Once the voyaging canoe Hokule'a circumnavigates the planet and a new generation of captains and navigators emerges, Nainoa Thompson believes it will be time to step aside as the leader of a movement that built up pride in Hawaiian culture and is now looking to help heal the Earth.

"This is my last voyage that I will lead, the worldwide voyage," Thompson said last week in Honolulu just hours after a young crew guided Hokule'a into the pristine waters of Palmyra Atoll 1,000 miles away.

While Thompson prepares for the worldwide voyage that will begin in 2012 and take Hokule'a across 31,000 nautical miles and to 40 countries, he's also looking ahead to the end of the trip in 2016 — and setting out on the next course of his life.

"When I'm pau, what will I leave?" asked Thompson, president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. "That's a fundamental and personal question to me. ... It's one of my life's great regrets watching my ocean home go into decline and not being able to do something about it."

Over the past three decades, Thompson, Hokule'a and the Polynesian Voyaging Society have helped lead a renaissance of Hawaiian culture while stirring the imaginations of thousands of schoolchildren to marvel at an ancient culture that used only wind, waves and stars to guide them across thousands of miles of open ocean and land to a spot now called the Hawaiian Islands.

Thompson is now simultaneously planning for the most ambitious voyage ever for Hokule'a while making his own personal plans to try to create a model that he hopes will restore his boyhood fishing spot, Maunalua Bay.

"Maunalua Bay — that was my first school," he said. "It taught me so much about the beauty of the oceans, but it's also a benchmark of the ocean's decline."

PLANNING TO MOVE ON

Thompson, a Kamehameha Schools trustee, sat in his office last week at Kawaiahao Plaza beneath a wall of pictures and remembrances of key people who influenced him. He reflected on both the early lessons of his life and his new dream of handing over the Polynesian Voyaging Society and its most famous voyaging canoe — Hokule'a — to a new generation of captains and navigators who will guide it using only ancient navigational techniques.

At the age of 56, Thompson believes he still has plenty to teach, but is falling behind in a quickly changing world full of young people.

"Someone needs to take my role," he said. "If I stay in the role too long, you run the risk of not being relevant to young people and their world. I'm aware enough to know that I'm not in it."

So he's going back to his boyhood days when he learned to fish along the shores of Maunalua Bay at the age of 4, when he stood in the shallow water watching slipper lobsters and green spiny lobsters march across the ocean floor. Black tip reef sharks patrolled the tidepools of the bay and schools of weke, awa, awa awa, mullet, papio, o'io and moi filled its waters.

"That bay becomes a metaphor for healthy life on the Earth," Thompson said. "The ocean is only a mirror of the well-being of the land. What happens in the ocean comes from the land. What we do on the land, we do to the sea."

He is already formulating plans for an "ocean education reserve" at Maunalua Bay that would represent a model of conservation in which fishermen, young people, conservationists and — perhaps most important of all — people in the neighboring communities of East O'ahu come together to understand how all of their actions on the land and in the sea are interconnected.

Some people living in the houses around Maunalua Bay don't realize that pesticides in their gardens and toxins they dump down storm drains end up pouring into the ocean and killing the wildlife, Thompson said.

He wonders how an old-time Hawaiian population of 800,000 was able to live off the ocean and the land and feed itself while managing island resources.

"The problem at Maunalua Bay is a lot less about fishing than it is about the whole ecological habitat," Thompson said. "How do we maintain our lifestyle in an urban environment in a way that doesn't destroy the living system in the oceans? I'm as much at fault as anyone else. It's a place for me to learn how to act appropriately."

THE NEXT GENERATION

So, as he's done for the past 34 years, Thompson is turning once again to Hokule'a.

The canoe and Thompson were a critical part of the renaissance of cultural pride in the Islands. And now Thompson believes Hokule'a can once again inspire a generation of people — this time to care for the planet.

"I've been blessed to be near Hokule'a for 34 years," he said. "It's shaped me. In many ways, it's defined my values. It's strengthened my principles. Hokule'a and the ocean are hands-down my most important schools."

For the worldwide voyage, 40 percent of the 240 to 260 crew members who will take turns sailing Hokule'a will have to be under age 30.

"If you don't get kids and young people into the ocean, they don't understand — then they don't care," Thompson said.

Eli Witt understands — and he cares.

Witt also grew up along Maunalua Bay, but long after Thompson. At age 29, Witt sailed into Palmyra aboard Hokule'a on Friday, escorted, crew members say, by manta rays, about 400 melon-headed whales and 500 to 1,000 bottle-nosed dolphins dancing off Hokule'a's bow.

As a crew member blew a conch shell, Witt was even more impressed by the thousands of tropical birds that took flight and began squawking.

During his first break, Witt jumped into one of Palmyra's lagoons and found himself directly above a clam about the size of a football.

"I grew up in Maunalua Bay, where I used to see coral reef rubble and lack of fish," Witt said via a computer telephone hook-up. "Here, it's just beautiful. It's breathtaking. I've never, ever seen a giant clam in Hawai'i. That's an indicator that you need pristine water to have a species like a giant clam. Hawai'i doesn't have clean enough water because of all of the run-off.

"You just look at the reef and it's so delicate. It hasn't been damaged by direct human impact. It's so encouraging to see this here."

Getting young people aboard Hokule'a to experience a pristine ecosystem firsthand is part of Thompson's dream for the worldwide voyage, as well as spreading the message that everyone needs to get involved to save the world's oceans.

"There's a notion that Hokule'a can be a needle weaving a lei of stories," Thompson said. "The oceans are in trouble. But conservation of our oceans is a critical piece of the future of humankind."

As he spoke for nearly two hours, Thompson's thoughts shifted between where he's been and where he's headed.

FISHING POLE AND ADZE

He constantly referred to the wall above and behind him honoring a range of teachers, including Yoshio Kawano, who delivered the milk produced on the Niu Valley dairy farm that Thompson grew up on.

Kawano gave Thompson his first fishing pole and took him down to Maunalua Bay in a battered car to teach him to fish because Thompson's mother didn't like the water and his father — the late Myron "Pinky" Thompson — always seemed to be busy at work.

Kawano "is the guy that took me to the ocean," Thompson said. "Yoshi is arguably my most important teacher."

There's a photo of the late Eddie Aikau sitting on a surfboard in the Ala Wai Canal on March 16, 1978, shortly before disaster struck Hokule'a at sea. It was the same surfboard that Aikau jumped on to find help for the crew of Hokule'a, after which he was never seen again, inspiring the legend of "Eddie Would Go."

And there's a framed photograph of the Hawaiian Islands taken from the space shuttle that Hawai'i-born astronaut Charles Lacy Veach gave to Thompson.

In the picture, a stone adze that Veach smuggled aboard the shuttle — an adze just like the ones ancient builders used to carve voyaging canoes — floats in zero gravity near the image of the Hawaiian Islands.

"Lacy in my mind is one of the powerful drivers of the worldwide voyage," Thompson said.

"He's been around the Earth more than any person from Hawai'i and he's seen the destruction of the planet. He said we need to understand and remember the journey of our ancestors and go back at least 500 years to figure out how they learned to live so well in Hawai'i."

But Thompson is also looking ahead to the next generation of Polynesian voyaging leaders and believes his successor will be someone with lots of deep-water navigational experience who also has a hand in the issues facing young people.

Whoever that turns out to be, Thompson said, "needs to be a bridge builder between us guys and the young."