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6 Ranch Podcast
6 Ranch Podcast
Epic Sailing Adventures with Mike Spalding
If you like adventurous story telling, this episode is for you! Join me as I talk with Mike Spalding whose life could be classified as adventure. Growing up in post-World War II Oahu, he shares stories of aloha, and his love for water sports. Discover his passion for marathon swimming, including his first swim from Lanai to Maui and numerous Hawaiian channel crossings. He talks near miss sailing journeys, spearfishing trips, and a hunting expedition in Zimbabwe. Mike's tales are not just stories of survival and exploration but lessons in leadership, perseverance, and the importance of adventure.
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We're open ocean and the next. You know we're drifting towards Australia and we don't have any means of telling anybody we're in trouble. Fiji doesn't have Coast Guard and we didn't have radio or E-Purb. This is you know 20 years ago.
Speaker 2:Just as much luck calling Ghostbusters.
Speaker 1:Yeah right, Exactly.
Speaker 2:These are stories of outdoor adventure and expert advice from folks with calloused hands. I'm James Nash and this is the Six Ranch Podcast. For those of you out there that are truck guys like me. I want to talk to you about one of our newest sponsors, dect. If you don't know DECT?
Speaker 2:They make bomb-proof drawer systems to keep your gear organized and safely locked away in the back of your truck. Clothes, rifles, packs, kill kits can all get organized and at the ready so you don't get to your hunting spot and waste time trying to find stuff. We all know that guy. Don't be that guy. They also have a line of storage cases that fit perfectly in the drawers. We use them for organizing ammunition, knives, glassing equipment, extra clothing and camping stuff. You can get a two-drawer system for all dimensions of full-size truck beds or a single-drawer system that fits mid-size truck beds. And maybe best of all, they're all made in the USA. So get decked and get after it. Check them out at deckedcom. Shipping is always free. We're sitting here at elk camp this morning with Mr Mike Spalding. Mike, you got your second bull elk friendly, fun, wild-ass guides.
Speaker 1:Nash, you're a wealth of information and efficiency and we couldn't have done it without your expert help.
Speaker 2:Oh that's, that's very kind, but I'm pretty sure, pretty sure you were, you were doing just fine there. Um that bull last night he went 50 yards, not even.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love that nothing better than getting a you know, a nice ethical kill, and the worst thing in hunting is if you wound an animal and you don't recover it. It's a very sad day. So yesterday being able to execute a good kill and recover the animal, and me and my family and friends are going to be enjoying elk meat for for a while yeah, 744 pound bull, nice big bull.
Speaker 2:Uh, where'd you grow up?
Speaker 1:so I'm born and raised in oahu, okay, and uh been a life lifelong lover of living in hawaii, uh have lots of friends on all the islands and, um, I can't imagine living anywhere else. So you were born right after World War II 1947. 1947.
Speaker 2:So you're 78?, 77.
Speaker 1:77?. I'm a baby product of the baby boomer yeah Generation. What brought?
Speaker 2:your parents to Oahu.
Speaker 1:So my mom it's interesting, you know she was on tour in the Pacific Theater as a. She was a nurse but she was with Bob Hope cheering up because she also was a movie actress. A B-movie actress was cheering up the troops and she spent a lot of time in the hospitals. Oh, really.
Speaker 1:You know cheering up the men. She was a beautiful young movie star Not a star, but a movie actress and on her way back to Hawaii she met my dad at a party in Honolulu. They got married and I'm a product of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, awesome.
Speaker 1:So I've always lived in Hawaii. I live on Maui now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, You're big on what it means to be a Hawaiian and Hawaiian spirit and aloha and all that right. That's something that people don't understand. They think aloha is a word. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We try to live that spirit. You know where you are kind to people and I'll give you an example. I think the best revenge when somebody is rude to you and it happens, it happened to us recently is to be nice back, is rude to you, and it happens uh, it happened to us recently is to be nice back. And I think if you take the bait and if somebody's rude to you and you're rude back to them, you lower yourself to their level, right and uh, that happened to us recently. Uh, and this, this, this gal was uh berating us for looking at some land I'm in the real estate business and she thought we were infringing on her little kingdom, and so she just, you know, went off on us using the F word and whatnot, and I just said just have a very nice day and left, you know, and I felt good about that. But most people would have an opposite reaction. It doesn't do you any good, right, yeah?
Speaker 2:A lot of folks in Hawaii are territorial, you know, and I understand that, coming from a rural area myself. But there's also this other side that is very welcoming and inviting and generous.
Speaker 1:That's very true. I think that if you are respectful like there's a Hawaiian word called makana, so if you come to somebody's house you bring a gift. You bring a gift If you're like we went to a sacred place, you know, called Luahinivai on the big island, we kayaked in there and it's a private, you know sanctuary in a pool, and we went up to the house and the caretaker was there and we brought them a slab of fresh ono that we had caught and we says you know, we'd like to give this to you as a gift, and do you mind if we go in the pool? She says not at all. It was like if we had been disrespectful and went in the pool and made a mess and you know it would have been the complete opposite reaction, but we got the welcoming. So I think it's about how you approach people and it's not exclusive to Hawaii.
Speaker 1:I think it applies to all kinds of places.
Speaker 1:I mean, if you, for example, you know you're in the hunting, ranching world, you know, if somebody comes to you and says you know, I notice your fence needs to be fixed, you know, you know, do you mind if me and my boys come over there and fix that fence and we'd love to go hunting if you don't mind.
Speaker 1:And you know it's kind of that kind of exchange and trade. That is a respectful request with you know you're not trying to be like, hey, you owe something to me. For example, I had a guy climbing up in one of my avocado trees you know no trespassing signs, you know stealing avocados and my daughter went up to him and said, hey, you know this is, you know we sell these avocados, you know. And he started giving her attitude like you know what you stole this land, or you know how come you guys are like you know you know what you stole this land, or you know how come you guys are you know in, you know, instead of being, you know, respectful. He was the opposite. That's the kind of guy you want to call the cops on and bust, you know.
Speaker 2:But uh, sure, whereas if somebody came up and asked and said hey, I'm kind of hungry. I noticed you have some avocados, you might as well? Yeah, we would cover that guy.
