Molokai Reef (23 page)

Each
ring represented one roach class – all male, all female, coed,
and derby. The first race was the all-male division. The final race
in the first heat would be the derby division – no rules,
dress-em up, paint them, or drug ’em. It didn’t matter.

Strumming
their ukuleles, three men in native Hawaiian attire and fresh leis
strolled through the crowd playing mariachi music.

Gybe
spotted Polunu hovering near the third track. When they made eye
contact, Polunu nodded towards two native Hawaiians standing just
outside the hale. Gybe assumed these were the pakalolo brothers,
Makaha and Nahoa. He slipped away from Kara when the conch blast
started the first race.

“
Hey
guys.”

The
two men ignored Gybe as if he were silent and invisible.

“
Excuse
me, I need to talk with you.”

Still
no response.

“
Yo
poi boy. Anybody home?” Gybe tapped the syllables on the
man’s pecs in five-four time.

Something
large, meaty, and smelly gripped each of Gybe’s arms. Oops
didn’t seem to describe the situation as he was dragged into
the darkness.

“
You
shoulda seen the other guy.” Gybe sat leaning against a palm
tree while Kara tried to stop the blood flow above his left eye.

“
He
looked OK to me.” Mongoose commented. “Except he either
spilled his beer or drank it. Did you learn anything?”

The
meatheads had carried Gybe away from the races to the far side of a
banyan tree. While the gorillas, there were two of them, held his
arms, Nahoa – the smart brother - warned Gybe to stay away from
them, stay away from pakalolo, stay away from the murders.

Gybe
asked if Nahoa knew the two victims.

This
was to be a one-sided conversation. While the two apes held his
arms, the strong and possibly crazy brother played punch the piñata
with Gybe’s body.

Lying
on the ground weaving back and forth across the line of
consciousness, Gybe thought he recalled that Nahoa had suggested that
Gybe should stay away from Moloka‘i. That was the last he
remembered until someone threw water on his face.

Kara
and the ’goose helped Gybe back to
Ferrity
. Kara
cleaned his wounds, fed him several aspirin, a big shot of vodka, and
helped him into the bunk. She shucked off her shorts and T-shirt and
snuggled up next to him. Gybe groaned with pain and fell asleep.

43

“
Now
what?” Kara asked. The boat sat motionless at anchor in the
glassy water of the harbor. The sun lingering behind Maui’s
Mt. Haleakala had yet to warm the crisp sixty-five degree air while
the air was as rippleless as the water. Steam rose from Kara’s
mug as she sipped the bean juice tainted coffee.

Gybe
had a half-inch cut over his left eye and a yellowing bruise under
his right eye. The nose wasn’t broken, but the port side was
numb. His ribs ached when he moved but he didn’t think they
were broken.

“
Surfing
is out. Maybe I’ll talk with the police about the brothers.”

“
Not
a good idea.” While Gybe regained consciousness last evening,
Kara had wanted to call the police. Mongoose, never fond of the law,
dissuaded her. At least one police officer was a sister to the
brothers. Four other officers were part of the pakalolo
Ohana
,
although they weren’t in the distribution network. At least
not in a provable sense.

“
Well,
then it’s off to see the brothers again.”

“
Are
you nuts?” Kara blurted.

Gybe
waved Mongoose over from
Makani
. The three drank coffee as
Gybe expressed his deepening interest in the brothers. There were no
other strong leads into the murders. Maybe the dead researchers, in
their attempt to sell the hashish, got mixed up with the wrong
people. “By the way, why do two seemingly unconnected
scientists have wholesale quantities of dope?”

Neither
Mongoose nor Kara answered.

He
didn’t know if they were involved in the murders or not. But,
he still wanted to know if they had met the victims. Had the victims
tried to sell hashish, as rumored, to the brothers? Did the brothers
buy?

If
not, then maybe the dead scientists tried to sell to someone else.
Were the murders the result of a drug sale gone bad?

Many
questions. He would begin with the brothers. Gybe explained his
plan.

