Sailing Across the World's Oceans with No Tech

(inspiring piano music) - Hawai`i is one of the remote places on the planet. And in the open ocean, there are no landmarks. So Hawai`i was discovered by canoes, with no GPS, no motors, no electronics. Just pure nature, and that's what we're doing today to celebrate that. (water crashing) So we're on Hokulea, she is a replica of a Polynesian voyaging canoe. They were the mode of transportation for discovering the Hawaiian Islands. - There's no metal, there's no screws, there's no nails, there's n

o braces that hold the canoe together. It's nothing but lashings and of rope. There's no motors on board, there's no navigation equipment that we use to go across the ocean. We started in Hawai`i in end of May, 2014. We embarked on this worldwide voyage which first ended up going towards Tahiti, through our ancestral routes, and now we're here in Martha's Vineyard. (ship bell ringing) - A big part of this voyage, right, Malama Honua, is to train a whole cadre of young navigators and captains. We

ll wait, now we leave the back sail, let's get the 23 out. The big foresail. (intense music) Kaleo Wong is one of the apprentice navigators. I've done four voyages with him, and he was on his own across the Atlantic Ocean, and he was brilliant. I mean, he was just so successful, you know, after traveling like 1,200 miles, finding just little islands in the middle of nowhere. You're talking like thousands of hours of observation at sea. - When we are navigating the open ocean, our biggest clue th

at tells us where we are and where we're going is the sun. The sun, as we know, rises in the east, and sets in the west, so if we just know where one point of is, then we know where everything else is. The stars do us the same thing, just like the compass in the sky. We memorize close to 200 stars and know where they rise and where they set and how they move across the skies. - The sun and the stars and everything work in conjunction with the swells, so in the absence of the sun, then you mainta

in the orientation of the crew into the swell patterns. That's a very difficult thing. The Hokulea was built with the express purpose of proving that navigation by the ancient way was very viable, that these canoes could be guided over 2,000 miles and long distances. They proved that on their very first voyage in 1976. What it means is continuation. Kaleo and these others, they're just like a pinch of salt as far as the people who know how to do this type of navigation.