For close to 50 years, Paddy Boy Malama of Kekaha has fished and hunted Na Pali, his exploits are so renowned that Steven Akana of Pakala Camp in Makaweli wrote a song in his honor titled “The Ballad of Paddy Boy Malama.” The tune is played occasionally on the Westside’s KUAI-AM radio station.
As a boy, Paddy Boy’s father Joseph Ku Malama taught him the ways of Na Pali, “hunting, fishing, picking limu” when they traveled down the coast aboard the family’s handmade 21-foot motor boat “Malama,” which held 21 people. Launching it from Polihale Beach by “rolling it on any logs and sticks available.” After his fathers untimely death, when Paddy Boy was a Waimea High School freshman, his Uncle Joe Quin Malama took over and Na Pali became a life long passion and ongoing adventure for the Westside man. If your lucky on a sun-filled day, you might still see this legend fishing the coast in his own boat, “Da Hawaiian.”
Looking back on his trips to Na Pali made during his youth, Paddy Boy says, “their was more fish and goats, not so many turtles as you where permitted to take them, but their was more life on the coast.”
“We never saw anyone one but hunters hiking except Dr. Wheatley who came in about 40 years ago.” Wheatley was a doctor from Jamaica who following the death of his wife became a hermit living in a cave along the coast at Kalalau.
Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Malama said there was a gentlemen’s agreement about how the coast and its resources should be used. “The Westsiders would go as far as Honopu, leaving Kalalau and up the coast for the North Shore crew,” he said. “Nu’alolo Kai, everyone would meet there, Louie Rego from Lihu’e, Carlos Andrade’s father Lawrence Andrade from Kapa’a.” The men would spend the night together to fish and talk story at this valley, which has a reef and boat anchorage.
“There was quite a few people on the coast” then, but few tourists and hikers. “Their was no tours then but my uncle would sometimes take friends from the Mainland down the coast and show them the sea caves and waterfalls,” he said. As with the family name “Malama” (Hawaiian for respect, honor, care), the family elders taught all the children to care for the coast. The ancient sites “were kapu, because sacred, yeah? So we never knew too much about the old-time stuff in this place,” Malama said in a recent issue of Hawaiian Air’s in-flight magazine Hana Hou.
When fishing, Malama said, “we just used to catch only what we could use, never sold…for family use.”
For years the local family’s enjoyed Na Pali alone from the time the last Native Hawaiian Na Pali dwellers had left their homes in the remote valleys in 1919 until the beginning of organized charter boat tours of Na Pali began out of Hanalei.
“In the late 60’s the hippies started hiking in, but few tour boats till Clancey Greff and Harada started their Zodiac tours (In the late 1970’s) then things got loco.”
As for the future, Malama hopes “local people get more chances of getting permit, state could change the rulings so it would be easier” for them to enjoy the coast. “I feel the state is keeping their children from going,” he said.