Gybe,
Kara, and Mongoose turned to watch Flyn motor into the harbor. She
handled the boat well and she was not alone.

Like
him, Gybe knew she preferred to anchor far from other boats. You
never knew their expertise with anchoring. Waking to the banging of
another hull on
Ferrity
at three in the morning – it
always happened in the middle of the night – was not fun.
However, he knew Flyn’s skills and she knew Gybe’s. She
dropped her CQR plow anchor about thirty yards off his stern.

They
knew that the two boats behaved similarly in wind and tide. The
boats would swing in parallel, each within the radius of the anchor
chain, like two ballroom dancers.

Gybe
motioned for Flyn to join them, then he asked Kara to make another
pot of coffee. Thirty minutes later, the five settled in to Gybe’s
cockpit. Flyn and Mongoose had never met. Flyn introduced the fifth
man.

Gybe
estimated that the young man stood about five foot seven or eight.
He was lean with a muscular build attained outdoors, not in a gym.
His skin color spoke of Polynesian ancestry, confirmed by his black,
thick hair, cut to a medium length. The tattoo on his left biceps
reminded Gybe of a tapa cloth pattern. He wore surfer shorts, no
shirt, and no shoes. The classic surfer dude. He was a decade
younger than Flyn. A boy toy. Flyn told them that she had met him
near the Ala Wai Small Boat Harbor in Waikiki.

44

As
Flyn had offered when they met at Mala Wharf, she had sailed to O‘ahu
to talk with University of Hawai‘i professors about the reef.
Susan’s motive, according to the prosecutor, was that the
genetic modification experiments at the seed corn companies were
escaping the lab and field test plots. The byproduct of the reckless
research was killing the reef.

The
reef was dying. No one disputed this.

Flyn
sailed directly from Maui’s Mala Wharf to Honolulu, leaving at
sunrise the morning following her discussion with Gybe and Kara.
After motoring for an hour, she cleared the lee of the island and set
sail in the northeast wind of the Pailolo Channel between Maui and
Moloka‘i. Except when she entered the wind shadow southwest of
Kamakou, the high peak of Moloka‘i’s east end, she sailed
all the way to O‘ahu. An hour before sunset, she motored into
the Ala Wai Harbor and claimed an empty slip near the Ewa end of the
800 row transient dock.

For
Kara’s benefit, Flyn explained that like many harbors in
Hawai‘i, Ala Wai maintained mooring balls about sixty feet away
from the dock. When Flyn motored into the slip, she snagged a line
to the mooring ball, tied it to the stern cleat, and then eased the
boat forward. Two bow lines and a stern line to the buoy kept the
boat perpendicular to the dock. As a singlehander himself, Gybe knew
that this was not an easy task, particularly if the trade winds blew
against the side of the boat.

The
next morning, she checked in with the harbormaster. Sighing, she
turned to Gybe. “It took forty-five minutes to fill out the
redundant forms. I was staying for two days. In a private marina, I
would have flipped them a credit card, they would have given me a map
to the area and coupons for the restaurants.”

“
Welcome
to the people’s republic of Hawai‘i. In forty some years
since statehood, Hawai‘i has been named State Bureaucracy of
the Year for the past seven years. In international competition,
they are climbing rapidly towards the top third world bureaucracies.”
Gybe knew of what she spoke.

Decades
of bureaucracy at the state-monopolized harbors had created a
labyrinth of paperwork. He didn’t know if the indifferent
employees rose to their level of incompetence or if they were as
frustrated with the endless, nonsensical paperwork as he was. Any
for-profit business worked to satisfy its customers and employees.
If it didn’t, its competition would and the business would
fail. Government bureaucracies, like the Hawaiian Small Boat
Harbors, were monopolies. No incentive to succeed, no penalty for
failure.

