafood market with a premium price tag. The topsides were faded. The lines were sun-bleached and stiff. And there, on the stern, in letters that had once been painted with care and were now communicating mostly through inference:
Tiny Bubbles.
She was not for sale.
I had developed the conviction, over several days of looking at boats that were for sale and finding them inadequate, that this was a negotiable condition. I got the owner's contact information from the marina office and called him that afternoon from a pay phone.
"I saw your Pacific Seacraft at Keʻehi," I said. "I was wondering if you might consider selling."
A pause. "How much?" he said — which was, I noted, an answer rather than an answer.
I had not prepared a number. The number arrived from somewhere unexamined. "Eight thousand dollars," I said.
This was almost certainly more than the boat was worth in her present state. I know this now. I did not know it then. The owner said he would meet me at the marina the following morning.
We met on the dock. He was a quiet man — the kind who has arrived at some peace with his choices and isn't interested in revisiting them. He signed the paperwork efficiently, accepted the cashier's check, and paused for one moment before he left, looking back at the boat.
"What are you going to do with her?" he asked.
"Sail her to Maui," I said. "Then the South Pacific."
He nodded slowly, with the expression of a man hearing an echo of something. "I always told myself I'd take her. Just sail away when things got bad at home." He looked at the boat a moment longer. "Never did, though."
He left. I stood on the dock with the papers in my hand and looked out boat.
She was ours. We were going.
An Inventory of Problems
The interior smelled of diesel and something else — something papery and organic and faintly alive in a way that diesel alone doesn't account for. Every horizontal surface was dusted with small translucent wings. Thousands of them. The shed wings of termites — a species that, when it's ready to leave the nest and start a new colony, simply drops its wings and gets on with it, which in this case appeared to mean they had gotten on with it inside the boat.
I pressed my hand against one of the wooden bulkheads, not as a test — just leaning, looking around. My thumb cracked the surface and small grains fell out.
Termites. Not former termites. Active, current, enthusiastic termites. They were in the cabinetry, in the trim, in the wooden structural elements throughout the interior. They had been there for a meaningful amount of time. The saving grace — the single piece of genuine luck in this otherwise humbling inventory — was that Tiny Bubbles was a fiberglass hull. The termites had eaten everything that belonged to them and had not, as far as I could determine, developed an appetite for fiberglass. The boat would float. It would just do so while hosting an active insect civilization in its woodwork.
The engine was a rusted hulk sitting under the companionway steps with the inert authority of something that had not run in years and was not going to start having opinions about it now. Several experienced sailors came by over the following days and looked at it, arriving independently at the same conclusion, delivered in variations of the same expression — the expression of someone regarding a situation they are relieved is not theirs.
"Needs a complete rebuild," said the first man.
"Needs replacing," said the second.
"You'd be better off without it," said a third, with the serenity of someone who has made peace with engines as a concept.
A new engine was not in the budget. Rebuilding was not in the timeline. The engine was deleted from consideration. We would be a sailboat in the purest, most historically accurate sense of the term: moved entirely by wind, docking with skill, departing with prayer.
The V-berth — the sleeping area up in the bow — had shag carpet on its walls. Not the floor. The walls. Someone in the 1970s had made this decision with commitment and followed through. I chose not to think about it. There were more pressing things.
The headliner sagged in the middle like a hammock that had given up on the concept of tension. The standing rigging was present and appeared attached to the mast, which I took as encouraging. The sails were aboard and intact. The hull, under all those oysters, was solid fiberglass — hand-laid, in 1976, and built to outlast anyone who had opinions about it.
I was choosing to be an optimist.
Heidi Arrives
Heidi taught special education, and she loved it — genuinely loved it, the way some people are simply built for the particular patience and creativity that work requires. She flew over from Maui on a Friday afternoon when summer school let out, walked down the dock at Keʻehi, and stopped at the slip.
She looked at Tiny Bubbles for a moment. I watched her take in the oyster-encrusted waterline, the sun-bleached topsides, the general impression of a vessel that had been passed over by several previous owners who presumably had options.
"She's fiberglass," I offered.
"Mm," said Heidi — a syllable she deploys with great precision, conveying everything while committing to nothing.
She stepped aboard. The diesel smell hit her.
"Diesel," I said. "But I’m cleaning everything in buckets. I’m not sure how it got into the sails."
"Mm," she said again.
She did not panic. She did not revise her position on the South Pacific. She looked around the compact interior with the focused attention of someone cataloguing a situation before deciding what to do about it, and then she said: "Okay. What needs to happen first?"
This is one of the things I love most about Heidi. She does not spend time on what can't be changed. The boat existed. We had bought it. The hull was sound. Everything else was a project. She had already moved on to the project, while I was still processing the termites.
West Marine and the Inflatable Kayak
Saturday morning we walked to West Marine, the nautical supply store that functions as both a chandlery and a confessional for sailors — you go in with a list and emerge having purchased things you didn't know you needed, feeling slightly judged by the prices and vaguely improved as a mariner.
The primary item on our list was an inflatable kayak. Not for recreation. For the crossing to Maui. Lāhainā, on Maui's western shore, has an open roadstead anchorage, which means boats anchor offshore and shuttles to land somehow. The kayak was our plan for the "somehow." It was small, packed into a cardboard box, cost less than a hundred dollars, and would, in theory, convey us from the boat to shore without swimming. We were operating at the intersection of budget consciousness and maritime optimism.
