KEALIA — Chandra Sun Eagle first moved to Kauai in August of 2006 and can still remember being visited, in her dreams, by some of the island’s famed humpback whales, promising a face-to-face meeting one day when the timing was
KEALIA — Chandra Sun Eagle first moved to Kauai in August of 2006 and can still remember being visited, in her dreams, by some of the island’s famed humpback whales, promising a face-to-face meeting one day when the timing was just right.
And that day, the Kapahi resident said, came about seven months later when she and a friend kayaked out from the Kealia Beach area and serendipitously came across a small pod of five or six humpback whales about half a mile off shore.
“I could feel the whales all over and just behind me this large whale breached – it was so close,” Sun Eagle recalled. “My heart just started racing so fast and then I saw this other whale coming toward me and I could hear it.”
It was a whale calf and a cow.
What happened next, she said, was something that she had only dreamed about.
“At that moment, when I laid my hands on her, there was this transmission that I don’t really know how I stayed conscious, because I was so just beside myself,” Sun Eagle said. “It was the most beautiful, blissful and peaceful eternal peace that I had ever felt.”
This same connection, Sun Eagle and others say, is what draws them to the whales.
And on Saturday, several dozen people gathered at the scenic lookout along Kuhio Highway next to Kealia Beach for a Kohola Leo ceremony to welcome the iconic cetaceans back to their breeding grounds on Kauai.
Kohola Leo Chair Kalasara Setaysha said the annual event, now in its fourth year, takes place around the first or second week of January to commemorate the beginning of whale season, which typically runs from December to May.
“I know whales start coming sooner, but now they’re really here,” said Setaysha, who estimated that about five or six pods breached before the late afternoon event even began. “There’s enough of them now to really feel connected to them.”
And there were a lot of stories, as well as songs, poems, chants and music to go around, too.
“It’s just to collectively send our appreciation for who the whales are out to them,” Setaysha said. “They were culturally important to native Hawaiians, who didn’t hunt them or eat them unlike other cultures. And, because of whaling, they are kind of a symbol that propelled the movement for conservation. We share this world with them and this is our way of kind of doing that more.”
John Dumas, who played the didgeridoo for the crowd, and the whales off shore, recalled painting a humpback whale on his handmade wind instrument even before he moved to Kauai from Sedona, Ariz.
“It’s a little different out there in the desert, but I painted that whale and made the didgeridoo as kind of a foreshadowing, I guess, of what was to come in the future,” Dumas said. “The whales have been so close to my heart. There has been so much opening and so much of a sharing over the years that I just wanted to honor the whales and the unconditional love that they put out.”