Speaker 1:I mean like, we have mango trees at our office, you know, and it's you know, we're kind of in a in wairuku town and we have these signs, you know, ask, don't steal. And everybody that comes and asks us we give them, we give them mangoes, yeah. But we also have people that you know would rather, you know, come when we're not there and steal our mangoes. So it goes both ways and I always prefer the way of aloha. That's what you're talking about and that's how we try to roll. We're not perfect, but we try to wear that on our sleeve.
Speaker 2:When did you start swimming?
Speaker 1:Started swimming. I remember the first time I started swimming I fell into a swing pool and I had to swim to save my life. So that was like I was. I don't know, I was maybe five or six. So that was like I was. I don't know, I was maybe five or six, but I definitely start. I start. You know, I have seven grandchildren and we start them swimming as early. As you know, one year old Lauren, who's by Lauren Spalding, is a famous water athlete, canoe paddler. She actually was semi-water safe at one years old, which was, you know, really kind of amazing that she could get to that point at such a young age, because all the other grandchildren, it was a struggle for them to be able to swim when they're one year old. It was more like two or three when they started getting to be water safe.
Speaker 2:That's pretty amazing. I've seen some of those videos where, like these little tiny infants get thrown in the water and they, they, figure it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's pretty cool, and the the earlier you can safely develop that comfort, I think the better the platform is. When did you start thinking about swimming distance?
Speaker 1:So I, you know, I swam in high school and I played water polo and I played water polo in college. After college I started swimming to augment my surfing abilities because swimming is an important you know criteria. Paddling and swimming are very compatible. So I started swimming, you know, as a regular recreational, you know exercise hobby. So it's been a lifelong passion of mine. But I started, I did my first. You know one of the things that you know that people ask me you know, what do you what? What are you famous for? What do you do? And basically I'm a marathon swimmer. That's what I am well known for. But there's a lot of other things that um are even more more interesting than just the marathon swimming, because that's kind of a small silo of my life.
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Speaker 1:So to get back to your, to answer your question, I was in my 20s when I did my first channel swimming from Lanai to Maui and there's two of us swimming. We had an escort boat and a kayak and we got separated. And so I'm with, you know, being escorted by a one person kayak on a nine mile swim, and I got bitten by or hit by a portuguese man of war some people call them blue bottles, but extremely painful and one of the antidotes for the pain. So once we got to shore so that was my first channel crossing got to shore and warm water takes away, does the sting. So what the?
Speaker 1:The remedy has always been you pee on it because it's warm. So I'm, I'm like, feel like I'm on fire, and there's these japanese fishermen on the side of the. You know they're fishing there where I came in and so I take him a cup. You know I said hey, you know I got. I got these portuguese man o'war stings on my body. I'm really sore. Can I get some pee from one of you guys? No way.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:I couldn't beg for any pee in the bottle. And so, anyway, that was my first channel swim. And then Linda Kaiser, who became one of my partners in channel swimming. I, I met her and she says Mike, can you arrange for an escort boat? I want to swim from Maui to Molokai. It's called a Pailolo Channel and pi in Hawaiian means slap and lolo means silly, so it's a rough channel, it's got a crosswind and current, and so we, you know I arranged for a sailboat to take us across the channel and so we started in Maui and we got about halfway through the channel and she taps me and she's Mike shark, you know. And so we stop in the water and the escort boat just keeps going. They leave us because they don't, you know, they're not paying attention.
Speaker 1:You know it's a five or six, it's a six hour swim. We're like three hours into it and I think it was a bronze whaler, it was a big, big critter Came up and so we made big body, we got together, you know, kind of, and we just were very still in the water and it came up and made about two or three passes and I thought for sure she's going to want to get out. But you know she says, okay, let's keep going. And we kept going and landed on the beach at a place called Honamuni and I met this guy, Hal Fuji, there and we became lifelong friends and you know he has a place there and I visited him on many occasions. But after that Linda would call me up and say, okay, Mike, what's going to be our next channel? And okay, let's do Molokai to Lanai. So we'd do that. And then we were the first to swim from Kaho'olavi to Lanai. We were the first to swim from Kauai to Ni'ihau.
Speaker 1:So we slowly started knocking off all the easy channels, and I wouldn't say any of them are easy. None of them are easy. But the harder ones are the Molokai, you know, the Ka'ivi that means the bones that channel is. You know it's a long, 27 miles. It took me 14 and a quarter hours to do it and when Linda and I were swimming it, she swallowed a jellyfish and she got.
Speaker 1:You know, she got, she got. Uh, she really got sick. She started to, you know, shake and whatnot. She couldn't continue. I thought for sure she was going to want to go ashore because she might die. But no, she says you finished the swim. So we continued and we ended up getting the current pushing us to China walls, and we had to actually climb up on the rocks, catch a swell up on the rocks and scamper up to the dry land to complete the swim. But that was a huge accomplishment and I thought well, we're done. No, we want to do Alinui Ha Ha. So that is a channel that only four people have crossed, and so we started off in the morning.
Speaker 2:Where, where is it?
Speaker 1:ala nui ha is from the big island upolo point to hana or kipahulu kaupo. You know you hit maui so it's a maui. So from big island of maui, so it's a Maui, so from Big Island to Maui.
Speaker 1:So that's a rough channel. That's some of the roughest water anywhere in the world when it's smoking trades. We caught it on a very, very calm day and we started at, we started. We started in at the night, in night, and at 8 o'clock, you know, at 8 o'clock at night, we were 10 miles.
Speaker 1:I was 10 miles off of upolo point, off the big island, and I started getting hit by, uh, cuttlefish were bouncing off my body. Three or four of them were bouncing off my body, and what was happening was that the escort boat had turned on their lights so they could see me, right, I mean, you don't want to get separated out there in the big ocean. And I had a kayaker next to me and he would, you know, pull ahead of like 100 yards and take it out of gear and wait for me to catch up to him, and so he was having a hard time seeing me during that transition period. And I had told him don't turn your lights on because you don't want to attract critters, and the lights attract the squid, and so we were a bait ball going through the water, right, and so I I'm going, and squid can bite too, so I'm going.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm in big trouble because I've got can cuttlefish bite? Yeah, they, cuttlefish bite. This is, this is what I'm talking cuttlefish bite, this is what I'm talking about cuttlefish. So they started hitting me and I'm going oh man, I'm really worried. And then all of a sudden I got a puncture in my sternum and it was super sore and so I screamed out and I'm going to get out because there's something nasty down there biting.