“Looks pink,” Heidi noted.
“More of a maroon,” I countered. “It’s a seaworthy color.”
We bought it. And thanks to a sympathetic employee who made assumptions about our financial state, and offered us his employee discount, we also bought a few things that seemed necessary, a chart of the entire Pacific Ocean, a chart of Fiji — I had heard Captain Bligh had had a challenging time there —two long paddles, one hundred feet of chain, and walked back to the boat heavier and lighter simultaneously, the way you always leave a marine supply store.
Oyster Season
The following morning we slowly paddled Tiny Bubbles out toward the harbor entrance and began the hull-scrubbing job. The water off Keʻehi was clear enough to see every oyster in its individual ambition. There were many of them, and they were well established. We donned our dive masks, jumped overboard with scrapers and attacked them, working around the hull systematically, losing knuckle skin to shell edges, making progress measured in square feet over several hours.
The oysters came off. The hull emerged beneath them — rougher than ideal but intact, fiberglass all the way down, solid.
By early afternoon the hull was clean enough to sail on. I raised the sails and hauled up the anchor, and Heidi manned the tiller (wooden steering arm).
We were going to Maui.
Into the Kaiwi Channel
Heidi had to be back in her classroom by Monday morning. That meant we had the rest of Saturday and Sunday. We raised sail, eased out of Keʻehi, and turned southeast along the Oʻahu coast — running down the leeward shore toward the southern tip of the island, where we would turn and face whatever the channel had prepared for us.
We tuned the VHF radio to the NOAA weather broadcast. The NOAA weather voice is a synthesized near-human monotone — not quite a person, not quite a machine — that delivers catastrophic forecasts with the emotional register of a parking meter.
SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY IN EFFECT. NORTHEAST TRADES TWENTY-FIVE TO THIRTY KNOTS. SEAS EIGHT TO TEN FEET IN THE KAIWI CHANNEL.
We looked at each other.
The Kaiwi Channel is the open water between Oʻahu and Molokaʻi, and it is not a channel in any gentle sense of the word. The Hawaiian inter-island channels funnel the Northeast Trades and the deep-ocean swells into corridors between the islands, compressing and accelerating them. Sailors who have crossed the North Atlantic sometimes describe Hawaiian inter-island sailing as more demanding. The Kaiwi, or Channel of Bones, has a certain reputation.
Past Diamond Head, the island's protection drops off abruptly and the Pacific reveals its actual scale. The swells stack up in long, organized sets. The northeast trades push hard on the nose. Tiny Bubbles climbed each wave with effort and came down the other side with a crash that communicated, structurally, that she found this undignified.
The plan was to sail southeast, duck behind Lānaʻi, and come up toward Lāhainā on Maui's western shore — a better angle to the wind than hammering directly across, a comfortable reach instead of a dead beat, which any sailor will tell you is the difference between sailing and suffering. Lāhainā was roughly ninety miles away.
We were making approximately two knots.
The math was not encouraging. But we had committed to the heading, and the heading was southeast, and we held it.
Luna Bars to Windward
I noticed Heidi getting quiet in a particular way — a stillness that was different from her regular quiet. A careful focus on the horizon that had nothing to do with navigation.
She moved toward the rail.
I went to help — to hold her hair, to be present in the way you are when the person you love is seasick on a boat hobbyhorsing wildly, after you remarked that it had a certain sea kindliness. I positioned myself behind her, one hand on her shoulder — a balancing act that required me to drop the tiller from my right hand, and steer with my right foot.
What I had failed to account for, in the chaos of beating to windward in a small craft advisory, was the wind direction. The rail Heidi had chosen was the windward rail.
The Luna Bar she had eaten for lunch returned to the world at approximately twenty-five knots.
It hit us both in the face.
There is a particular kind of shared experience that bypasses all normal social convention and goes straight to something more fundamental — something that either destroys a relationship or welds it permanently. We stood there, the boat crashing and heaving, the trades blowing, looking at each other.
"We should turn around," I said.
"Yes," said Heidi.
We turned around.
Party Style
We sailed into Ala Wai Harbor under sail alone, since the engine had never expressed any interest in working. Threading a twenty-five-foot boat under sail into a crowded slip on the first approach requires either skill or luck; at this stage of my sailing career I was heavily reliant on the latter. We made it cleanly.
A man on the dock called over: "Hey! You're doing it party style!"
We did not feel like a party. We smelled of granola bar and Pacific Ocean and regrettable decisions.
We later learned that "party style" is a reference to Lin and Larry Pardey — legendary offshore sailors who crossed oceans in engineless boats and wrote books about doing it with seemingly inexhaustible good cheer. At the moment, standing in the cockpit of a termite-infested Pacific Seacraft 25 having failed to get twenty miles from the harbor, we were not accessing the Pardey energy.
Heidi flew back to Maui. She had a classroom full of children who needed her, a life that was continuing on schedule while mine had become entirely devoted to an eight-thousand-dollar floating problem.
Next chapter: Josh gets evicted from the marina. The jib blows out. The Coast Guard pays a visit. A sailmaker named Walt offers a better education than anything they taught in teacher prep school.
👉 Read Chapter 4 — The Coast Guard Knows Our Boat's Name Now
© 2026 Heidi & Josh. All Rights Reserved.
This story is based on real events. Some names, dialogue, and identifying details have been changed or recreated for narrative purposes.
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