Episode 69 - MV Holoholo
Tanner: Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of Beyond the Breakers, a podcast about shipwrecks, loss, and lessons learned from maritime disasters. My name is Tanner, I am one of your hosts, and I’m here with our other host Taylor. How’s it going?
Taylor: Pretty good. Can’t complain, it’s a nice day here in Ohio and everything, it’s going pretty good. How about yourself?
Tanner: I’m doin’ pretty well. Have you gotten up to anything interesting in the 20 minutes since I talked to you last?
Taylor: [laughs] Yeah, we just recorded a bonus episode right before this. Um, nothing new. I’m sitting here eating a bagel. Yesterday, however, had a pretty good adventure. We went out to Yellow Springs, Ohio. Yellow Springs is a pretty cool place, it sort of has like an Asheville, North Carolina or an Austin, Texas sort of vibe but in a small town in Ohio. It’s a little different than a lot of the small towns, it’s a lot of art and that kind of stuff there. But it’s a lot of fun. There’s a lot of outdoor activities too, there’s a lot of hiking and that kind of stuff there. A lot of biking. We ate at a place called the Ye Olde Trail Tavern, which apparently has been around since 1852, at least the building and the tavern has…
Tanner: …pretty old.
Taylor: …so yeah, by American standards, pretty old. It was cool, it was kind of German-inspired stuff, kind of like a pub menu but definitely with like some German flair. A lot of brat, a lot of schnitzel, that kind of thing.
Tanner: A lot of wursts?
Taylor: Lot of wursts. Had some excellent currywurst with like a curry ketchup, that was really good there. And then I had a pork schnitzel sandwich that was excellent, covered in beer cheese. So yeah, if you’re ever in the Yellow Springs area, give that a glance. It was fun. What about you? What have you been up to?
Tanner: For our listeners, Yellow Springs, Ohio, also the hometown of noted trans ally Dave Chappelle.
Taylor: [laughs] yes. Yes, it is.
Tanner: For me, what have I been up to? Well, mostly writing two episodes for this podcast, although that was all concentrated in about an eighteen hour span.
Taylor: [laughs] some prolific writing.
Tanner: Right. Um, I hope the quality shines through on these two. But I did actually do a little bit of reading too, I actually started the third in the Alatriste novel series. Last episode or the one before I referenced reading the second one, got through that one, and I started on the third one ‘cause they’re just about the perfect length for me right now as I’m trying to balance other stuff. They’re good, compact little stories and I can read them in Spanish for some practice. The third one in Spanish is called El sol de Breda. I think in English it’s called The Sun Over Breda. It’s interesting to read about the Dutch revolt and specifically the siege of Breda from this perspective because it comes up so often in reading about the lead up to the British Civil Wars, which I really like reading about, just because a lot of the people fighting in the English Civil Wars, the British Civil Wars, didn’t have military experience and were kinda figuring it out for the first time. The ones that did primarily gained it fighting in The Netherlands against the Spanish, notably at places like Breda, or otherwise serving with the Swedes under Gustavus Adolphus. So yeah, it’s kinda interesting, I’ve read a lot of that side of things, kind of the English, more Protestant-y side of things, and so reading, even though it’s just a novel, from the Spanish side is interesting.
Taylor: It’s not a period of time that I’m very acquainted with, but sounds interesting.
Tanner: Yeah, the Dutch revolt is interesting because it’s this very long, protracted war, I mean it’s called the Eighty Years’ War for a reason, with like very few actual pitched battles involved, where it is a series of sieges, just slogging it out with towns going back and forth, obviously that leads to a lot of sacks and looting and all of the terrible things that go along with that. So yeah, it is kind of a…definitely not as widely known conflict, especially ‘cause it’s kind of under the umbrella of the Thirty Years’ War that’s a little more widely known. Yeah, so it’s an interesting read, and I’m, again, picking up a lot of good vocabulary from it.
Taylor: Nice.
Tanner: But anyway, we should can the banter ‘cause we have a long episode coming up here.
Taylor: Let’s do it.
Tanner: I’m glad we did have some laughs at the beginning though, because this is not one that’s very conducive to them.
Taylor: Oh no.
Tanner: So we are gonna go somewhere new. I hinted at it very directly on Twitter by posting a map of the Hawaiian Islands. That is our location this week, we’ve never, I don’t think, traveled to Hawaii on this podcast.
Taylor: No, I don’t think so.
Tanner: Except to refer to Captain Cook getting killed there in The Bounty bonus episode.
Taylor: Yeah.
Tanner: So the ship we’re talking about today…ship…boat, I’ll kinda go between the two, is called the MV Holoholo. A nice Hawaiian name there.
Taylor: It is very Hawaiian. Lilo and Stitch didn’t teach me that one, what does that mean?
Tanner: It was not in the vocabulary list. The name Holoholo is Hawaiian for “to go out for pleasure.” In some documents you’ll see the name written incorrectly as two words, Holo Holo, that is not the accepted way that that’s written. So yeah, it’s a solid name for this boat, as we’ll see. So Holoholo was initially launched in 1963 and was commissioned by Arthur F. Stubenberg who’s a pretty noteworthy figure in the history of Hawaii, at least in the American history of Hawaii due to his role in the industrialization of the sugar and pineapple industries. Kind of a big name there, him and his son were both pretty instrumental in that. For the time that Stubenberg owned Holoholo, this was used purely as a pleasure craft, just a fun boat to go out in and enjoy the water on, and that designation as a pleasure craft will be kind of important later. So Holoholo had a register length of 77.4 feet with an overall length of 90 feet. A register breadth of 25.4 feet and a register depth of 4.6 feet. This didn’t initially jump out at me as anything out of the ordinary, but her proportions are noted as being a little bit odd for an ocean-going vessel.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: With a length-to-beam ratio of 3.6 to 1 rather than the more common 5 to 1 ratio. In addition to being a little bit…you know, stubby…structurally she was a flat-bottomed, hard-chine, steel vessel, quoting from the Coast Guard report. “Chine” was a new term for me, actually. I didn’t know what this referred to, and it just refers to the shape of the hull, so a hard-chine craft is one that has…if you flip it over you can see more angles, basically, more angular segments with sharper, more defined corners. Compared to a soft-chine vessel that has the same sort of change but they’re much smoother, they’re less sharp angles. It’s not hugely important to the story, but it was just a new term that I found and was interested in. I wasn’t sure how to pronounce it at first, so I went on YouTube to see if I could find someone saying it, and I actually came across a really interesting YouTube channel called Adventure Otaku. He was talking specifically about kayaks, demonstrating the differences, and yeah, I came literally just for the first 30 seconds to hear him say the word and I ended up watching the whole video and really wanting to buy a kayak.
