Business Profile: A Different Kind of Kayak Company

Let’s face it, life is good in Hawaii. It’s easy to just catch the tropical breeze, soak up the Pacific sun and passively enjoy life’s moments as they float by. Hawaii’s remote location and Polynesian roots allow us to invent our own priorities and way of life. These include relishing the ocean and land but also preserving its pristine state. Otherwise, before you know it, “they’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

We recognize that we are not just running a business in a ‘vacuum’ as if we were a restaurant or retail store. We interact with our guest’s, nature and the community when paddling in Kailua Bay. We consider those pillars as the foundation that keeps us grounded. We look at work as an opportunity to facilitate the interactions between human, animal and our natural world. Granted we could look the other way and operate as an amusement park but that would not be fair to our company morals and community we have built. As a company we want to preserve the beautiful culture and environment and hold ourselves accountable as environmental stewards. 

Our Goal: Educate and push coexistence throughout Kailua

How we accomplish our goals:

We hold beach clean ups in perpetuity as the world’s plastic consumption is relentlessly endless. We allow these cleanups to act as an educational tool as well as to bring attention to issues such as the Pacific Garbage Patch. Seeing this issue has pushed us to pay out of our own pocket for compostable containers for the restaurants providing our kayaker’s lunch and sell water in boxes instead of plastic bottles. We help the Dept. of Land and Natural Resources recruit volunteers, provide staff and kayaks for restoration of our offshore islands. We see this kind of cooperation as the perfect embodiment of our goals as a company.

We stay humble, however as we recognize that we can always do much more. We learn from our neighbors and from our out of town guests as the problems facing us are complex and pervasive.  So, go surf, go kayak, be outside and spread your passion for these things. People will work hard to protect the things that bring them enjoyment and we’re all in this one together.