Save Kauai blog has a description of the Superferry’s return to Maui by a critic (“Riding the Spooker-ferry”), which contains some interesting observations. First, she says she and two travel partners were “randomly selected” for full security searches, and believes this is because they were either known to be opponents or else not known to be Superferry backers. That’s related to her impression that things were done to give the impression that the vessel was carrying more people than it really did. She estimates half of the passengers she observed were media-related, and most of the others were family and friends of Superferry employees.

And her description is quite blunt about getting seasick.

I don’t get sea sick. I love the feeling of rocking around to the motion of the waves–it usually puts me right to sleep. But I got sick. In fact, so did just about everybody on board. Every time I used the toilet there were remnants of someone else’s breakfast. The place wreaked of puke. An old lady was lying on the floor of the women’s bathroom. Every single person I talked to felt ill. One picture in the Honolulu Advertiser shows passengers sprawled out on the booth seats, supposedly taking nice naps. In actuality, we were keeled over in pain.

A story in The Garden Island described similar conditions.

“It was torture,” said O‘ahu resident Nola Watasa, who was traveling to Maui with her son, Colby, and husband, Dave, for a varsity wrestling tournament. “I’m glad it’s over.”

She and others riding the $85 million jet-propelled vessel — such as Clayton Fernandez, an O‘ahu resident visiting Maui for the first time — filled up the “barf bags” that Hawaii Superferry staff handed out early on in the three-hour voyage.

Workers scrubbed the carpet and wiped down the faux leather seats for those passengers who were unable to find a paper sack or make it to the bathroom in time.

But the best line came the Advertiser’s Dan Nakaso, who wrote: “At least 25 passengers all over the Alakai were openly vomiting, said Superferry cabinet attendant Leeann Toro, who passed out barf bags as if they were candy on Halloween.”

Now that is a great use of just a few words to convey an image!

It may be that ocean conditions will end up being a more difficult opponent than the people of Maui and Kauai, at least once reviews start hitting the web describing the lovely views of the islands amidst other people’s returning breakfasts. Not a pretty image. After all, barf bags have become a thing of the past on most airlines. Perhaps some poster-size images of Superferry logo barf bags would be an effective communications tool.

One more note re the appointment of Melvin “Kauila” Clark to the Superferry Task Force. According to this 2004 Bob Rees story that appeared in the Advertiser, Clark and House Speaker Calvin Say are both active in the Daihonzan Chozen-ji zen dojo in Kalihi, often described as a gathering place for a big slice of Honolulu’s power elite. Small world. So it was a natural that Say turned to Clark as his designated Native Hawaiian practitioner.

I found a couple of photos taken when we visited Punchbowl in January 1970 and stitched two of them together to get this view of what the city looked like at that time. Nothing startling here, fewer high rise condos and hotels. You can mess with your brain by trying to compare to the current Google Maps satellite view (if this link works).