Taylor: Nice! [laughs]
Tanner: A successful video, I would say.
Taylor: Yeah, I would say so.
Tanner: So anyway, we talked a little bit about the ship herself. So we look at all these features, she’s got this flat bottom, she has a blunt bow, she’s gonna take waves really hard.
Taylor: That’s what I was thinking, like this sounds like a boat that is designed to be in protected water or like a large lake or something. It just feels like out on ocean swells and stuff, you’re gonna feel everything. It’s sorta like how a sports car isn’t designed for comfort necessarily, like a Cadillac, it’s not necessarily the fastest car but it’s super smooth and everything’s comfortable, but if you get into like a Mustang, you feel every bump.
Tanner: This is definitely not a craft that was ever designed to be taking really any sort of rough seas. You know, it’s designed to go out and relax, if the weather’s getting rough, you should probably bring it in. In mid-September of 1978, there’s a change in her ownership and this involves a deal being worked out to sell her to John Laney who is described as a quote “professional airline pilot and novice mariner.”
Taylor: I don’t like that, ‘cause he’s probably pretty confident from being a pilot…
Tanner: [laughs]
Taylor: ...but the “novice mariner” part, you know…
Tanner: …I don’t know if this is a real thing, they talk about it on an episode of Criminal Minds, so it’s probably not, but it’s that whole idea of like brain surgery delusion where you think you can do one thing that’s really, really challenging, and so you think that you can do everything. Or like a doctor Ben Carson thing, you know, super, super talented doctor, obviously, maybe that’s the only thing he’s super talented at. [laughs]
Taylor: [laughs] right.
Tanner: So yeah, John Laney is purchasing this vessel from Stubenberg. The terms of the sale are kind of interesting. They allowed for payment to be made in installments with Stubenberg actually retaining the title to the craft while Laney was allowed to take immediate possession of it.
Taylor: It was like a rent-to-own scheme.
Tanner: Kind of, yeah. So the total sale amount was for $75,000 with an additional down payment of $10,000. I don’t think I ever saw what the amounts were for those installments, but it doesn’t really matter because he doesn’t get that many chances to pay them.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: We’ll talk about why. So this leads to a situation where Stubenberg’s name will appear on subsequent documents in the coming investigation, though he basically has nothing to do with the vessel at this time. That interesting ownership situation kinda does end up mattering, because his name gets drawn into this where otherwise it wouldn’t be. So very soon after acquiring Holoholo, Laney, the new owner, he jumped into some plans to charter her out as a research vessel.
Taylor: This man’s doing Airbnb with a ship.
Tanner: Uh, yeah, it seems very clear…
Taylor: …he’s financing the purchase of this vessel with like zero plans to operate it, but just to like, charter it out right away. This is a money-making venture for him.
Tanner: Yeah, definitely seems that way. I don’t know that it was explicitly stated there, but just the timeline, you can see this was always the plan for him buying a vessel like this, wanting to outfit it and rent it out for profit. The first time that this happened, that she was used for research purposes, this was near the end of October 1978. So this is just like a little over a month after this initial acquisition. This was the first of six planned research voyages for an ocean thermal energy conversion project in coordination with the University of Hawaii. I wanted to read a little bit more about this, the basic concept is pretty straightforward. When I thought I might have to bulk this episode up a little bit, I was planning to do more research on this process, this OTEC process. Essentially it’s using the difference in temperature between ocean currents to sort of extract energy from the ocean. I certainly don’t understand the physics of how that works, but it is a thing being looked into, and apparently is still being looked into.
Taylor: That was actually gonna be my next question, is this like something that was a thing in the ‘70s that we decided isn’t worthwhile, or are we still doing this.
Tanner: Yeah, I mean my understanding is that it’s not like alchemy, it’s not something that we’ve ditched in the past. I really don’t know what the status of it is right now. But that was kind of the goal here, looking for potential areas to set up a facility to work with this. So on October 6th, Holoholo underwent inspection for a certification as a small passenger vessel, or at least the opening stages of an inspection.
Taylor: Okay…
Tanner: An external examination was conducted, this is by the Coast Guard. Her side and bottom plating and welds were found to be acceptable by the inspectors. However, the inspection was terminated by Laney, who indicated that he wanted to defer his application citing a lack of funds.
Taylor: Interesting.
Tanner: So my understanding of this is that literally they looked at the outside, and then when they came onboard to look he said “no, no, no, no, no. Nevermind, I don’t have the money for this right now.”
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: I don’t know, that seems very suspicious? You would think he would have known that going in. Maybe he got new information during the inspection and he changed his mind. I don’t know. Of the things Laney does in this episode, maybe that’s not the worst one.
Taylor: Oh no.
Tanner: There’s more. So the inspectors did issue some cursory verbal recommendations as to what alterations would need to happen for a certificate to be formally issued. However, and this is some shades of the OMI Charger story where we had that same kind of situation where you have the Coast Guard on board doing an inspection. At no point during this inspection was the Coast Guard informed of Laney’s intention to use the vessel for oceanographic research.
Taylor: I was gonna ask you about that, ‘cause I noticed that it had been stated that it was undergoing inspection to be a passenger vessel, which I imagine is technically different than a research vessel.
Tanner: Yess. Mm-hmm. This is gonna be kind of a big deal in that this is the last known contact between Laney and the Coast Guard regarding the status of Holoholo. At no point does the Coast Guard even know that this vessel is operating in this capacity that it ends up being. All of their paperwork indicates that this is purely a pleasure craft. Moving forward, keep that in mind.
Taylor: One more thing about the Coast Guard, I guess just at this time. What a toothless organization it must have been in like the late ‘70s, early ‘80s. I mean you’ve got this, you’ve got the Charger, you’ve got the Edmund Fitzgerald, you’ve got the Marine Electric, you have the sinking of the Blackthorn in 1980, like it just feels like the Coast Guard is kind of a joke.
Tanner: [laughs] little bit.
Taylor: At this point they don’t have a rescue swimmer program, like they don’t have any of the things that we have today that you know, kind of make the Coast Guard this respectable organization. But they also, it’s not the old golden glory days of rescue swimmers of like beach-launched vessels going out to save people on the Great Lakes. The ‘70s and ‘80s must have been a weird time for the Coast Guard, they just feel like they don’t quite have a mission. Or like the means to enforce anything.
Tanner: So the first OTEC research voyage was planned for October 25, 1978. Right off the bat it had a little problem, they had to push back their launch date due to issues with the fuel, specifically the presence of water in the fuel.
Taylor: That’s not good.
Tanner: So someone not being careful enough I guess.
Taylor: Something about fuel storage in Hawaii, I know the Army and Air Force have had some…sorry, Army and Navy, I believe, have had some major issues with like their fuel on some of their bases in Hawaii.
