January 1976.
Dozens of people set out from Maui’s Maalaea Harbor in small boats, destination Kahoolawe. Just nine made it to the beach in the symbolic “occupation” of the island, a protest that sparked the long effort to stop the Navy’s bombing of the island and return it to civilian control.
I took a lot of photos that day, but I only appear in a couple of them. This is one of them.
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Ahhhhh . . . those were the days.
Nice to see Inez Ashdown. When I was a kid for a few years in the late ’40s on Lana`i, my mother wrote a column for the island newspaper of the day (a weekly maybe, but more likely a monthly?) and she frequently used Inez as a resource and retold many of her tales.
It is commonly-unknown that a canoe left from L?na?i as part of the Kahoolawe occupation, with L?na?i residents paddling across the channel. Three others (still good friends to this date) were on an escort boat that hoped to serve as a diversion. We were stopped by a Coast Guard cutter but were released because we were able to convince them that we were just fishing — holding up the one ahi we’d caught that morning!