Right now, somewhere out in the Pacific, a woman is racing toward Hawaii. Not flying, sailing, or cruising. She’s aboard a small boat named Lily, pulling herself across roughly 2,400 miles of Pacific Ocean with Honolulu as her target and months of water still ahead.
For most of us, Hawaii is a destination reached after searching flights, checking hotels and airfares, and deciding whether this is the year we finally take that trip. But for Kelsey Pfendler, Hawaii is a point on the horizon that will not come into view for weeks. We found ourselves thinking less about the row itself and more about something else: why Hawaii?
Hawaii has long been the goal.
For more than two decades, Hawaii has occupied a strange and fascinating place in the world of ocean rowing. Again and again, people launch from the California coast and head west.
The destination is Hawaii, and the crossing is one of the longest legitimate human-powered ocean challenges in the world. Depending on conditions in the Pacific, rowers can spend 70 to 90 days alone at sea before reaching land. Only nine people are known to have completed the California-to-Hawaii solo unsupported crossing. Seven have been men, and two have been women.
The rarity of the experience is what draws attention, but it’s the destination which may be the more interesting part. People keep aiming for the islands, year after year, among the longest crossings there are. The Pacific is enormous, the route is challenging, and yet Hawaii keeps showing up as the place people want to reach.
We have seen this before.
In 2023, we met one of the rowers who had just crossed the Pacific to Hawaii. The accomplishment itself was remarkable, but what stayed with us afterward was how completely Hawaii sat at the center of his story.
For that rower, the finish was never just the end of an ordeal. Hawaii had become the destination that years of preparation, planning, training, and aspiration had all been pointed at. Hearing that experience firsthand made us look differently at the islands we live in and write about every day.
Most visitors never experience Hawaii like this.
We arrive after five or six hours from the West Coast. We complain about airfares, airlines and flights, baggage fees, resort charges, rental car prices, and whether our favorite beach has become too busy or is only now by reservation. We do it ourselves, and that’s still part of modern travel in Hawaii.
Yet every so often a story like this appears and reminds us that Hawaii still occupies a very different and inspired place in some people’s imaginations. The islands remain among the few destinations on Earth that people actually spend months trying to reach under their own power.
Kelsey Pfendler is the latest example.
A New York native, she works as a river guide in the Grand Canyon and spends winters as an emergency room technician in Colorado. She is attempting to become the first American woman to complete a solo, unsupported crossing from California to Hawaii.
If successful, she would become only the third woman ever to accomplish this. To capture the speed record too, she would need to arrive at Honolulu in fewer than 86 days, 10 hours, and 5 minutes, the prior time of Lia Ditton.
That’s all mighty impressive, while we think many Hawaii readers will find something else even more interesting. Pfendler already knows what it feels like to arrive in Hawaii after weeks at sea. In 2024, she skippered a four-woman team in a rowing race that landed on Kauai after 40 days, 22 hours, and 14 minutes. When she arrived, she said, “I was almost devastated that it was over. I really wanted to keep going.”
The crossing is only beginning.
As of today, Pfendler remains in the early stages of her latest attempt to reach Hawaii. Her updates have included blisters and equipment challenges, such as losing the cap to a freshwater container. Overcast skies she’s encountered have also reduced the solar power her desalinator needs.
Those are just in week one, while the bigger part is that she still faces months of Pacific Ocean. Sometime late this summer, if all goes well, Oahu will begin appearing on the horizon as the first mountains emerge from the sea. The crossing will become an arrival, and Hawaii will once again become the answer.
We spend a lot of time covering what has changed about Hawaii. We write about visitor and resident frustrations, rising costs, crowded beaches, airline shakeups, new fees, tourism debates, and the endless calculations travelers now make before booking a trip. Those stories are real. They’re also not the whole of what Hawaii still is to people.
The existence of ocean rowers doesn’t erase any challenge. It points to something visitor frustrations tend to bury. For all the discussions about Hawaii travel, the islands continue to exert an outsized pull that is difficult to explain entirely through beaches, weather, scenery, or travel marketing.
Something about Hawaii remains large enough in people’s minds that they will even spend months crossing an ocean to reach it. Perhaps that is why stories like Pfendler’s continue to attract attention far beyond the rowing community. Most of us are not going to row 2,400 miles to Hawaii, yet many of us still understand the feeling of being drawn toward a place that occupies more space in our imagination than logic alone can justify.
Right now, Kelsey is rowing toward Honolulu. The bigger story may be that after all these years, Hawaii is still the place she chose to row toward.
Follow Kelsey here:
Current Location from Hawaii: https://my.yb.tl/solocatohawaii
Website: https://yourowkelsey.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yourowkelsey/
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