Tanner: Hmm. So Holoholo left from Diamond Head on the island of Oahu and the Coast Guard report notes that there was calm weather for the entire first voyage, with swells around a pretty manageable 3 feet in height. The Coast Guard report…I kinda glossed over this first one, there’s not a ton of detail about it. Aside from the Coast Guard Casualty Report, the other main source I used for this episode is chapter 14 of David Karl’s book UH and the Sea, UH being University of Hawaii. And that whole chapter covers the story of the Holoholo in depth. On this first voyage, Karl notes [multiple] issues. David Zieman, who was on the boat at the time, described the voyages as going very smoothly, except that they “had run out of potable water en route to the Big Island.” So this isn’t a huge trip, I think from Honolulu to where they’re sailing on the Big Island is like 150 miles as the crow flies? Not a huge trip, but not bringing enough water when you’re sailing between islands, you know, over some stretches of open sea, it just illustrates a little bit of shaky planning.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Tanner: Like, sure, you probably aren’t thinking about that, like “oh we could potentially die of thirst”...
Taylor: …you could.
Tanner: …you’d think you’d plan for that just in case. So the lead scientist on the project, Gary Niemeyer and another scientist Mike Allen, weren't convinced that the Holoholo was the right vessel for the job, nor that Laney was the right captain.
Taylor: Oh good. I’m so glad that Laney is the captain of this vessel.
Tanner: Yeah, so at this point Laney is the owner and he’s also functioning as the captain.
Taylor: You may get into this, but is he in any way qualified to be the captain of a vessel like this?
Tanner: I’ll save that for later.
Taylor: Okay.
Tanner: It’s actually coming up here very soon. So quoting here from chapter 14 of that book: “Due to a lack of qualified crew members, Allen had to stand watch” - so that’s one of the scientists here - “because he was a former NOAA bridge officer, he had the expertise and experience - even though he was a member of the science party, not the crew. Allen reported that the radios did not work properly. There were not even enough bunks for the personnel aboard and Allen slept on the deck.”
Taylor: This just sounds like the sort of half-assed adventure that so many of our stories start out as.
Tanner: Occasionally on our episodes, we’ve had situations where like a disaster happens and the passengers get roped into helping bail water or helping to evacuate people. This is not quite the same situation, this would be like, I don’t know, on a flight if someone asks you to be a flight attendant or the co-pilot and there’s not even an emergency happening. They just don’t have the personnel.
Taylor: [laughs] right.
Tanner: Due to these issues with the first trip, Niemeyer expressed a desire to cancel the contract for the remaining voyages. You know, he’s the head scientist, he’s kind of in charge of coordinating these things, but he’s not the one controlling the money. He and Allen basically are pretty confident that this is not a ship that we want to be on for doing this research. And again, Allen has the experience, he’s the most experienced person on the boat, even though he’s part of the science team. He doesn’t wanna get back on, Niemeyer doesn’t wanna get back on. But, of course, after a meeting with the research corporation of the University of Hawaii, this was denied on the basis that “a contract is a contract.”
Taylor: Tell me you’ve never done business before.
Tanner: [laughs] right, people break contracts all the time.
Taylor: Yeah, I mean that’s literally why they probably have lawyers on retainer, is for that.
Tanner: For the second voyage, this is where things start to get interesting. Alterations were made to the vessel to accommodate some additional needs of the research team.
Taylor: They’re like “fine, you can have water and a bed.”
Tanner: [laughs] So quoting from the Coast Guard report, these alterations were as follows. This is kind of a lengthy quote, but I want to get the technical details right because they’re important. From page 9 of the Coast Guard report: “A hatch and associated coming were removed from the fantail by cutting flush with the main deck leaving a 2 foot by 4 foot opening into the steering compartment.”
Taylor: Hmm. Okay.
Tanner: That was Part A. There are four of these. Part B: “A freezer box previously located on the fantail was relocated inside the galley / wet lab compartment. The freezer machinery was located in the after storeroom on the tank top. Removal of the associated refrigerant piping left two holes, half an inch and three quarters of an inch in the deck of the fan tail, and through bulkhead 46 between the steering gear room and the after store room. Penetrations in the main deck at the new location were required to re-activate the freezer.
C: The entire upper half of bulkhead 46 separating the galley / wet lab compartment from the fantail was removed, leaving the compartment open to the weather.” And D: “A hydraulic winch was installed on the winch deck. A hydraulic pump was installed in the engine room, penetrations were made in the winch deck at frame 45 and a half, the main deck at frame 45 and a half, and the after engine room bulkhead using a cutting torch. Two hydraulic lines were installed through these penetrations without stuffing tubes or other provisions for sealing them.”
Taylor: Hmm.
Tanner: I shared a diagram on Twitter the other day…
Taylor: …it seems like there’s a lot of holes in this…
Tanner: …yeah, a lot of holes being punched in this.
Taylor: …that weren’t originally there. Also, what’s a “wet lab”.
Tanner: I think it’s just a lab that maybe has connection…I was kind of thinking of it as the same as a wet bar, where it has like a connection and running water?
Taylor: [laughs] okay.
Tanner: But I don’t know. As I stated, very soon the whole thing is gonna be a wet lab.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: Yeah. So, they made some alterations. Again, more connections to the Charger episode of, you know, if you’re making these pretty significant alterations to the ship, normally you have to tell the Coast Guard.
Taylor: Yeah. Yeah, you would think that that would be important.
Tanner: Like we said in that episode, anything involving welding, they wanna know about. If it’s significant enough to do that. So yeah, in that diagram, it highlights where these holes and these alterations were on the ship. These alterations were all being made, as you can kinda see there, on a pretty ad hoc basis.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Tanner: And this was happening basically up until the final minutes before she left on her second voyage. This is very much like “oh, you need to get in here? We’ll just cut a hole through here and we’ll run this pipe through here.” And no attention’s really being paid to sealing those things back up.
Taylor: It’s just super interesting that the guy in charge of this is like a trained pilot, and the fact that you don’t do this kind of stuff when you’re a pilot, like you don’t do ad hoc stuff to your plane…
Tanner: …right.
Taylor: …you don’t like not plan before you…you know you have to file a flight plan, you have to have an idea of what you’re doing, it just seems like this is like “oh, this is just a boat, this is easy.” There is a little bit of that like being blind to the dangers here because you think you know what you’re doing, and you have no idea.
Tanner: Mm-hmm, yeah. Again, cannot overstate this enough, he is described as a novice mariner. He is new to this, he’s definitely not anything like a naval engineer, and has no concept of what effect this is going to have on the vessel. So the goal of this second voyage would be to place two oceanographic moorings for the purpose of ocean temperature data collection. During the week of December 5th, so this is the scheduled week for the second voyage, the scientific equipment was loaded onto Holoholo.