Speaker 1:I'm out of here, so I'm climbing into the kayak.
Speaker 1:one-man kayak and there's only room for one of us on there and I feel something bite my leg, yeah, and it was a cookie-cutter shark and it took a big chunk out of my leg and I ran my fingers down there and there's a big divot. I mean, this hole is about three inches circumference and so you know there was. I had to leave my legs in the water to keep balancing the kayak just the two of us on there. And so we called the boat in, rescued us and got back on the boat and I was thinking to myself, I said, you know, and got back on the boat and I was thinking to myself I said, you know, I'm not going to let this incident prevent me from completing all of the channels. You know, I'm going to come back one more time and I'm only going to come back one more time If I have another problem for any reason, I'm done. So we got back, you know, I got treated, had the you know the wound back and spent three months getting it, you know, kind of drying up and maybe in four months I was back in the water. So I trained for another year and a half and we hit a really good day and, boom off, we went again to go swim it again. This time we started at three in the morning. I wanted to be in the channel as in much light as possible.
Speaker 1:Now, cookie cutter sharks are small. They're only like 20 centimeters. They're a very unusual shark. I'd recommend you guys look them up. You know they're google them. They're because they're as far as the shark species. They're very interesting. But instead of having a cookie cutter incident, at the same place, about about 10 miles off the big island, I had an oceanic white tip shark visit me and, if you understand shark behavior, they've probably eaten more humans than any shark Because, like in World War II, when the U-boats were bombing our you know, were torpedoing our ships and the sailors were in the water, like the USS Indianapolis, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you know there'd be a thousand people floating around and you know the oceanic white tips would come in. There are millions of them. There are less of them now because they've been, the fin fishermen have taken them out. So, anyway, the oceanic white tip, some shark that I totally respect. So I'm going. Oh my god, what is this going to end my in my life? Or end my, my swim? So it cruised around about four times and then it disappeared. So we continued on and we had very good weather and then, as as I was approached, this is a 19 hour swim, 19 and a quarter hour swim as we approached maui, we're five miles offshore and I get bumped again, and this is in the dark, like eight o'clock at night. Something bumps me and I'm going oh no, this is you know. And at this point I wanted to finish this swim in the worst way. So I skipped my feedings. I put on as much speed as I could.
Speaker 2:Because nobody can touch you while you're in the water. They can hand you water, food you can't touch the boat.
Speaker 1:You can't be touched to make it an official swim. So I just put on the jets, swam as hard as I could. At this point I'd already been bitten by a Portuguese man o' war and I had stings along my shoulder and under my arm that were excruciating. But I figured if I was going to get into a nest of Portuguese man o' war I'd get out. But only had one incident, so I just gritted it, got to shore, got up on the, got up on the rocks and completed my swim.
Speaker 1:And I was so ecstatic for having gotten that done because that's a very nasty, tough channel to to accomplish, you know, another incident that happened to us. That was kind of unusual, like when we were swimming to Niihau, which is where Niihau is off Kauai. So it's Kauai to Niihau. That's another channel that we've done. We did, we were the first to accomplish that and that was Barry Brown and Linda Kaiser and myself and we had a marlin come up and check us out. Now marlin are, you know, they're the king of the ocean. Nobody can mess with them yeah so yeah they're.
Speaker 1:They're ready for a fight everywhere they go yeah, they're, they're really. He's wondering what the hell are you guys doing in my water, you know, and there was bait the whole time across that channel. There was bait everywhere, so that was that was kind of an interesting uh experience to have that that happened to us.
Speaker 2:Um you kind of have a reputation, mike, of, uh, of boat disasters, and I don't know if that's well earned or not. I I don't know. But is your comfort with water so good? Because you can. You know we drop you in the middle of the Pacific and you can swim home again, that you know if a boat goes down, you're not worried about it.
Speaker 1:You know one of the okay, this is kind of interesting. One of the reasons I trained a lot for swimming was because we did two epic shit things. I mean, our motto for our old guys we call ourselves the silver long bags is keep doing epic shit. But one of the things that I did during my swimming career and just growing up is I kayaked around all of the Hawaiian islands up is. I kayaked around all of the Hawaiian islands and I wanted so I would train for swimming, to be sure that I would. If, if I had any kind of a problem with kayaking or canoeing we did canoeing adventures too that I could be capable of helping rescue people that were I was with, or rescue my own ass in in a, in a situation where I needed to to go a long distance and what time period would this have been?
Speaker 1:This is in the seventies, eighties.
Speaker 2:So these aren't nineties, these aren't the plastic kayaks that people are.
Speaker 1:These are Kevlar.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Kevlar expedition kayak I had. I have one. That is a take apart. You sit in it, you put a skirt on it and you know I, like you know I've traveled with it. But you know, traveling around the islands by kayak really gave me a good understanding of how you can navigate around the islands on a larger craft. So once I graduated from the kayak then I started using a sailing canoe to go around the islands and you know we went around the big island around. We went around the whole state. We went.
Speaker 1:We did more ocean voyaging on our sailing canoe, unescorted, than any other, than anybody else. We anchored in places that canoes in modern days haven't ever gone, uh, and we had the most fun doing that and that. And, and you know you talk about spearfishing. You know, I know you love to spearfish. You know we would depend on spearfishing to feed ourselves.
Speaker 1:So we'd be in the most remote areas. We'd come ashore, bring the canoe onshore or anchor it offshore, set up a camp. You know, go spearing troll for fish. You know, clean, prepare, eat whatever we could catch. That was our protein. So those trips, you know, included my two daughters, my grandchildren as they got older, multiple friends, and these trips would always involve danger and problem solving and that the a lot of the, the, the kids that would come with me, you know, like my friends, kids, um, they would say after the trip that was the most fun we've ever had you know, even, even, and then then then some of them would say, you know, we like it when we have to solve problems, when know, stuff happens, you know like we were sailing across the pylolo channel once and the mass broke and my grandson was on board and he'll still talks about it to this day, you know.
