The Grave on Taongi: Nine Years, Two Thousand Miles, and a Cross Made of Driftwood

2026-08-31 · Ghost Ships · 7 min read

The water in Hana Bay was so flat on the morning of February 11, 1979 that the men who watched the Sarah Joe motor out would later say the sea looked like a lake. It was a Sunday on the windward side of Maui. The sky over the Alenuihaha Channel was clean, the trade winds were asleep, and five men loaded a seventeen foot boat with fishing gear and a cooler and pointed the bow toward the fishing grounds. They expected to be home for dinner.

The Sarah Joe was a small open motorboat with an eighty five horsepower engine on the transom. She carried no life raft, no emergency beacon and no long range radio. In Hana in 1979 that was ordinary. Men went out for a few hours in good weather and came back, and had done so for as long as anyone could remember.

Reader comments (0)