From the Coast Guard report: “On December 9th, sailing time was delayed until the afternoon because some of the scientific personnel were dissatisfied with the stowage of the scientific equipment and insisted on more secure stowage prior to sailing.” From reading this, I got the sense that they’re more concerned about the equipment itself, you know, they don’t want their stuff to break, they don’t want it to get damaged, but also, how many times on the show have we talked about the issue of unsecured cargo?
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: Whether it’s cars, train cars, whatever coming loose on a bigger ship, but you know, this is a pretty small vessel, you don’t need nearly as much shifting around to cause a problem.
Taylor: Absolutely. Maybe if they’d done some new stability tests after doing all of these modifications they’d know.
Tanner: Yeah, it would be a good thing to know about for sure. I wish there was an organization that could help them with that.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: There’s another point of concern for those who are planning to set sail on Holoholo. So, I mentioned the goal of this mission, it was to place two oceanographic moorings in the ocean. I don’t know why I added that detail to the notes…of course it’s in the ocean. These moorings had to be weighed down on the seafloor to stay in place. So from the report: “Each mooring was to be anchored to the bottom with a 2,300 pound weight consisting of three railroad car wheels.”
Taylor: Okay, so this is some big pieces of metal they’ve like welded together?
Tanner: I guess, and I don’t know if this was, like, a standard thing that like other research teams had done, maybe it’s the kind of thing that’s easy to get discarded railroad wheels?
Taylor: Probably.
Tanner: Maybe it was an established thing that “hey, these are perfect for weighing these things down.” I don’t know if that was special to this mission or if it had been done before.
Taylor: I would imagine it was just like “hey, here’s some heavy stuff that we can easily acquire cheap.”
Tanner: Yeah, that itself wasn’t pointed out as something of note or being weird, so I think that probably was done with other research trips.
Taylor: I guess like you were saying though, that’s some big pieces of cargo potentially moving around on a vessel that isn’t that big.
Tanner: Right, yeah and you mention it not being that big, there’s not a lot of deck space. So little deck space that these were not stored on deck, but rather hung over the stern.
Taylor: Oh! Well that’s not good.
Tanner: Causing a little bit of worry among the scientific team. Again, most of the science team, they’re not sailors, they don’t necessarily know what they’re looking at, but they definitely have a bad feeling about these 2,300 pound weights just dangling off the back of the ship.
Taylor: Yeah, that would be concerning potentially.
Tanner: So this gets us to The Incident. The second voyage. Holoholo left Honolulu just after 2:30pm on December 9th, 1978. There were 10 individuals known to be on board at the time. One of them was John Laney, the owner we’ve already talked about. Another was Michael Trens, who was serving as the ship’s master on this voyage. So, due to…I think this was just for certification reasons, the owner can’t also technically be the master of the ship, there has to be someone else on board who’s technically serving as the master so you have at least one certified, qualified person.
Taylor: This is known as the Jerry Jones rule. This is what keeps Jerry Jones from being the coach of the Cowboys.
Tanner: Very good comparison. There was a third crew member, John Ruseckas. These three were the entirety of the crew. There were three scientists from the University of Hawaii, so the aforementioned lead scientist Gary Niemeyer, he was a 31 year old Assistant Professor of Ocean Engineering. Michael Allen, also mentioned him before, he was the scientist who had doubled as crew on the first trip, he was 29 years old. So again, both Niemeyer and Allen had been reluctant to sail on Holoholo again after the first voyage. Niemeyer probably out of an abundance of concern for his team, and Allen from his experience at sea.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: There was also Robert Harvey, age 39 from University of Hawaii. There were two scientists from the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, those were Robert Charnell, 41, and Norman Laird, 42. There were also two scientists from the University of California, James Sandusky, age 32, and Stephen Shannon, age 35. The research was sponsored by the US Department of Energy with the goal of exploring a possible placement site for an OTEC facility near Hawaii. So just after departure, Holoholo was sighted by a tour boat skipper, Victoria Woltz off of Diamond Head. Traveling at around 4 knots, pitching and taking a continuous light spray in seas of 2-3 feet.
Taylor: That sounds pleasant. Sounds nice. It’d be a good day to be in the water.
Tanner: Yeah, that’s the kind of seas that it should be operating in, but, remember this person seeing this, she was also a boat operator herself, you know, these tour boats she probably has an awareness of the currents and the tides around the island of Oahu. She estimated that the Holoholo was heading into seas of about 8-12 feet in the Molokai Channel.
Taylor: Okay, I’ve been in those kinds of seas before on like a smaller vessel, like a 25-28 foot fishing boat. But it’s made to be in that kind of sea, you know what I mean? It’s not a pleasant ride, but it cuts through waves and rides waves versus just plowing into them, but you’ll still take them over the bow sometimes and pop through them. You haven’t really lived until you’ve seen like a 10-foot wave over top of you, it’s an intimidating thing to see a 10-foot wall of water coming at you and knowing you have to ride that out, but it’s different when I’m in a boat that’s made to do that.
Tanner: Yeah, that was something that reading this whole story, whenever they got into details like this, I really did have to keep that in mind that most of the time when we discuss a ship on this show, it’s either a bigger ship that naturally can take a little bit more punishment, or even if it’s a small ship, it’s one that’s built to take some damage. We talk about fishing vessels, crab fishing boats can handle quite a lot, Coast Guard cutters, things like that. This is not the case with Holoholo. This is not designed for anything above basically totally calm water.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: So it is highly likely that Victoria Woltz, that tour boat skipper, was the last outside observer to ever see Holoholo. According to the scientific team’s plans, after the placement of the moorings, Holoholo was to continue on to…sorry for the Hawaiian pronunciation…Kawaihae on the northwestern coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. So this is a trip of about 150 miles as the crow flies. In the early morning of December 11th, just before sunrise, the three new scientists scheduled to board Holoholo arrived at Kawaihae. So they’re waiting there, they’re gonna hope on board when this ship arrives. At around 9:30, two of them drove up a nearby mountain. They looked for, but didn’t see, Holoholo.
Taylor: Hmm.
Tanner: It doesn’t note if looking for the ship was the reason they went up the mountain, or if this was just incidentally, they thought they had some time to kill and figured they would look while they were up there. What they did see was a convoy of US Army landing craft that had traveled from Pearl Harbor to Kawaihae over roughly the same time frame as Holoholo’s voyage.
Taylor: That couldn’t have been a pleasant journey, either.
Tanner: Probably not. Holoholo was reportedly not seen by this convoy, despite the fact that they were traveling basically the same route. In addition to the Army convoy, the MV Holokai had also been traveling from Oahu to Kawaihae. Holokai also had no visual or radio contact with Holoholo. If you look at that map, that same map I shared on Twitter, it notes two different possible routes you can basically go, the Army convoy and the Holokai, they each took one of those routes; neither one of them saw Holoholo.
