Boat made of tule reeds from Lake County will attempt voyage to Hawaii

There are some funky-looking houseboats docked at Galilee Harbor, a kind of water-borne artists’ colony overlooking Sausalito’s Richardson Bay.

Bobbing gently beside a boxy, light blue barn of a boat on a late-June afternoon, across the dock from a floating Quonset hut, was an even more remarkable craft.

This 30-foot vessel was made from bundles of tule reeds, a boat-building method practiced for thousands of years by the Coast Miwok, Ohlone and Pomo. It is the prototype for a future vessel, twice as long, that will attempt a voyage from San Francisco to Hawaii.

That boat, like its 30-foot predecessor, will be constructed of dried tule reeds harvested by Joe Weber, a tribal member of the Big Valley Rancheria of Pomo Indians, based in Lake County.

Tules grow in the shallow water of marshes, muddy shores, and lakes, and are sacred to the Pomo, said Weber. “We eat them, we use them to make baskets, boats, huts, fishing nets.”

Half Lakota Sioux, half Pomo, all 49ers fan, he sees this seafaring quest as an opportunity to raise awareness around issues important to the Pomo and other California native peoples, but also as a chance to unite the state’s tribes.

Weber is collaborating with Jin Ishikawa, the driving force behind this expedition, which will launch sometime in 2025 with a crew of between six and 10 mariners. Weber himself won’t be making the ocean voyage, which is expected to take at least nine weeks.

“I wanted to go, then I got voted into office,” says Weber, his tribe’s housing commissioner. “So I won’t have time.”

He will, however, fly to Hawaii to greet the boat upon its arrival.

Quest for ‘ancient wisdom’

Ishikawa is a Japanese adventurer who has crossed the Sahara by camel and lived with the Inuit in Point Barrow, Alaska, where he helped build an umiak — an open boat covered with seal skins.

For the last quarter century, the native of Nagasaki has been drawn to seafaring adventures on reed boats, a “common means of transportation for all of our distant ancestors,” he writes on his website.

By reviving the practice of traveling on such vessels, he believes, “we may start to recover some of the ancient wisdom, which we have amputated and forgotten in our modern civilization.”

In 1998 and ’99 Ishikawa was part of an eight-man crew that spent 88 days on a reed boat voyaging from Chile to the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific. One hundred feet long when it left Chile, the Mata Rangi II was half that length when it limped ashore in French Polynesia “half eaten by mollusks,” according to a CNN report.

"Mollusks were eating away at the reed and ropes, attracting smaller fishes and consequently sharks, adding to the danger,“ a local official told the network.

Since that ordeal, Ishikawa has built over 340 reed boats, and logged thousands of nautical miles in them.

‘The Creator’s talking to me’

A few years back, intrigued by the possibility that thousands of years ago, native Californians might have sailed to Hawaii on boats made of reed bundles, he vowed to attempt that very feat. Thus was born Expedition Amana, which begat that 30-foot prototype docked at Galilee Harbor.

Before that boat was built, Ishikawa struggled to find places to harvest tule reeds. While visiting Southern California years earlier, he’d met Dennis Banks, who was described in his 2017 New York Times obituary as “the militant Chippewa who founded the American Indian Movement in 1968 and led often-violent insurrections to protest the treatment of Native Americans and the nation’s history of injustices against its indigenous peoples.”

Banks had visited the Big Valley Rancheria while working on the 2011 movie “California Indian,” in which he makes a cameo appearance. While there, he learned about the tribe’s annual Tule Boat Festival. For the past 15 years, Weber has been the head instructor for the event. This year’s festival takes place July 20-22.

At Banks’ urging, Ishikawa visited the reservation, on the shore of Clear Lake, near the town of Finley.

Even though it was clear Ishikawa “knew his way around a reed boat,” Weber recalls, he wasn’t sure what to make of his guest. “Once again, our tules are sacred,” says Weber. “We’re not just going to give them away.”

When Ishikawa visited the Rancheria in 2019, Weber challenged him to a tule boat race. “If you beat me, I’ll do it,” said Weber, who was mostly convinced, by then, that Ishikawa deserved his help.

Ishikawa lost that race. It wasn’t close, Weber recalls. But as they slogged through the shallow water, pulling their boats ashore, Weber asked Ishikawa how long he expected the voyage to last.

“Forty-nine days,” came his reply.

“I’ll do it,” said Weber.

Ishikawa looked confused.

“You could’ve said any number, but you said 49,” noted Weber, who then removed his 49ers ball cap and showed it to the explorer.

“Obviously the Creator’s talking to me.”

Working with tribes around the lake, they harvested 1,000 bundles of reeds, which sat in a warehouse for two-plus years as Expedition Amana was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fortunately, the dried reeds showed no signs of mold when Ishikawa returned to the project earlier this year. Between April 18 and May 6, he built the 30-foot prototype at Galilee Harbor, a community of artists and maritime workers. Following its May 6 launch, the boat underwent a series of sea trials on San Francisco Bay, to test its maneuverability.

Standing on the dock in June, Ishikawa explained that the 60-foot version of the Amana, when it is built, will sail south along the California coast, borne by the counterclockwise California Current, before bearing west somewhere south of Los Angeles.

Cargo to include flags, ashes

Yes, he’ll have GPS — “for emergency,” he said. But he won’t use it if he doesn’t have to. His goal is to “recreate” the voyage as it might have been experienced by the “ancient people.”

While Weber won’t be along for the ride, his friend and fellow Big Valley tribal member Mark McCloud will. McCloud passed away in 2022. His ashes will be on the boat, which will be met by Weber, along with a company of Pomo dancers he is recruiting.

A passionate “cultural practitioner,” Weber is steeped in the traditions of his tribe, including native dances.

He’s got at least 10 dancers lined up for Hawaii, and is hoping to add six more to that total.

When the tule boat makes port, if it makes port, its rigging will be festooned with flags from over 40 California Native American tribes.

While Ishikawa is back in Japan, lining up sponsorship to defray the expedition’s costs, which hopefully will include a follow-vessel to stand by in case of emergency, Weber is ranging high and low in California seeking tule reeds from tribes. He and Ishikawa figure they’ll need 3,000 bundles to build the Amana. Any tribe that allows Weber to harvest even a single bundle of reeds will be represented by a pennant on the ship.

He’s also asking each tribe for a short list of its biggest issues and concerns, “whether it’s homelessness, education, missing indigenous women — we all have a concern,” he said.

When the voyage is over, he’ll return the flags to each tribe, and share with them the names of tribes who had similar issues and concerns.

By doing that “hopefully we’ll be able to connect them in some way. Instead of looking at what’s different, they’ll understand, ‘Hey, our struggles are the same. Let’s work together and see what we can do.’

“That’s my vision.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.