Speaker 1:So you know we're in, you know stiff winds, the, but so we so that was amazing part of our lives and we also, at the same time, we were campaigning our sailing canoe in the sailing canoe races. We were, you know, part of the forefront of canoe sailing in Hawaii and it's a competitive sport. They have about eight or nine boats that run a series and they go from, you know, from island to island. But when we Do they have outriggers or they have in Hawaii, and it's a competitive sport.
Speaker 2:They have about eight or nine boats that run a series and they go from island to island. But when we Do, they have outriggers. Yeah, big keels. What keeps them from tipping over?
Speaker 1:No, they have two outriggers so it's like a trimaran and they have a 450-square-foot sail. It's kind of a primitive setup.
Speaker 2:Is it an upwind sail?
Speaker 1:No, it foot sail. It's a kind of a primitive setup. Is it an upwind sail? No, it's a downwind sail, it's it's. All these races are downwind, okay, and you've just, you know, you're going anywhere from you know six knots to 20 knots and you're catching waves, you're surfing waves. 20 knots is a lot, it's a lot. Yeah, yeah, we're flying and you're, you're flying over, you're punching into the back of the. You know the bow is going into the back of the swell. You know they're 44-foot vessels, wow.
Speaker 1:But we were very successful in our sailing. You know, we had a guy named Cappy Sheely who was a world-class sailor, paddler. You know, canoe guy, he was a multi-talented ocean guy, waterman, and so he would, you know, he said, hey, you know what we got to go light. Everybody was going heavy and strong. We went strong and light and then, you know, everybody would just sit there and sail. You know, six guys in a canoe, we paddled and sailed, and so you'd get, maybe you'd race for seven or eight hours and you might win by three minutes, and it made a difference how well you paddle in your course. And so, you know, we, we kind of dominated that sport for about five years and we, we did it for a good 10 years. We, we campaigned, uh, but I'm glad they're still doing it.
Speaker 1:But in the in, you know, like off season, we would take that same canoe that we had, we had, uh, perfected all of the parts on it, and then we go voyaging around around the state, uh, and that that was really, uh, you know great memories. And so then we decided let's go, do something a little more radical, let's go. So we bought a canoe from Nappy Napoleon and we fitted it up with a canvas and you know, all of our rigs to make it a trimaran, made another ama and we shipped it to Lakemba in Fiji, in the Lao group, and for three summers we'd go down there and I had a good friend, jeff Johnson, and my daughter, nicole, was on these trips, and my good friend, gaylord Wilcox, and we'd always have a Fijian. We'd recruit a Fijian to come with us, so it'd be five of us from Hawaii and one Fijian, and then we would from Lake Lakemba. We would go spend two or three weeks, you know, going from island to island, and we'd always bring gifts to the chief, you know we'd bring and do a ceremony and Nicole would chant. They really got a kick out of that. She'd chant in Hawaiian and and we would catch fish spearing and share the fish with the village, and then we would take them on our boat and show them how the canoes could be used as sailing, because they lost their canoe culture.
Speaker 1:So on the last trip we decided to take the canoe back to Suva to give it to a canoe club there. So we had to do a 50 mile crossing and so we came to an Island and we got some bad weather. So we had to kind of just stay at that Island for six or seven days and the weather just started to turn and they said okay, it's just like Captain Cook, you know, we're tired of you guys being around here. Time for you guys to leave. The weather's down. Bye, we love you, but you know, see you later.
Speaker 1:So we pushed off and we were in about 10 to 50 knots of wind. We're sailing to the next island it's 50 miles and we get about seven miles off that island and the front AMA, which is a flotation device, starts to crack on the front. And that's our. You know, it's a safety device. This is not a trimaran, this is just a regular outrigger canoe with one flotation device and a sail and we had a small motor that was giving us some problems because it had, by this time of the trip, it had a lot of salt water in the carburetor.
Speaker 1:So we, the, the, the, the Alma starts to crack and it's a hollow Alma. And I'm in the back there steering, and I'm petrified that the Alma is going to fill with water because it's hollow and it's been sitting in the sun for three years waiting for us, you know, to water because it's hollow and it's been sitting in the sun for three years waiting for us, you know, to do these trips. So it's brittle, that's why it cracked and it, and so the, our friend Rufus Kimura, he jumps in with a bungee cord, he starts to strap, you know, relash it. But because the front had given away, the back cracked. So I jumped in and I'm grabbing the rope you know they got about a 50 foot rope and it's coiled up.
Speaker 1:So I'm holding the ama and I'm trying to get the rope undone with one hand and untangle it, and I finally get it, you know, untangled, and I tie a bowline and I, I start to lash the back and, sure enough, we get the back lashed, the front's lashed, it's not leaking, but we're limping along and I, I'm, I'm not positive it's not going to start taking on water because it had been cracked pretty severely and you're an open ocean now, we're open ocean and the next. You know we're drifting towards australia and we don't have any means of of telling anybody we're in trouble. Fiji doesn't have coast guard, that and we didn't have a or E-Purb.
Speaker 2:This was 20 years ago.
Speaker 1:Just as much luck calling Ghostbusters yeah right, exactly so I'm there with my daughter, my friends.
Speaker 2:And how old is Nicole right now?
Speaker 1:She's 16. And I am mortified. I hope none of you guys have ever had that feeling where your gut is turning and you think you might lose one of your kids. I mean that's the worst. I mean not only kids, yourself, everybody. We're going to go down because of you.
Speaker 2:Know whatever blame you're going to catch as a captain, because you're pushing the envelope of like doing epic shit. Yeah, oops, went a bit too far. Maybe it might have gone over yeah.
Speaker 1:So we're starting to throw our dive weights over, we're making the canoe lighter and you know, we're just praying that the alma doesn't fill up with water and and that I have that mortified feeling. And and nicole is sitting up in the front you know my daughter she turns around, she looks at me with a big smile and she points her finger at me with a big smile and everybody's listening and we know what is Nicole going to say. It's just daddy, daddy, when we get back to Maui, you owe me a truck. And everybody just cracked up.
Speaker 2:Oh, we want to get her, her truck, you know.
Speaker 1:But so we we got to. We got to the reef and I knew there was a channel in the reef but the waves were blasting. I mean, it was like I'm going to when we talk waves, you know, surfers have all kinds of waves. I'm going to tell you the face of the waves were like six to eight foot faces of waves just crashing on the reef shallow reef, dry reef. So then we started going down the coastline. I knew there was a channel and I saw an opening in the reef. It was closing out every once in a while, but I could tell this is our entry. So we went through that entry and it was about a mile from there.