Taylor: Well that’s not good.
Tanner: So those two science team members returned down the mountain around noon. We talk a lot on the show, delays happen all the time with ships, and usually they’re nothing to worry about. Unless you’re on this show. However, after failing to contact Holoholo after four attempts to do so, the scientists started to get concerned. They notified both the University of Hawaii and the Coast Guard that Holoholo was overdue. The Coast Guard didn’t immediately panic, you know, as we would expect, they agreed to make harbor checks overnight and they basically said “hey, report this to the Joint Rescue Coordination Center in the morning if we don’t find anything.” This kicked off a 10-day search for the vessel including assets from the Coast Guard, the Navy, the Coast Guard Auxiliary, the Civil Air Patrol, the University of Hawaii, and the Air Force.
Taylor: Okay…
Tanner: That included the use of four U-2 reconnaissance flights, so they’re kinda pulling out most of the tools they have for this. There would be 520 flight hours put into this search, covering 377,000 square miles of ocean… with no significant sightings of Holoholo.
Taylor: That’s crazy.
Tanner: So the search was suspended on December 21, 1978 and then officially ended on Christmas Eve. So somewhere between those destinations, again, not a massive amount of space, Holoholo has just disappeared.
Taylor: Yeah, and like looking at it on that map, they’re never really in true open water for a lot of that.
Tanner: Yeah, and it’s water that is relatively heavily trafficked on a pretty routine basis. So in the immediate aftermath of the vessel’s disappearance, the only confirmed evidence of the vessel was an empty wooden box that was recovered from the water on December 18th by a fisherman about six miles west of Miloli’i on the southwest coast of the Big Island. This was significant, this box was confirmed to have been part of the mooring equipment that was used by the research team and it had previously contained a current meter.
Taylor: Okay.
Tanner: Examination of the barnacle on the box established that it had been in the water for at least 3-5 days, which matches up, the higher end of that, pretty well with when the ship might have sank. I was fascinated to learn that they can use barnacles forensically.
Taylor: Yeah, that’s really interesting.
Tanner: I mean, makes sense I guess. One of the U-2 flights did come up with an image of interest. So if you read more about this, this image comes up quite a bit. This picture showed a vessel adrift about 75 miles south by southwest of the OTEC benchmark site. The vessel was estimated at between 72 and 88 feet in length and 20 to 24 feet in width. So similar, but not exactly the same, again, this is an approximation based on this U-2 image, but it doesn’t quite match up well enough for the Coast Guard to confirm that this is the Holoholo. The vessel was never located after that image was taken, so there’s no way to verify it. Photo analysts from the Air Force determined that the length to beam ratio was the only similarity between this ship and the Holoholo, and while we said that that was kind of a unique ratio, it’s not unheard of.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: So from the image they could tell that the canopy was a different color than Holoholo was known to have. The safety rails, the square stack and the a-frame were known to have been on board but weren’t identifiable in the picture even though they should have been visible. The forecastle raft shown in the photo was also different from the one thought to be on board Holoholo. So multiple reasons they kind of say “you know, this is possible, but there’s a lot to indicate that it isn’t Holoholo.” There’s a lot of back and forth about that image that we won’t get into here, it’s worth reading about if you’re interested in these things, and it is featured in one of the sources that I’ll share in that chapter 14 of Karl’s book.
Taylor: My first glance at this, it’s pretty obvious it’s a different vessel and it’s far scarier to think that we wouldn’t have even known about that one if there hadn’t been this search.
Tanner: Right, yeah thinking that like “okay, someone else’s boat just disappeared.”
Taylor: And then you have to think, like how many vessels are adrift in the ocean, you know what I mean? It’s pretty crazy to think about that this vessel would have never been found.
Tanner: Right, so getting into some of the aftermath stuff, getting into the Coast Guard investigation and some probable causes. If you’re listening, you’re probably already developing some theories in your head, and they’re probably right. The Coast Guard investigation began in January 1979 and was headed by Captain George Greiner, chief of marine inspections in Portland, Oregon, Commander Alfred Utara, marine safety officer in Honolulu, and Lieutenant Commander Robert Isherwood. Also on hand was Orland French as a representative of the NTSB. The first person to testify was Ralph Woody who had been one of the last people to leave the boat the night before it sailed. He talked about an aft hatch being open and pointed out that some of the watertight bulkheads had been penetrated, so these are those aforementioned alterations to the vessel.
Taylor: Watertight bulkheads and penetrated really just aren’t words you ever wanna see together.
Tanner: Rarely go well together. The attorney for the owner…it actually wasn’t clear from the report, I assume this means an attorney for Laney rather than Stubenberg? He claimed that this could be a misrepresentation of the sailing state of Holoholo as more work was done up until the time of sailing.
Taylor: Mm-hmm. It’s amazing, we found lawyers now in this story, finally, that can argue things.
Tanner: It’s fascinating though, that line of argument, of like “oh, well you don’t know that that’s what it was like when it actually sailed.” There was a little over, what, 12 hours between this guy leaving the ship probably and them getting ready to sail. So you’re telling me that you fixed all these water tightness issues before the following afternoon after this guy is saying he saw it and it didn’t look good.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: Yeah, like just the ad hoc nature of all of these things right up to the last minute “we gotta get this fixed, we can change this” it just doesn't make for a comfortable situation. Woody had been hired to do some of that reconfiguring, including cutting away the main deck, the aft bulkheads, and removing an aft hatch and coaming to clear deck space. So again, he’s not testifying this because he saw it, he’s testifying because he did it.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: He knows that this stuff has happened because he was the one who did it. He knows he’s not seeing something wrong. He’s also the one who welded the three winches to the deck, each winch weighing around one ton.
Taylor: And that’s before it’s holding the railroad [car wheels].
Tanner: Another person who testified was William Young, a marine repairman. Young had initially planned to sail as the engineer on Holoholo. Allegedly, he pointed out that the open hatch would be an issue, so that same hatch that we were just talking about. To which Laney responded that “he would cover it with plywood for the voyage.”
Taylor: Uh-huh.
Tanner: Young stated that Laney quote “was not a seaman and had absolutely no experience” and that he quote “insisted on damaging the watertight integrity of the vessel and destroying her buoyancy.”
Taylor: Again, I’m just blown away by someone that comes from aviation where safety is so important, like you wouldn’t just duct tape down something on the wing of your plane and be like “oh, that’ll work. Good enough.”
[both laugh]
Tanner: Right, yeah, “we’ll just gorilla glue that aileron back on, it’ll be fine.” Yeah, the downgrade from watertight hatch to plywood doesn’t sound reassuring.
