Aloha Hanalei
Well friends, it’s time to mark another notch on the Holo Holo Charters timeline! January 2023 is officially going down as the month and year we sold our Hanalei operations and brought all the chips back home to Port Allen to reinvest in our home-base operations—woo hoo!
Yep, we sold our two Hanalei Bay permits, our two badass RHIB boats, and pretty much all the related supporting assets, all in one convenient package. It’s a big deal, but we’re passing everything along to a really solid guy, and for that reason, we’re feeling great about it.
Does the name Evan Valiere ring a bell? He’s a pro surfer and he grew up here on the north shore, so you might have heard of him. Anyway—he’s our guy!
And he’s a great guy. His dad taught him to surf here on Kauai and eventually, he went pro! He came in 5th at Pipeline, got on all the magazines, traveled the world, and came back home to mama Kauai where he lives on the north shore, in the house he grew up in, with his wife and daughter. It’s pretty cute!
Currently, Evan owns Hanalei Surf School and he organizes the annual 17-mile Napali Coast SUP, paddleboard, and outrigger canoe race here on Kauai. He’s grounded and thoughtful, and when the opportunity arose to pass this portion of our business along to Evan, it just felt right. It felt pono.
You gotta understand, this is all very personal to us. We built those boats here on Kauai, and we put a decade of our collective blood, sweat, and tears into that business. Over our ten seasons in Hanalei, we took more than 55,000 passengers out on epic wet-and-wild Napali Coast adventures! Our business survived the Kauai Flood of 2018, Covid-19, and the 2021 landslide! There were highs, there were lows, and now… it’s all behind us.
It’s important to us that we’re passing everything along to a respected member of the community, who knows and cares about Hanalei Bay deeply, rather than some out-of-state investor or something like that.
The hardest part of closing this chapter is breaking the news to our north shore staff— the many captains, crew members, and support all-stars that have been part of the journey. There were lots of magical Hanalei days, but there were plenty of challenges over the years too. Challenges we were able to weather because of the loyalty and creativity of our Holo Holo north shore contingent. Sounds cliché, but we couldn’t have done it without you.
Big mahalos to our friends at Tahiti Nui, Hanalei’s iconic tiki bar! Thank you for sharing your space and giving us a home base in Hanalei all these years. Talk about location–it was really cool for us to be partnered with such a north shore institution!
Also, big shout-out to our friends at the Waipa Foundation that totally saved our butts following the massive flood of 2018. The area by the Hanalei River mouth, where we normally operate, was completely washed out overnight, and if the folks at Waipa wouldn’t have graciously housed our operation, we’d have been unable to run any tours at all in the 2018 and 2019 season.
Thanks to our reliable and hard-working caterers at the North Shore General Store (in Princeville Center—really good food, check it out!) , and to the north shore community in general. That’s a community that knows how to come together when times get tough, and we learned a lot and made some lasting relationships being part of it.
Meanwhile, we’ll be down here in Port Allen, focusing and reinvesting all our energy and resources into our base catamaran operations here. We’re remodeling our offices and customer check-in center in the Port Allen Marina this spring, which will be a big upgrade, and (teaser!) there are plans a-brewing to use our brand new boat building space to update the Port Allen fleet.
Holo Holo Charters’ years of operating in Hanalei are officially over! We wish Evan all the abundance and success, and we’re excited to continue evolving here in Port Allen and living up to our reputation as the best boat tour company on Kauai.