Speaker 1:We finally got to shore and all of the Fijians from that island, they all came running down. You know, you know where are you guys coming from, what are you guys doing? Da, da, da, da da. So a family thank, thankfully, you know adopted us. We took all our stuff up to their, their little grass house you know it's very primitive and then, luckily, we had food enough so we could provide them with food and ourselves we didn't have to, you know, eat, eat their food.
Speaker 1:And so after dinner, nicole, again she comes up to me, you know, and she says Daddy, daddy, I want to tell you something. I said what? And I'm still, you know, just reeling from this experience of having almost lost everybody. I haven't recovered yet. And she says you know, daddy, if we're ever going down, we're going to go down happy and laughing. We're not going to go down sad, because she could see how fucked up I was in that moment. And she realized, hey, you know what, if it that's not how you go down, you're going to go down, you know, fighting, charging and not remorseful. And that was a great lesson for me to to hear her say that at that age. And you know, to this day. You know we're very close, all of our family are very close. She always will remind me that part of her character that she has is a result of know challenges that we went through doing epic shit and same with lauren.
Speaker 1:You know we, we had a, you know. You know talking about our paddling trips. You know we had this. I had this great idea. You know, do an epic shit trip, let's paddle around the big island, but you know, you got to go upwind, so we started in in Kailua Kona. When you go up the Hilo, that's all upwind and then you get the Hilo it you can kind of coast to Kumukai and then you can sail down along the that Kau coast. So we got.
Speaker 1:So we got up to Waipio Valley and just canoes, don't go into Waipio Valley. You got to go through a break. We sailed in and set up camp there and then I had the bright idea let's, you know, we've got to get up to Lapuihoe. It's about a you know 20-mile slug upwind and it was blowing trades. It was, you know, blowing, you know, 12 to 15, 18 knots. So the Hawaiians would go at night sometimes because the winds were down. So I said, you know, let's learn a lesson from the Hawaiians and let's go tonight. So we left about eight o'clock at night, punched through the surf. I mean, luckily we got through because you could see the waves very well. And are you paddling?
Speaker 2:through the surf. We're paddling through the surf and we start paddling upwind.
Speaker 1:And we had power bars I'll never eat another power bar, but that was our food, yeah. And so we paddled all night long. And if you let up paddling just the slightest amount, the canoe would start to swing Right, and then you had a hard time getting it back up into the wind. So you had to keep it, you had to keep the power on and go straight into the wind. And so we, we finally got up to alapoy hoy the next morning and everybody was exhausted, and that's when I experienced my first mutiny.
Speaker 1:So they they said okay, okay gang, uh, you know, la, you know, and they all ganged up and says Mike, we're not going one inch further upwind, we're turning around and going back. So I had no choice and so we turned around and we sailed back to Waipio Valley and we had a beautiful sail. We caught a nice big ulua and we presented it to Takia Frondaonda, who was a you know, our kind of, our host in the valley, hawaiian guide in there, and um, he had a bunch of people there. He fed all of them and then we sailed back to kawaii and and then we shipped the canoe back to maui.
Speaker 1:But you know um, talking, you know so that that was something that lauren talks about and and ribs me about. You know that that trip where we had to paddle at night, and I don't know if you, if you listen to the Yeti podcast, you know you can catch her uh on on the podcast about, and she mentions that and she, she also burns me a lot in that podcast. But you know I, you know she's, she's, she's sponsored by Yeti and she has a. But you know I, you know she's, but with love, she, she's sponsored by yeti and she has a. You know um, leaning into the wind. You guys would like seeing that uh yeti film. If you go, if you go on youtube, you can see her. It's about 11 minutes and it talks about her family and it talks about her. She's quite an accomplished uh athlete and she's also a very inspirational uh person and you know some of the things that she's. She's done um to help people fellow paddlers, young paddlers and and people in general.
Speaker 2:You know, spreading the lowest spirit, quite, quite remarkable you know I I've never taken a single, uh single paddle stroke in an outrigger canoe, but I think about that film quite often and when I'm up against tough stuff, there's something about the look on Lauren's face in a couple of those shots it's like there's just nothing in the world that she is going to turn away from. You know she's going to get after it and I love that about her. Haven't had the pleasure of meeting her yet. Hope to someday, whether it's hunting here or diving over there, uh, something like that.
Speaker 1:But yeah, she, she's pretty incredible and that that was a really great film, one of the best that yeti ever did you know she did this um texas water safari race with uh, jt van Zandt and that's also on a Yeti Films, but that race was two days of torture and you know they were doing it, you know to get a badge, but it's a competition and they won their competition. But the amount of grit that she exhibited in those two days and you know, kind of using the F word and almost blacking out you know, on some of the, you know it's hot mosquitoes, alligators, and it's just, you know, crazy trip, but that's another one that's pretty cool. Crazy trip, uh, but that's another one that's pretty cool. But you know it's lauren.
Speaker 1:Getting back to lauren, when she was conceived, um, jill and I and she's pregnant we did a canoe trip down the north shore of molokai on our three-man canoe and so, uh, and we camped and we ran out of food, we had to eat opihis and we caught, luckily, we caught fish and we went down to kalapapa.
Speaker 1:It's a little muscle that that hangs onto the rocks like limp it right, yeah it's a limp, it um, but I I that is really the beginning of lauren's paddling career is being in the womb of Jill, while we went down this shoreline, this beautiful shoreline of Molokai, just absolutely magnificent. And I remember one morning waking up and hearing a rock fall, and so the rocks were falling off the cliffs and actually hit our canoe that was parked on the rocks and the beach there when we camped at Waikolo Valley. And also when we, you know, when we were walking along the coastline, we heard some rocks falling and a goat had fallen off, I don't know, from 800 feet up or so and hit it sounded like a cannon going off. But that was kind of Lauren's first, before she was born, paddling experience that got her going. So you know, you were asking, you know one of the things you were talking about is boat wrecks. So you know, I got to think, I got to say that that Fijian trip was, you know, really, really amazing that we pulled that off.