Taylor: This is like Groverhaus but with a ship.
Tanner: David Russell, who was a marine surveyor and boat operator, he was another person who turned down Laney’s offers to sail on Holoholo.
Taylor: All of these people sound so qualified and they’re all like, “yeah, no.”
Tanner: He was even offered the spot as the skipper, which, again, as we said is kinda just a paper job, Laney’s on board, he’s the one who’s calling the shots, he just needs someone technically there as the master of the vessel. Russell declined because the pay was inadequate and it quote “wasn’t a smooth operation.”
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: He didn’t like the last minute nature of all these things, these changes. He especially didn’t like the last minute hiring of the crew.
Taylor: I’m picturing this job posting being like “looking for a rock star to be part of our family.” You know what I mean?
Tanner: “A self-starter.”
Taylor: Yeah, “real self-starter, problem-solver who isn’t afraid to work hard.”
Tanner: So we see a pattern here, kinda like you just said, a pattern here of anyone who knows what the hell they’re doing on a boat doesn’t wanna be on Holoholo once they see it in person. It’s kind of a knee-jerk reaction, as soon as they see what’s up on this boat, they say no. There’s one more person of note, and this is Timothy Scroghan. This one is significant because Scroghan had been the captain of Holoholo during the first OTEC voyage in October.
Taylor: Oh!
Tanner: So he knows the vessel at least, he’s skippered it before, and it’s these alterations that make him think this is no longer going to be safe. After seeing this [work] to the deck that left that hatch uncovered, he decided not to sail on her again. So yeah, quite literally even people who aren’t new to the ship, they see what’s happened to it and they say no, no way.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: So one person who was really heavily questioned during the proceedings was John Craven, the state of Hawaii Marine Affairs Coordinator and University of Hawaii Dean of Marine Programs. When he was asked about the lapse in safety protocols, Craven claimed that since Holoholo was a chartered vessel, she was exempt from University of Hawaii safety regulations.
Taylor: God, you have to love the bureaucracy, you have to love the whole like “well we don’t own it, so it’s not technically our problem.”
Tanner: Yeah, like “this isn’t technically my fault here.” He also testified that the responsibility for safety rested with the principal investigator on the project, in this case the lead scientist Gary Niemeyer.
Taylor: He is blaming the dead guy.
Tanner: Yeah. The dead guy who’s not even the captain. This is new depths of depravity on the show. Another administrator, William Coops, stated that RCUH, that’s the research corporation of the University of Hawaii, had quote “no relevant safety guidelines for chartered vessels and made no independent inquiry to determine whether the vessel or its crew were suitable for the planned research.”
Taylor: I’m getting the vibes of “well, someone certainly messed up, and it wasn’t me.”
Tanner: Yeah, you should really call someone about that.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: This received some pushback from University of Hawaii oceanographers who kinda suddenly are thinking “wait, wait, wait, what now? Read that last part back.” Quoting from Karl here: “If true, this would place an undue burden on professional scientists who are novice mariners.” Saying “eh, we trust you, you’ll pick a good vessel, we don’t need to look at it.” This research project, you know these things are expensive, they cost money. $32,000 had been appropriated by the state of Hawaii for the Holoholo project. To me, it is baffling and infuriating that the state, the university would be okay with this money just going off to some vessel or captain that isn’t being vetted for safety.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: You know, that’s a significant amount of money for an academic department, and for there to be zero oversight or really even just caring where this money’s going is really crazy when there are these safety issues in play. So the initial inquiry wrapped up after twelve days. An editorial in the Honolulu Advertiser on January 29th concluded that quote “Strict enforcement of safety standards may add to the cost of ocean research, but if it’s too expensive to be done at a reasonable level of safety, perhaps the research ought not be done at all.”
Taylor: Fair enough.
Tanner: Quoting from the Coast Guard’s conclusions portion of the report, that report was completed in November of 1981:
“The exact cause of the casualty is unknown. It is concluded that the most probable cause was the Holoholo encountered seas of sufficient height and frequency to flood the forecastle, for which drainage was grossly inadequate, to a point where stability was lost, capsizing the vessel.
A probable contributing cause was the lack of watertight integrity which would permit the ingress of water in heavy seas and possible progressive flooding. Initial ingress of substantial quantities of water could occur into the steering gear compartment, through the non-watertight 2 foot by 4 foot opening left by the earlier removal of the fantail deck hatch. Alternatively, or concurrently, the two 2300 pound anchors secured on the transom (or possibly on the fantail) could have broken loose in the heavy seas and punctured the transom (or the after deck) permitting water to enter the steering gear compartment.”
Tanner: So when there’s this many ways for water to access your steering gear compartment, we know that this is not a good setup.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: Why this is interesting to me, in terms of the ship’s structure, this is all about the watertight integrity, you know, we’ve seen stories and we’ve read reports on what can happen to a ship at sea when there is an inch or two inch or three inch opening in the hull letting in water. Here we’ve got this opening of two feet by four feet. Granted this isn’t underwater, this is on deck, but still, that’s a ton of space to let in water. The possibility of a structural failure, breaking apart, was considered, but the lack of distress call made this unlikely, just like we talked about with the Fitzgerald.
Taylor: Yeah, whatever happened was sudden.
Tanner: So like other vessels that have sunk under mysterious circumstances, there’s a lot of sensationalism around the story of the Holoholo. In March of 1980, the story is featured as Playboy magazine’s mystery of the month.
Taylor: [laughs] wow, okay. Mystery of the month.
Tanner: Yes.
Taylor: This is the articles that people read it for.
Tanner: Exactly, you read it for the articles, you read it to learn about shipwrecks. The cover of that one has Bo Derek, if anyone’s interested. Just as a little aside, some other cover stories from that issue include “Pot Power: Who’ll Cash In If They Legalize Grass?”
Taylor: Amazing that 42 years later, we’re still working on that.
Tanner: Right. And also “Terry Bradshaw: An Irreverent Interview with the NFL’s Best Quarterback”
Taylor: Hmm, “best” is doing a lot of work there.
Tanner: I would actually like to read that and see how irreverent he is.
Taylor: Also, like, good-not-great quarterback with a really good defense around him.
Tanner: [laughs]
Taylor: Just sayin’. As a Steelers fan I can admit…Terry Bradshaw, never the best quarterback in the league.
Tanner: [laughs] So back to the article. As one would expect for this sort of publication, obviously going for what’s gonna get people to read it? The article included suggestions that the ship may have been hijacked…
Taylor: …of course.
Tanner: …and / or been under observation by Russian spy satellites.
Taylor: This reminds me a little bit of the Caroll A. Deering off of Cape Hatteras. When we get into crazy plots of like “oh, the Soviet Communists must have hijacked it.”