From
the Harbor Office, she biked to the University of Hawai‘i,
Manoa campus, where she sought the university library. She read and
skimmed several books about the reefs before finding an Internet
terminal to continue her research. By mid-afternoon, she felt
prepared to meet with the university scientists. During the
research, she jotted down the names of five people whose names
appeared in the more informative scientific papers. The next day she
talked with them.

She
biked back to the Ala Wai, showered, and talked with other transient
boaters on the dock. One couple, on a boat called
Strait Aero
,
invited her to dinner. They had sailed from Oregon via Alaska. In a
few months, they would sail towards Europe by way of the South
Pacific, Indian Ocean, and the Cape of Good Hope. She met Thelonius
Monk, their cat, who would stress their patience as they dealt with
animal quarantine laws throughout their voyage.

After
the great dinner and conversation, she hiked to an Irish Pub on
Lewers Street for a pint of Guinness. That’s where she met the
surfer dude.

The
next day she visited two of the five professors on her list.
Confirming her previous day’s research, both professors denied
that the seed research companies had anything to do with the death of
the reef on Moloka‘i. Reefs were dying all over the world.
Each referred her to a recent report
Status of coral reefs of the
world: 2002
by the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

She
printed the chapter relating to the Hawaiian Islands. The report
divided the Hawaiian Islands into two categories. The Main Hawaiian
Islands (MHI) consisting of the well-known populated islands and the
Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI) comprised of the uninhabited
atolls and banks.

For
the group in the cockpit, she summarized the more egregious
abominable findings. “From agriculture, ranching, urban, and
industrial sources in the main Hawaiian Islands – one million
tons of runoff per year flow into the ocean. Reasons include poor
land-use practices, such as, slash and burn of pineapple and sugar
cane; increased oil and toxin spills including acids, PCB’s,
refrigerants, heavy metals, pesticides, herbicides; and increased
gray water discharges from the burgeoning cruise ship industry.”

Gybe
knew that many small communities still relied on septic systems,
often only a few feet from the surf line. As a sailor, he had added
filters to his gray water system. Without exception, Gybe complied
with other overboard discharge regulations and laws.

He
wasn’t surprised at the chemical flows into the ocean. In his
visits around the islands, he had found twelve-volt lead acid car
batteries, oil buckets, and paint cans dumped along roads or left
near trash dumpsters. Recycling was voluntary and from the size of
the beer can middens he encountered, he assumed that few islanders
participated.

Flyn
shifted her summary to the wildlife.

The
preponderance of small fish that seldom reach breeding size pointed
to classic over-fishing. Hawai‘i had little to no regulation
of fishing –less than three tenths of one percent of the reef
area of the MHI designated as a “no-take” zone.

There
was an extensive infrastructure for the collection and trade of
ornamental fish and invertebrates.

Sea
turtles, both the green sea turtle and the Hawaiian hawksbill were
threatened. Turtle tumors (fibropapillomatosis), rare before 1985,
were now common. Up to 60% of the turtles in Kane‘ohe Bay were
infected.

The
turtle tumors alarmed Gybe. On the Big Island, he had docked in the
Honokohau Harbor. The water was clear and he could see the harbor
bottom beneath the boat. Daily, he watched rays and turtles swim
around the harbor. In a small park, north of the harbor, dozens of
the peaceful turtles fed on sea grass in the shallow water or basked
in the sun on the beach. Signs warned visitors to stay several yards
from the turtles. Even from that distance, he saw the grotesque
tumors sprouting from the heads and flippers of the truck-tire-sized
green sea turtles. The marble-sized tumors often mutated near the
eyes or around the mouth.

“
If
you guys want to learn more about the turtle tumors, I recommend
Fire
in the Turtle House
by Osha Gray Davidson. It’s a good
read and an eye-opener about how fast this disease has spread through
the sea turtle population.” For emphasis, he added. “These
turtles muddled around before the dinosaurs and then saw the dinos
disappear. Now, in less time than it took to build the Internet,
they could disappear.”

“
Top
predators have almost disappeared.” Flyn read from her next
factoid. “The counts are 260% lower around the populated
islands than in the northwest islands.”