Speaker 1:We also had another situation where we were approaching an island and we started to swamp and swamping a canoe is not a good thing, but we were able to get the canoe dry and get to shore, uh, but I remember the, the guy that we were with dolati. He was praying in fijian that we wouldn't sink, you know, and he was bailing like mad and we pulled that off um, another, another time, uh, that we had kind of an interesting experience. We were sailing around Caho'olavi, on the backside of Caho'olavi, and again, you know, if you get in trouble over there you're going to get blown out, you know, out into the big blue, and we were sailing down these 12-foot waves catching these waves, and it was so much fun. And then all of a sudden we jibed and we flipped over and so we started to, you know, get the canoe popped back over again.
Speaker 1:We all climbed back in and where's Nicole? She was. She was the canoe was starting to sail away and she was behind the canoe. So grab the fishing line. So she grabbed the fishing line and then we retrieved her, we pulled her in, got her on the boat and we keep pulling the fishing line in. There was a mahi-mahi on the back of that, so we put that in the boat. I mean, you can't make this shit up. So we got the fish and then we saw a turtle came up and so that's her amakua. That's sort of her savior of God, the amakua is the turtle. So we came into a little bay and got everything organized and continued on our journey. You know, but those are the kind of experiences that my kids had to endure growing up with me as their scout leader.
Speaker 2:What would Eddie Vedder say?
Speaker 1:Eddie Vedder. So we were I mentioned this to you, so you brought it up but we were sailing from Maui to Molokai and it was windy. We shouldn't have gone. But we went and Eddie wanted to come. Eddie had been hearing about our canoe voyaging trips and so he was dying to go on a trip with us. So, okay, okay, eddie, we're gonna come and. And then, you know, we had another experienced paddler, this gal, that wanted to come and and oh, can I bring my friend, you know? So we had an extra seat. So we sailed over to Molokai and and we're trying to get upwind and we I I had a guy named Pef on there that had heart surgery a few months earlier. He couldn't paddle. I didn't have any paddlers. Usually I have these young kids that can paddle, like Lauren and Nicole and their friends.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're the engine, they're the engine.
Speaker 1:They can go all day long. But I had and never after that did I ever take an experienced crew with me on the voyage. I learned my lesson. So we flipped over and you know I was trying to ask this. I had this one gal who's not experienced and we were in irons and I said, okay, could you get out on the tramp? No, get out, get out. And I wanted her to get out on the tramp and I didn't say tramp, I said get out. And she got ready to jump out of the. I said, what are you doing? I'm gonna get out. No, get on the tramp. But it was like you know, she wasn't experienced. You know I want people that you don't even have to tell them they were supposed to do.
Speaker 1:But this, this was a situation where so we didn't have the weight out there and we got in the irons and then the sheet line got tangled and so we couldn't release the sail. We flipped over. So we get to get the canoe back up and everybody, you know all of us knew what to do. We get back in the canoe, except for eddie and this one gal who couldn't swim very well. She, she was a gal that shouldn't have been on the trip and so they're holding the paddles for flotation. We're in the canoe, we have a few paddles and and we're drifting away from them and you know, you know, we try to throw the anchor and the anchor lines tangled, and you know, just, it's compounded errors. And so, luckily, my good friend, keith baxter, and his daughter are, see, see them in the water and they go and rescue them and they come and get us and they tow us up to honamuni, where we were.
Speaker 1:We're going to camp and we go ashore and we had the most amazing celebration of survival, survivalist, you know. So we made a campfire and we, we drank some wine, we, we ate some, we had fish, we ate some fish. You know, eddie and I were the last two standing. Everybody left, and you know I'll never forget this. He gives me a big hug and he says, mike, I'll go with you anywhere. And I almost, you know, lost him. And he's saying I'll go with you anywhere. And I was so stoked to hear that and so I, I would say, at any time, um, we see each other again. It's it's, it's huggles, for sure, you know. Uh, for, for, for, for the for having, whenever anybody goes through an experience like that and lives through it. You're friends for life, you know. So that was a cool, cool experience. We had another one.
Speaker 1:Since we're on the subject, we're sailing down. We're sailing our vessel to Oahu to race it, and we had a gal from Molokai on board that we wanted to drop off at a beach called Mo'omomi. Now Mo'omomi has a is all beaches are different, but Mo'omomi has a trade wind swell that hits it and it's steep. So we, we decide, okay, we're going to, we're going to just catch a wave in there and sail in there. And so we, we, we actually don't're gonna just catch a wave in there and and sail in there. And so we, we, we actually don't want to catch a big wave, we want to just kind of go in on the back of a wave if we can. But we get, once we start getting into this broad reach, we can't slow us down and we're on a wave and it's non-stop, right to the beach. We're flying and we hit the beach, and with so much force that it breaks our two yaku's and the ama gets, you know, broken. And so we push up on the beach, get every, you know, push the boat up. Two of my paddlers had bailed out, one of them actually, jumping out, got caught on one of the lines and injured his his knee, which was unfortunate.
Speaker 1:We get the boat up on the beach, we take it apart and then my, you know, call up my, my Hawaiian friends, adolph Helm and his son Kanoho. They come down and they help me and they, okay, how are we going to get the boat up to the car to get it to Kanakakai? We've got to ship it to Honolulu and we don't have enough bodies to carry it. And plus, you know, one of my crew members is injured and they're all like I don't want to do anything, you know we're done. But Kanoho says, okay, you know what, anything, you know we're, we're, we're done.
Speaker 1:But kanoa says, okay, you know what, let's push it in this. So we took it down to the sand and in about you know four inches of water, you know where, the waves, we, we just pushed it, you know, in. You know it was like floating, just the hull. We pushed it, got it up on the, got it up on the truck, we put it on young brothers on the next day, shipped it to oahu, borrowed some yaku's came from the big island. What's a yaku. Yaku is the connecting point for the flotation on the boat.
Speaker 2:It's like a, like a strut, yeah, yeah so we took it.
Speaker 1:We took it to uh, young brothers, um, shipped it to oahu and put it together the next weekend and raced and won the race.
Speaker 1:Really it was like amazing. It was amazing that we could have pulled it off and still, you know, got the spare parts and everything and got that done. So that was an incredible experience. And I know Eddie Vedder acknowledged you know the gal, you know Ashley Baxter and Keith Baxter at one of his concerts. You know, and you know he, you know, gave me all kinds of albums and stuff of his music. Have you ever heard his stuff? Oh yeah, do you like him? Yeah, yeah, great, yeah, yeah. So, anyway, that that was. That was my boat crash experience on that one.