Tanner: Right, right.
Taylor: Like we literally have the same thing here that…those pesky Russians.
Tanner: There was even some buzz around the fact that…you know, we talked about the U-2 planes searching for this, there was even some public buzz around the fact that they had been employed in the search for the vessel, you know, given the reputation of the U-2 as a “spy plane”.
Taylor: [laughs] maybe it’s just good at finding things.
Tanner: Yeah, exactly. Spying is conditional on basically the situation, otherwise you’re just looking for stuff.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: A crew member from another University of Hawaii vessel, the Kana Keoki, claimed that there may have been two female crew members on board, possibly in a cook or mess staff capacity. This is just kind of a weird detail here, there’s no officially filed crew list for Holoholo, so this is really unverifiable, they were still drilling holes in the deck like six hours before they left, so no, of course they don’t have good paperwork on who’s on the ship. But again, given the slapdash nature of this whole endeavor, a last minute informal hire is totally within the realm of possibility.
Taylor: I would just think that at some point someone would be like “hey, my cousin or my sister’s missing.”
Tanner: Exactly, one would presume that these people also existed on land and they were never matched with any missing persons reports on land, again that doesn’t 100% say that this wasn’t true…
Taylor: …I would also imagine this was a massive story locally, that if like you hadn’t seen your sister in a month and you couldn’t get a hold of her, and you knew she worked in this capacity, like, I think you’d put it together…
Tanner: …exactly.
Taylor: …no one’s unaware of this happening.
Tanner: Yeah, and again, there’s lots of stuff going on with this ship, probably lots of people coming on, going off, easy to see someone and think it’s part of the crew, when in fact they’re maybe just someone from shore.
Taylor: I mean, you sit down to read your Playboy that month, you read about it and you think “wow, you know what, I haven’t heard from them in a while.”
Tanner: So yeah, that’s one that does come up a little bit, but like there’s no verifiable reason to think that that’s true. So next up is uh, I guess interesting is the word for it. Tony Hodges, who is described as an environmentalist and 1976 People’s Party Senate candidate…
Taylor: Hmm.
Tanner: I looked him up. I had trouble finding him initially, but I was able to find a website about the People’s Party of Hawaii that was last updated in 2003. [laughs] It looks the way that you would expect a website from then to look.
Taylor: Please tell me that the People’s Party of Hawaii wants to like reinstitute the queen.
Tanner: From what I could tell, they’re very far left environmentalist-type stuff with a good, healthy amount of crazy peppered in.
Taylor: Ahh. [laughs]
Tanner: So Hodge’s made some pretty objectively ridiculous claims regarding Holoholo that I considered not even including here, just because those kinds of things can be a distraction from the real story.
Taylor: It’s okay, we can ridicule them here.
Tanner: Since they’re included in David Karl’s book, I figured it’s probably worth including here. Hodges claimed that Robert Harvey, so the third of those University of Hawaii scientists, was the target of a Russian kidnapping plot and that he had just returned from a Russian research mission in the Kuril Islands.
Taylor: Like what do they want with him?
Tanner: Those close to Hodges said that this was outrageous.
Taylor: These people always think they’re living in like a Tom Clancy novel and it’s just not that exciting.
Tanner: Hodges also testified that he thought quote “a submarine collided with the Holoholo and caused the death of all aboard.”
Taylor: Was it a Russian submarine?
Tanner: In my notes next to this, I just wrote “g*ddamnit”.
Taylor: [laughs] We know what happens when a submarine hits a ship.
Tanner: The amount of times on this show we have been researching and there has been a theory that “oh, well maybe it hit a submarine.” Very frustrating. Several times we’ve done research and that’s come up, and typically with just as much proof as there is here which is to say none. Hodges was one of the people, and I don’t know, maybe the only one, stirring up the concern about the use of the U-2 plane.
Taylor: Excellent.
Tanner: So anyway, we can forget all about Tony Hodges.
Taylor: I bet he has some interesting thoughts on nuclear energy.
Tanner: Probably, actually. Yeah, I was gonna go down that rabbit hole and see what else is the People’s Party up to?
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: So the location of the vessel itself was never actually verified, though in December of 1979, the NOAA ship Townsend Cromwell was able to pick up signals that were matched to the instruments known to have been on board Holoholo. These were picked up about 28 miles south of Maui, at a depth of about 7,200 feet, which is really fascinating timing, honestly. That was December 12th, and the batteries in the acoustic devices had an approximate lifespan of one year. This would have been about a year and a day from the time Holoholo was reported missing. I just think that’s a funny coincidence of wow, they found it just in time.
Taylor: Yeah, that is.
Tanner: However, it is noted that doesn’t necessarily indicate the location of the ship itself, it could be quite far away, that’s quite far down. Things don’t always sink straight down, and also the signals that they picked up were I think between 200 and 500 meters apart from one another.
Taylor: Okay.
Tanner: So, a good bit of distance across the sea floor. The ship’s location has never been verified. If it is in that area, just that area south of Maui, looking at a map, just a rough estimate, it looks like they would have made it about two-thirds of the way into their journey. But again, there’s no proof that that is where the ship is. So as might be expected, numerous lawsuits resulted from the loss of the Holoholo. Just for the sake of time and my lack of understanding, I’m just gonna summarize them here, but we’ll share the source material on Patreon for you, if you wanna read more. Several relatives of those lost on Holoholo sued various combinations of the following defendants: the University of Hawaii, the Research Corporation of the University of Hawaii, the state of Hawaii, the University of California, which seems random, but they were the actual sponsor of the research here, and they had personnel on there as well. John Laney, and circling back into the story, Arthur Stubenberg.
Taylor: Oh, that’s right. He still owns the thing, doesn’t he?
Tanner: Exactly, so if you don’t remember who that is, he’s still technically the owner of this ship, and so you’re gonna leave yourself open to some liability there probably.
Taylor: What a bad phone call to wake up to, not only is there the human side of it, but like oh by the way, you still technically own this.
Tanner: Yeah, and again, situations like this seem to me like the exact reason you wouldn’t make an agreement like that? Like, no, I’m not gonna give you this thing and let you do what you want with it when my name’s still on it.
Taylor: Or you better have some good lawyers that are really good at drawing up contracts that like shed any liability off of you.
Tanner: Yeah, exactly.
Taylor: Onto like a shell company, or something. Like, you would wanna get it off of you personally for sure.
Tanner: Yeah, especially if he like, I don’t know, talked to John Laney for like 15 minutes before he agreed to this.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Tanner: It seems like it’d be very clear that maybe I wouldn’t trust this person with my ship. Ultimately, after quite a bit of time, a 3.46 million dollar out-of-court settlement was reached in February of 1983 among the three chartering institutions, so that’s University of Hawaii, the Research Corporation of the University of Hawaii, and the University of California, and eight of the families in question. So Laney’s is not included in this settlement, I guess for obvious reasons? I don’t know.
Taylor: You know how you can’t pitch yourself into a save situation? I feel like that’s kind of what’s going on there. [laughs]
Tanner: That’s true. The family of James Sandusky also wasn’t included in this, and at least at the time of writing, this is from the David Karl, he wasn’t aware of why…
Taylor: …interesting.
Tanner: …why they weren’t included in this. So, unless there was some separate settlement that they had made independent of this, to me that seems like it’s a possibility.
Taylor: I guess the only other option is pursuing something outside of the settlement of going for a different agreement or saying “no, I don’t want to settle, I want to litigate.”
Tanner: Yeah, basically. So yeah, I’m sure there’s a perfectly normal reason for that. So getting into the…starting to wrap up here…this is gonna be a long episode. Some of the commemoration and memorials for Holoholo and the people on board. A lot of times by the end of these episodes we’re pretty burned out, and we tend to sort of skip over or just skim the memorial segment, and sometimes there just isn’t that much information, or sometimes there just isn’t a memorial for ships we talk about. Fortunately for this one, there’s a little bit more to say about that.
On the night before the inquiry began, this is January 8th, 1979, there was a memorial service in Ala Moana Park for Gary Niemeyer, Michael Allen, and Robert Harvey, the three University of Hawaii scientists lost on Holoholo. It featured prayers, music, Hawaiian chanting, and a lei-floating ceremony. The ceremony focused on remembering the three for their personal and professional lives. Niemeyer had received his PhD in Physical Oceanography from the University of Hawaii in 1977–he was pretty early in having his PhD and being a little bit more independent. His wife Susan was there, she mourned his loss at a time when he was just getting the opportunity to do his own research. Working to get your PhD, I haven’t done it yet, but I know that it involves a lot of hard work and a lot of, you know, probably doing stuff that you don’t necessarily want to do to get to your academic and professional goals, and he was kind of just getting started on that path when this happened.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: Mike Allen had been employed by the NOAA-University of Hawaii Joint Tsunami Research Effort at the time of his death. He received a posthumous Master of Science degree for his sedimentology work in Pearl Harbor. Robert Harvey had been involved in numerous research organizations, including that same Joint Tsunami Research Effort. Harvey had two stepchildren and he left behind a wife, Youngsook. There was a campus memorial established at the University of Hawaii in 1979 that featured three gold trees. The trees had health issues due to damage and water drainage that eventually led to calls for a new memorial. In 2003, the memorial was re-dedicated on the 25th anniversary of the Holoholo’s loss. This new memorial garden featured a restored plaque with the names of Niemeyer, Harvey, and Allen.
There was another formal memorial service held on January 23rd in 2004, and this one, there’s some images from the David Karl source, some photos actually taken by him that we’ll be sharing online as well as the program from the service. As I’ve mentioned, the source I read for the memorial information is specifically focused on the University of Hawaii, so it didn’t include information about the other victims, specifically. I’m sure that similar remembrances were held for them, you know, the other academics, the crew on this vessel I’m sure were remembered in their own ways by their family. I would be interested to find specifics if they’re out there. So yeah, I mean that would be something good to know about. So that is the kinda long tale of Holoholo.
Taylor: Yeah, it’s a super interesting story. It’s a little different than some of the other ones that we’ve talked about, since we don’t really know what happened necessarily. Like we have a good idea, but it’s so familiar in other ways of someone being irresponsible. We were just talking about sea shanties and all that in the bonus episode and how it almost gives you instructions for acting a certain way and respecting the ocean and things like that, and you see when someone doesn’t do those things what happens.
Tanner: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: Just having that disregard for this [being] serious business.
Tanner: And it goes back to what you pointed out with you know, coming from a different industry where maybe you are very accomplished and very well respected and what we talked about in that bonus episode was a lot of reframing yourself and sort of severing ties with the land, because buckle up buckaroo, you’re on the high seas now. You really do have to sort of humble yourself before the ocean and really respect what it can do, and in this story we definitely saw a case where the novice isn’t doing that and you’ve got experienced sailors telling you that you really should.
Taylor: Yeah, and I think that you come from the aviation environment, so great, you know Crew Resource Management, sit there, be quiet, and let the people that know what they’re doing do their job.
Tanner: [laughs] right.
Taylor: You know what I mean? That’s sort of what it is.
Tanner: Yeah, especially in a situation where like, legally, on paper, you are not expected or required to be in charge of this vessel. You should be hiring someone to do this stuff for you who does know what they’re doing. Yeah, it’s kind of a fascinating look at a lot of different things. It’s a very sad story, this was one of the more sad stories that I remember researching.
Taylor: I think partially here like…completely avoidable.
Tanner: At multiple steps, too.
Taylor: A lot of these stories, they aren’t that way, but this one didn’t have to happen.
Tanner: Yeah, I mean the selection of this vessel, the alterations to this vessel, the not listening to Gary Niemeyer and Mike Allen when they expressed very clear concerns after having been out on this ship and saying “this is not going to go well.” There’s a lot of things in play. It also is a story about some of the sludge and bureaucracy that goes on with universities. A lot of that background stuff of how money gets spent and who’s approving these things, and why are they approving these things. Yeah, there’s a lot of ugliness in this story.
So that’s that, I mean that’s the story of Holoholo. It was definitely new to me and I ended up finding a lot more about it than I expected to, but yeah, I think that’s all I’ve got for it. Oh, before we sign off, I did wanna mention big things going on in the world with Patreon this month, you know, just due to the pretty terrible flooding that’s going on in Eastern Kentucky and Appalachia, we wanted to get a little bit involved there. We’re looking into the best ways to donate to the right organizations and places where our pretty humble amount of money can do the most good. So we’ll be looking into that, and we’ll share wherever we decided that money is gonna go from Patreon this month. We’ll share that with you just to let you know and keep you informed about what we’re doing with that. We’ll be sharing resources also, we would encourage anyone, if you’ve got a little bit of cash laying around, see if you can give it to someone in need. I know a lot of the stuff they need is more material than just money, but sometimes that’s the easiest and most direct way to help out. So I think that’s that. Any final thoughts, Taylor?
Taylor: No, I think that’s pretty much it, I think we’ve summed it up pretty good. Yeah, definitely lookin’ forward to getting some of that Patreon where it can do the most good.
Tanner: Sounds good. We’re gonna sign off here, we’ll be back next week. Next week we have a very fun episode, we’re gonna have a guest host and we’ll be sharing some stuff leading up to that, some teasers. So yeah, we’re looking forward to that, and we will talk to you all next week.
[background audio of waves on shore]
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