Speaker 1:Tahiti or Fiji, tahiti. Yeah, you know we love to go to Tahiti. What we do, what we've done in recent years, we've done bare boat charters. You know we've. You know talking about epic shit. You know we charter a catamaran down there and take the family and go fishing, diving, surfing Made lots of friends in Fiji.
Speaker 1:You know, when we go to Huahini, you know we have friends there that you know we're the party. We come ashore, it's okay, we're coming to your house to barbecue, we bring all the food and everything and you know their friends come and we just have the most fun. And you know their friends come and we just have the we have the most fun and you know t is a very localized, local localism place too and like. Like there's a place called uh fete. That is a really good surf spot and the locals are very protective. You know, if they, if they don't like you, they just said, hey, go in. You white boy or holly boy, you know.
Speaker 1:And so I remember I went out there and I got dropped off. I'm going to swim back to our boat and so I go out to the lineup. There's all these, you know, heavy, heavy duty Fijian regulators out there, you know, and I and I see Liz Clark, you know. So I go up to Liz, you know, says hey, which guy is Smitty? Cause Smitty is like the main regulator, so he's like that big guy over there, you know. So I swim up to Smitty, you know, I put my hand out and he shakes my hand. I says hey, jeff Johnson said to say hi, and Petey, no shit. Hey, mike, meet all, meet all these guys, you know, cause you know he had. Actually, when he was in high school he stayed with Jeff on the North shore and surfed and got to know, and he and his son worked together in carpentry. So hey, meet, meet Mike, you know everybody, and so I got to know all those, all those local guys you know and, um, you know, and so that's that's how we roll.
Speaker 1:You know we try to, we try to bring the Aloa spirit and we're not, you know, like if you go surfing we take our turn. And you know, I remember another, another place we we surfed at, you know we had some stuff from the kind you know. So you know, we gave stuffed leashes and some board pads and things that they wanted to the to the locals, you know, and they were always, always nice to us. They just kind of picked up the vibe hey, these guys are respectful. You know, like some people go out and they'll try and catch every wave and paddle around you and that's not, that's not how we, that's not how we roll. But yeah, fiji is a is a great place. Uh, you know we, I remember Lauren was pregnant with her first.
Speaker 1:I think maybe it was her second child, leah, and she was seven months pregnant and she was surfing Tava Roa cloud break and and I remembered, I can never forget watching her cutting out at shish kebabs and going up in the air and and just twisting so she wouldn't land on her belly and landing on her back and she said, oh, I could feel Lea just cringing. The baby was cringing because she was, you know, pushing the envelopes, you know surfing with her when she was quite pregnant. But yeah, we had lots of fun experiences at Tavaroa and Nomotu family trips, surfing. In fact, you know, jim and I went to Numotu several times surfing and he's a great athlete and a really good surfer and he's the one that invited me to hunt here, jim Kennedy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is his ranch and his lodge and I've guided for him for many years now.
Speaker 1:He had a great time surfing there and caught some fabulous waves and he still thinks about how fun it was. One more hunting story, sure, okay. So Africa. So I met a guy from Australia that was formerly from Zimbabwe Rhodesia back then and I introduced him to hunting on Molokai. We had access to hunting on Molokai. So he called me up a couple years later and says Mike, my cousin has invited us to do the last hunt on their ranch in Zimbabwe. It's being expropriated by the government, the white government.
Speaker 1:At the time Apartheid was going strong and they wanted, you know, greenbacks. So they were going to take it over and try, and, you know, sell safaris on this ranch. So I flew down there and the guy that in, that guy that was hosting us, was the cousin of my friend, rick townsend, and, and, uh, paul halsted is his name. He's still down there and so he's 22 years old and he's, you know, he's no, no concern for our safety. He just is just like wild young buck. You know, let's just go in. And we had, we had a farm tags. We could, we could basically shoot anything. So so we, we, we shot some zebra, uh, for, and we, we kept the skins, but we hung the zebras up in trees for for lions and I had.
Speaker 1:I, you know, I went on a Cape buffalo hunt with a guide and you know there was. It's hard you see like 40, 50, 80 Cape buffalo in a herd. It's hard to pick out the bull. They all kind of look alike. So anyway, I shot and you know, and I wounded a Cape buffalo and there's hardly any trees around. They're dangerous, they'll stalk you and kill you. They're a dangerous animal. And so we go and we stalk this animal, we want to kill it. We keep going and he sees it out there and he says, okay, there it is. So it's a pretty long shot. For this I was using I think it was, a 450 caliber rifle and so I'm, so I'm having a you know I'm shooting high because it's a, you know, 200 yard shot or so I nicked the back of the supposed bull that I had wounded supposed wounded, not elephant Cape buffalo.
Speaker 2:Cape buffalo.
Speaker 1:So I nicked the back and the shot goes into the ear of the calf. So two Cape buffalos dropped dead like that. So we had meat to give to the villagers. Not the only one that's shot, two with one shot, but that was kind of an interesting thing. So later on we see the lionesses along. You know that are in the area. They're following the buffalo herd. So we see a lioness, we shoot. We see a lioness, we shoot. We wound a lioness. This is a full-grown 400 and 350 pound animal, wound it. So we have to go and stalk it. So we we get out and one of the guys, the cousin, the guy took the molokai from Australia, that formerly from South Africa. He decides that he will guard the truck.
Speaker 2:So he's going to stay back and make sure nobody nothing to do with it.
Speaker 1:You know he knows how dangerous it is to go. You know, go after a wounded lioness. So we have the. We have, you know, paul myself, we both have guns. And then there's one other guy that has a gun, and then we have our black guy with an axe. You know, he's the bravest guy of all, he's our guide. So we start to stalk and we see that we see it, the wounded lioness, and we shoot and it drags itself into the tall grass. So we go and we just figure, you know what, we're going to, let it die, we'll give it as much time as it needs to die, we don't need to go in there. So we wait, and the other South African guy that's with us, he's up in the tree.
Speaker 1:So I'm from Hawaii. I don't know really what's going on. I'm hunting axis deer all the Hawaii. I don't know really what's going on. I'm hunting, you know, axis deer all the time, I don't know what. But so the guy says, okay, I want to have a smoko. The 22-year-old guy, paul Halstead, let's go in and get him. So he comes out of the tree and he's got, you know, the tip of his head, the shorts on, you know, and tip of his he's got the shorts on, you know and his knees are shaking when I see that I'm going. Oh shit, and at this point I only have one round left. And so I said hey, do you think I could borrow one bullet from you, you know? So I get a bullet, so I, you know the bullet. I had had been gone in and out so many hunts that the actual head was compressed into the shell. So that's a defective shell anyway.
Speaker 2:And it's something that's common with these big African cartridges is that cartridge that's inside the magazine due to recoil is constantly getting smashed by the rifle so that bullet compresses down into the brass.
Speaker 1:So I put that it was my second and I put the other one in, you know, I load that in, you know, and we take it off safety and we start to walk into the grass and I know I have at least two bullets. And then we get about 10 steps from this tall grass where the lioness had gone into bed and died, and all of a sudden the grass moves like that and a lioness comes out and literally just leaps at us you can see the yellow in the eye leaps at us to kill us for having killed the sister. And we shoot, we all shoot, and you know, fortunately, two rounds chested her and one either came out the back, or the third one might have gone in the back. And so then I you know you're crapping in your pants, so I put the other round in it jams. So I don't have any protection at this point, you know.
Speaker 2:You're out of gas. You're out of gas, we're out of gas.
Speaker 1:So here we have a, we have the lioness at our feet, you know, literally at our feet, dead. We go in, we found this, we find the other one dead in inside and uh, so we, you know, we, we had, you know, we had there's a bushman there and we helped us, you know, get them all skinned out. And I have the skin at my house in my attic. That's where it belongs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I just want to remind people that are feeling some kind of way about this that you need to consider what hunting was like when Zimbabwe was called Rhodesia. Right, like we need to think about things within the context of their times. Yeah, that's a crazy hunting adventure. That's doing epic shit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm sure that some of you listening to this podcast wish the lioness had finished us off, if you're a lion lover. But we got the better edge of it, Thank God to technology. But I tell you what, when we were there, when we killed our water buck and our kudu and you know eland, all the meat went to the native tribes there. You know which is a?
Speaker 2:big deal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the people that we were with, you know they had, you know, africans working for them and they built a school so that africans could be well educated. And you know and just, but it wasn't. It was, wasn't that many years after that that, um, rhodesia, you know, they gave up apartheid and they, they uh, expropriated the farms and Rhodesia, back in the day, was the breadbasket for Africa and once they expropriated the farms and they had, you know, very corrupt rulership, it really went into, you know, great recession and poverty. And you know, just to this day, rhodesia is a very broken country.
Speaker 2:Yeah, tough times, and there's so many different sides to those stories all the time, and there's always an evil, no matter what. But, yeah, you've done a lot of incredible things. I've got to ask you, though, a couple things. One, what kind of truck did Nicole get?
Speaker 1:She got a Tacoma, she got a.
Speaker 2:Tacoma. Yeah, the patron truck of Hawaii. And two. What's the next adventure? What's the next epic? Thing, you're going to do so.
Speaker 1:I have to say that I want to just rewind last year, because we did. We. You know, like I said, I'm a marathon swimmer, and so, my buddies, we decided that we wanted to swim the Cook Straits. Now, Cook Straits is between South and North Island, so last year we finally got Phil Rush to agree to pilot us at the end of the season Of the Cook Islands. No New Zealand.
Speaker 2:So North and.
Speaker 1:South Island, new Zealand. There's a channel between those two islands. It's very rough, you know. It's like 24 miles, 26 miles, and it's a hard swim to complete because of the currents and big fish, big current, cold water. And so we pulled that off, barely got across in 12 hours in a relay and one of our relay members we had five of us one of the relay members had some issues with the cold water and couldn't continue, so he dropped out. The four of us had to pick with the cold water and couldn't continue, so he dropped out. The four of us had to pick up the slack.
Speaker 1:So, to answer your question, the next epic adventure is those guys that I swam that channel with. They're coming back in October and we're going to swim the three Maui channels in a relay. We're going to go from Lanai to Maui, to Molokai and back to lanai. So that that's our next epic uh adventure that we're going to do. And and then we're hoping to go back to tahiti this summer, uh, with the family. Um, we also this summer we did two epic shit trips, you know we we did a trip into kalalau by kayak all of the grandchildren and my daughters and we had 15 of us on that, you know, because we had some friends come along and that was really super fun, great experience for the kids to do, you know, get them off social media, get them, you know, in the water, swimming, kayaking, hiking, in the valleys. And we also did a trip on the North Shore of Molokai with the family. We took some of our Molokai friends and we spent three nights on the backside of Molokai fishing and diving and hiking.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I'm 77 years old. So, yeah, I'm 77 years old and I like to think that I'm trying to set an example for old people. To, number one, be cheerful, be optimistic, you know. Be thankful for what you have, you know, be gracious about the gifts that are given to you and thankful for that. And also, to just stay healthy and keep doing Epic Shed. And that's our motto Just love being able to share my passion for the outdoors, for hunting, for diving, for surfing, for fishing, voyaging with friends and family. Yeah, and take some risks, friends and family.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and take some risks. Calculated, yeah, calculated risks yeah, don't get too comfortable.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so all right. Well, it's an absolute pleasure. I love these stories and, yeah, look forward to seeing you on Maui one of these days, or seeing you back here again.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, thanks for the opportunity to share some of these stories with you, and blessings to all of you and your families, wherever you are listening to this and do epic shit.
Speaker 2:Yep Agreed. Bye everybody. I just want to take a second and thank everyone who's written a review, who has sent mail, who's sent emails, who's sent messages. Your support is incredible, and I also love running into you at trade shows and events and just out on the hillside when we're hunting. I think that that's fantastic. I hope you guys keep adventuring as hard and as often as you can. Art for the Six Ranch Podcast was created by John Chatelain and was digitized by Celia Harlander. Original music was written and performed by Justin Hay, and the Six Ranch Podcast is now produced by Six Ranch Media. Thank you all so much for your continued support of the show and I look forward to next week when we can bring you a brand new episode.